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Dec 10, 2023

The beauty brands saying no to single

During the pandemic the British beauty editor Olivia Falcon began hearing about

During the pandemic the British beauty editor Olivia Falcon began hearing about a wonder formula, a moisturiser that could calm frazzled skin and revive complexions. A serum, primer and moisturiser all in one, this unguent was the bathroom-cabinet secret of the A-list. Falcon decided to hunt the product down, her quest leading her to its formulator, Andre Condit. Together they founded Spectacle Skincare (spectacleskincare.com), and their first product is the Performance Crème.

What gets me really excited about this wonder cream, though, is its packaging. The easily squeezable tube is made from processed sawdust chippings and sugarcane, and the box fibre is sourced from European hemp fields. They’ve even added an airless pump without any metal components so, in theory, it can be fully recycled (in practice recycling remains a postcode lottery in the UK).

Ordinarily, with this high concentration of active ingredients, a brand might swerve any moral compunction to put it in sustainable packaging. After all, as Condit explains, "a jar will not work, because the active ingredients will react with the air every time you open it, so we had to develop a totally different solution."

This little tube is emblematic of what luxury cosmetic packaging can do if only brands would make the effort and stop the excuses. The industry has an ugly dependency on single-use plastics. Annually the beauty and cosmetics industry creates 120 billion units of packaging, 70 per cent of which ends up heading for landfill or incineration.

It's strange because, as anybody in the luxury segment of the cosmetics industry will tell you, demand for "conscious beauty" is at an all-time high. As Millie Kendall, CEO of the British Beauty Council, tells me, no self-respecting "brand can launch in this current climate without ensuring they do their very best to use packaging that is as sustainable as possible. It's utterly irresponsible not to."

But when I think of some of the more egregious examples of overpackaged cosmetics I break out in a cold sweat. Like the time a make-up artist friend recommended a famously effective eco plumping serum for my highly stressed skin and I just couldn't go through with the purchase. Three different layers of heat-sealed rigid plastic formed a pot in a Russian-doll format and a complex pump mechanism from an entirely different sort of plastic made the whole mess nonrecyclable. I even wrote to the brand, which didn't feel the need to respond. I was shouting into the void.

If it would listen, it has been estimated that the beauty industry could reduce carbon emissions by up to 70 per cent through a circular model. In this system refills become the norm, containers are kept in near constant use and any retired packaging is successfully recycled. There are notable mainstream adopters of this culture of re-use, such as the Body Shop and L’Occitane, which has launched refill stations in some of its outlets.

On a smaller scale there is Emma Lewisham, a brand that has been a fixture in my bathroom since I signed up to it in 2021. I was attracted not just by the high-tech yet natural ingredients but the rigorous research into sustainability and the way the New Zealand entrepreneur called out complacency in the industry. For example, she was clear about the fact that many of the products that claim to be recyclable — in theory any material is recyclable — very rarely are recycled.

The brand has two distribution and collection hubs in Australia and the UK, and there is a large degree of transparency on everything from the amount of packaging that can be collected, sterilised and refilled (now up to 88 per cent) to full disclosure on carbon emissions and the origin and extraction of ingredients.

I also look for innovation. It's a sign of the times that the buzziest spa launch — Heckfield Place hotel's The Bothy (which opened in April) — should also be one of the most nature-focused. Hidden in 400 acres of Hampshire countryside, it is stocked with Wildsmith skincare. This 30-product house skincare range is named after Heckfield's most famous gardener, William Walker Wildsmith — the Monty Don of his age. When Wildsmith died in 1890, the Journal of Horticulture declared him the "best all-round gardener of his generation". I’d like to think he would be as keen as I am on Wildsmith's use of mycelium (made from mushroom roots) for packaging products.

You’ll find mycelium packaging holding the three biocompostable Wildsmith gift sets. They look humble, but don't be fooled — this is the new frontier in material science. Mycelium has unique biological properties, meaning it can grow miles of threadlike roots in days. Add some agricultural waste like corn husks into a mould, and the mycelium will digest the seed husks, forming a material that appears to all the world as a dense foam without any of the Earth-killing properties of petroleum-based styrofoam. In fact the main problem is how you stop it growing — a natural disinfectant such as cinnamon bark or thyme or oregano oil stops the growth by killing off competing spores.

After its useful life packaging the Wildsmith gift set, the mycelium-based material can be left out in your garden and will decompose within a few weeks, making good on its promise to be completely biodegradable. At the recent Cosmetics Global 2023 trade fair there was a lot of buzz around novel natural ingredients such as freeze-dried mollusc mucus but also plenty of chat about mycelium.

But for the big wins we need the big brands. Notably, while Emma Lewisham has sold 37,000 refills since October 2021, saving more than 29,000kg of carbon emissions, we should remember that Clinique sells a unit of Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion roughly every five seconds. Imagine the carbon savings if it switched to a refill system.

We’re definitely seeing moves in the mainstream. But many are still on the lower rungs of the sustainability ladder, eliminating the usage of so-called problem or "forever" plastics like PVC and BPA, or introducing goals for the reduction of virgin plastic. But they are going to need to up the ante; a recent study pointed out that 90 per cent of public sustainability claims by brands will not be met by 2025 and the majority of companies continues to use fossil fuel-based, single-use packaging. Jayn Sternland, managing director of the ethical brand Weleda in the UK and head of the British Beauty Council's Sustainable Beauty Coalition, says: "Most brands have switched, or are in the process of switching, from virgin plastic to PCR [post-consumer recycled] plastics for their packaging, but this is more costly than virgin plastic and is only a short-term solution as there is little to no viable recycling of the packaging when it is discarded."

In the absence of legal or standard definitions of what constitutes sustainable packaging or ingredients, and with a flurry of certifications and labels in the industry, brands need to work doubly hard to avoid greenwashing their eco face wash. The European Commission found that more than half of eco-friendly claims made by personal care brands were false or misleading.

For now my advice is to back the independent disruptors who aren't just content to make slightly less of an environmental impact. Their full-throated commitment to real sustainable action is in every tube and every jar. The products that aren't skin deep are worth your patronage every time.