(Skin)

10 New Sustainable Beauty Products That Are Genuinely Impressive

They all live up to their claims.

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sustainable beauty products
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Beauty enthusiasts have grown quite savvy to greenwashing. Gone are the days when a brand could put pictures of fruits on a label to say the product is good for the planet or burden you to figure out how to recycle their only semi-recyclable products. These days, eco-minded shoppers want actual sustainable beauty products, and are even willing to change how they shop when it really counts. For example, sales of refillable beauty products in the UK increased 47% between January and July of 2022.

Thankfully, many brands and their founders are listening and responding to their customers by finding legitimate, quantifiable ways to update and evolve. Some of the most impactful packaging advances can be seen in the categories on Credo’s home page: post-consumer recycled plastic, plastic alternatives, glass packaging, and refillable components. Inside the bottles, more brands are using carbon neutral ingredients, concentrated formulas that require less water, and biotech developed alternatives to ingredients that are otherwise destructive to cultivate.

“Brands are being more mindful than they were just six or seven years ago,” says cosmetic chemist Krupa Koestline who specializes in clean beauty and helps reduce the carbon footprint of formulas. “Expectations from retailers or the new plastic tax in the UK are helping drive the change, too.”

But if it feels like there’s a lot of conflicting theories about how to reduce beauty waste and environmental impact, that’s not always a bad sign. There is no evolution without trial and error.

“There are so many factors and it’s ever changing, so what is the best option right now, might not be the right option in a few months, or next year, but we make the right choice when it arises,” says Jamie Richards who is the director of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) of hair brand Eva NYC — her job is to measure the environmental impact of everything from an email to an ingredient. “For example, our hair masks are in PCR (recycled plastic) because we could not find a supplier who could provide recycled aluminum at the quality we wanted — virgin aluminum is more energy intensive than plastic, so we try to avoid it. Instead of one perfect packaging solution, there is a right time and place to use certain materials.”

Here, TZR highlights 10 of the most interesting and impactful green beauty innovations of the last year that are turning up the dial on sustainability.

Palmless
Nourishing Torula Oil
$45
Palm oil — derived from palm trees — is found in countless beauty products (as well as food products) for its hydrating benefits, but it’s also been a problem child causing excessive deforestation over the years. While this deforestation has slowed, palm oil is still highly used yet not sustainable. Biotech company C16 Biosciences uses naturally-occurring yeast to create an alternative called Palmless. You can find it in their multi-use beauty oil, lovingly named “Save the F#$!%ng Rainforest” or manufacturers can purchase the innovation in mass quantities as a green replacement.