What is clean beauty? Where is the clean beauty movement headed? Here’s what you can expect for 2022.

Clean beauty is associated with natural beauty, green beauty, and all other types of beauty that deviate from the norm.

But at its core, what does the clean beauty movement stand for?

Since there’s no legal or official definition, many brands have taken it upon themselves to define clean beauty according to their agendas.

It’s time to settle this debate once and for all. So, what is clean beauty?

To us, a clean beauty product must satisfy these two main criteria:

1. Clean ingredients
At its core, clean beauty means that you can use a product without risking your own health. The ingredients list must contain only safe, clean ingredients.

What constitutes “clean” ingredients? At the Good Face Project, we analyze each and every cosmetic ingredient and give grades based purely on safety and toxicity.

To us, a clean beauty product is free of hormone disruptors and carcinogens. We developed the Good Face Index, which takes hundreds of thousands of scientific studies and research papers on cosmetic ingredients and turns them into easy-to-understand safety ratings. This makes it easy to see if a product is safe based on its ingredients. Essentially, a product is only as clean as its worst ingredient.

2. Transparent labels
When a beauty brand makes an effort to list all of its ingredients and label accordingly, it is on the right path to clean beauty. However, not all brands are transparent.

A good example of lack of transparency in the beauty industry is including fragrance in beauty products. Fragrance is not an ingredient, but since the industry is highly unregulated, companies can hide ingredients under the umbrella term “fragrance.”

Another example of non-transparent labels is misleading the consumer based on packaging. Brands can falsely label their products with buzzwords like “natural” and “eco” in order to capture the conscious consumer’s attention. This is called “greenwashing” and we’ll elaborate in a moment.

Clean beauty simply doesn’t contain mystery ingredients, and clean beauty certainly doesn’t claim to be something that it’s not.