Quick & dirty facts about the beauty industry

Hold your wallets people. Your clean beauty journey doesn’t have to start with you drastically throwing away all your current products and go on a clean beauty shopping spree. First of all, before spending your hard-earned $$$, your journey should start with educating yourself. You should first understand what’s wrong with the beauty industry and why clean beauty is a worthwhile investment.

To help you, in this first ever article (yoohoo!), I’m going to sum up some quick facts and figures. Please be advised that the following content may shock you and change forever how you see your shower ritual or beauty routine.

• The U.S. Beauty and Cosmetics Market exceeded $62 Billion in sales in 2016 and makes for almost 20% of the global beauty and cosmetics industry in terms of market share
• The average US woman uses 12 products a day, which amounts to 5 pounds (!) a year.
• The Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act has not been substantially updated since 1938. Yep, that’s 80 years. And Subchapter VI about Cosmetics is only one and a half page long… See for yourself:
  • §361 Adulterated Cosmetics
  • §362 Misbranded Cosmetics
  • §363 Regulations making exemptions

Tl;dr: it basically allows you to put anything you want in a formulation.

• The FDA doesn’t protect you. “Consumers assume the FDA has the power to protect them, which it doesn’t, and that cosmetic products are labelled in the same way as food products, which is not the case. The FDA doesn’t have the power to recall products. They do research and they can suggest; they cannot enforce.” Says Gregg Renfrew, founder and chief executive of Beautycounter in this BoF interview.
• One point of proof: 29,000 companies from 181 countries are able to bring 3 million shipments of personal care products into the United States with little or no oversight from the Food and Drug Administration (see this appalling letter)
• Cosmetic manufacturers have no legal obligation to report health problems from their products to the FDA.
• In Europe, 1,500 substances are banned from personal care products. In the United States, that number is … 30.

Fainted yet? Wait til you see the list of toxic chemicals included in your everyday personal care products. For your sanity, I’m keeping this one for another day…

But don’t fret, we’ll soon plunge into the positivism of clean beauty!