What is Clean Beauty?

As a brand recognized for our leadership in this growing category, our in-house team of scientists works hard to stay up-to-date with the latest peer-reviewed scientific literature to ensure that our formulations are always 100% safe. 

One result of this research is our Never List™: an industry-leading list of over 1,800+ ingredients we never use in our product formulations. But what really makes us the leader in clean beauty is how we screen each and every ingredient in our formulas for 23 health and environmental endpoints. Examining these endpoints is part of our newly launched Blueprint for Clean, a roadmap that sets the highest bar for safety in the beauty industry. 

To examine the 23 health and safety endpoints, we rely on up to 17 unique databases, like the EU’s REACH, Prop 65, and EPA lists—data and research studies that have been peer-reviewed (the gold standard in the scientific research community). However, there are also lots of unstudied ingredients. We never assume that an ingredient is safe. Instead, for questionable ingredients we collaborate with leading academic institutions, like Tufts University, to close this data gap and publicly share our findings. 

Beautycounter invests in research and testing because we know that certain ingredients have proven potential dangers, like endocrine disruption, reproductive harm, or links to increased risks of cancer, as well as possible skin or eye irritation. We also devote a lot of time to researching the environmental impact of ingredients—like how ingredients in sunscreen worn at the beach could damage coral reefs, or how long an ingredient lasts in the soil before breaking down. 

The truth is that the beauty industry is largely unregulated, and companies often have to define what “clean” means for themselves. For us, clean beauty is about being transparent with our ingredient selection process, so customers can make an informed decision about what they put on their bodies every day. Because we believe beauty isn’t just about how you look, but how it makes you feel—from the inside out.