I focus on using multifunctional beauty products with natural ingredients that don’t have any of the big bad ingredients. By big bad I mean parabens, phthalates, sulfates, formaldehyde, and synthetic fragrances. These products have been shown to disrupt hormones, affecting the reproductive system and increasing the risks of cancer. We can minimize these effects by using products that do not include these ingredients. There is a great resource where you can check the hazard score of beauty products. The resource is Environmental Working Groups Skin Deep database. Also, Ulta and Sephora have their categorization for clean products so I usually only shop from that list. Not that their criteria are emphatically true, but it is a good starting point. This leads to the controversy of greenwashing. Greenwashing is when companies tout natural and clean ingredients, but upon scrutiny, they still contain the big bads. Also, one issue is, that a product line may have some items that are less harmful and others that are more harmful.
I also don’t necessarily like dichotomous terms such as “clean”, which has a counterpart word which is “dirty”. If some makeup is clean, then the next supposition would be that makeup that uses harmful chemicals is dirty. Perhaps we should be using a different synonym. I think the most accurate description would be “unsullied”, which does not quite roll off the tongue as nicely as “clean beauty”, but I digress. I think Dictionary.com captures the word the best as “not spoiled or made impure”. Impure has another set of connotations and the word is a misnomer with makeup and skincare because very few products are pure. First, you usually blend one or more products together. For example, my body butter combines shea butter, beeswax and carrier oils. To get products to have a consistency that you can use on the skin sometimes thickeners are used and to increase shelf life and enable the blending of water and oils together, preservatives are used. These things, however, are not harmful to the body like the big bads. The phrase “not spoiled” speaks to me because why are companies adding ingredients that mess up our bodies? My point is, that the language and how we frame things affect people’s perceptions of the products and even the people who use them. This is also how companies use marketing: to portray a lifestyle. Do you want to be part of an aesthetic? Of course, we all do, but let’s do it with more discernment, shall we?
On that note, here is my list of my favorite unsullied beauty products. I have categorized them by price range based on the highest price single product on their website (not including sets or combos) as of the date of this blog post. This skews some of the data and there are outliers. First, Subtl Stacks looks like it has high prices, but they sell everything as combos that is the whole point, you have all your makeup in this stack you can easily pack on the go. Clever! Also, for the brands that are both skincare and makeup, sometimes the skincare is way more expensive. Especially if they have a special serum or moisturizer. Below is a visualization I made in Tableau Public illustrating the brands I like.
