Episode:
39
Why the Beauty Industry Sucks: The Reality of Packaging, Marketing, and Supply Chains (Part One)
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In this episode, we’re kicking off a mini-series on the beauty industry, focusing on what’s wrong with it. But don’t worry — it won’t be all doom and gloom! We’ll also be looking at solutions to these problems.
I’ve spent over a decade in this industry, and to be honest, it really kind of sucks. That’s actually where Ethique came from — a desire to tackle all the waste the beauty industry creates. So join me in this episode as we take a look behind the pretty packaging and sparkly glitter to uncover what’s really going on behind the scenes.
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0:00:00
Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place, without the judgment and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our
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planet with. So if you are looking to navigate through everything green or not so green, you have come to the right place. Kia ora kaitiaki and welcome back. Now, some of you may know that I am the founder and former CEO of Ethique, which is a regenerative beauty brand. And that's important because today I'm kicking off a new mini series on the beauty industry or mainly what's wrong
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with it and most importantly, how we can fix it. So this is gonna be a four-part series. We're gonna look at the problems and the solutions, starting with some of the biggest challenges facing the cosmetics industry, and ending what we can do to make better choices, basically. I've spent over a decade in this industry,
0:01:05
and it kinda sucks. Like, it's the furthest thing from beautiful. I've seen the good, the bad, and the really frickin' awful. And that's where Ethique came about, right? It was born out of this frustration with how much waste the beauty industry generates and just the general supply chain. It’s just
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my mission to do beauty better. So if you're ready to look beyond the pretty packaging, the sparkly glitter and find out what's really going on behind the scenes, listen on, dear listener. It doesn't really work as well, does it, when you're not writing? Anyway. First and foremost, the elephant in the room is overconsumption. Everything I'm about to discuss is made infinitely worse by the fact that we overconsume beauty.
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We have now tipped into fast beauty, and that's a term obviously stolen from fast fashion which is being used to describe the rapid turnaround of new beauty products, with some taking just a couple of months from idea to shelf. I cannot tell you how breathtakingly fast it is. Your average company, like a Unilever, they have an R&D cycle of two to three to four years.
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So fast beauty is this constant cycle of launching new collections, usually tied to trends on social media or seasons, that drives this overconsumption. Whether it's new skincare for a few weeks or the latest eyeshadow that is exactly the same
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as every other frickin' eyeshadow that's out there, all promoted by influencers, the industry is thriving on convincing us that we need way more products than we actually do. The average person uses about 12 beauty products every single day. And you'll think, no, I don't, that's way too many.
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But actually, when you think about it, it's shampoo, conditioner, body wash or soap, moisturiser, deodorant, makeup, toothpaste, it adds up real fast. And what's even worse is how quickly we actually go through those products. Because over the course of a year, women in the US spend about three and a half to $4,000 on cosmetics. The beauty industry in the US alone is worth $90 billion
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and globally, the industry is expected to reach over 800 billion by 2027. We are buying and using a lot of it. Well, actually, is that true? No, because we may buy them, but we don't necessarily use them.
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On average, 25% of beauty products are thrown away well before they're finished. Maybe we buy a new foundation, so therefore we don't finish the one we already have, or we buy a skincare product and it sucks. There is an enormous amount of waste
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driven by this idea of consumption at all costs. This is a tremendous amount of waste, which leads me to my next point, packaging. If you think about waste and beauty industry, you think about packaging, right? It's not all of it, obviously, we'll get into that,
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but the beauty industry produces about 120 billion units of packaging every single year. I think I was just sick in my mouth a little bit. That is everything from tiny mascara tubes to shampoo bottles and everything in between. And the problem with beauty packaging
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is the vast, vast, vast majority of it is of course designed for single use. So once the product's gone, the container is binned, and only a fraction of that gets recycled. We know that only 9% of plastic on average is recycled. The rest ends up in landfills or our oceans,
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and that has led to the pollution crisis we're facing today. Now, I started Ethique specifically because of packaging, because obviously you need to package liquids, like liquid shampoo or conditioner, inside something. And because material science for compostables just isn't there yet, that thing has to be plastic or glass. Plastic is kind of maligned,
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right? It's the most incredible material. It is exactly what the inventors set out to achieve. It is stable, it's resilient, it's flexible. It's many different types of many different properties and it's wonderful in so many ways. It enables the medical field to work as it does. It has infinite benefits for us and yet those same properties are what causes massive amounts of problems when it ends up in our environment, our waterways, our oceans. And just that figure again, 120 billion pieces of packaging made every year, and the vast
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majority of that is plastic. But it's not just about how much there is, and that is a shed load, it's also about complexity. So, one of the challenges with beauty packaging is that it's often made with mixed materials. So, if you think about like a lipstick, right? The tube might be plastic,
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but there is a metal spring inside and maybe some plastic and foil combinations for certain parts or the lid is metal. However it's set up, this mixture makes recycling incredibly difficult to the point where it just is no longer recyclable.
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Most recycling systems are just not designed to handle multiple materials in one product. So even if you try to recycle that lipstick tube, chances are it's going in the landfill. And by chances I mean it's almost certainly going in the landfill. Because those plants cannot handle mixed materials, that is why we have to separate things in
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our bins, right? Take the lids off this and put these in different bins. But who breaks up their packaging into its components? No one is going to do that. Not to mention that only one in five people actually recycle their personal care and cosmetic packaging.
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Because typically we only have one bin in our bathroom, which is a rubbish bin, whereas people might have two or three in their kitchen so they can separate stuff. Okay, let's say a brand uses recycled plastic. You will see it referred to as PCR, which stands for post-consumer recycled plastic. That means it has been made from recycled materials like plastic bottles that have been used, collected, and then processed into new packaging. In theory, great solution because it's reusing stuff that already exists, reducing the need for virgin plastic and ensuring it doesn't end up in the oceans.
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But it actually gets a little bit complicated. The reality is that recycling plastic is not a perfect solution. I have talked about this on another episode, but first of all, downcycling is a big issue. Plastic loses quality every time it's recycled.
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So that shiny PCR shampoo bottle might be made from recycled plastic, but once it's used again, it's probably going to be turned into something less helpful. It's not really a true circular solution
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because the material degrades over time, unlike glass, for example, which can be recycled over and over, although statistically, again, unless you're in Germany, it won't be. And I'll get to glass because no, that isn't a perfect solution either. But it gets even dodgier when you actually look at the supply chain for recycled plastic. And there's been a few investigations into this because one of the big problems with PCR is sourcing. The demand for recycled plastic is massive and continuing to
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grow because consumers want their brands to do better. And this is really one of the only ways they can do that. Brands want to appear eco-friendly, but the supply of truly high quality recycled plastic is really limited and it costs more than virgin plastic. So companies often rely on,
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let's say less than transparent or questionable sources. Some suppliers mix virgin plastic with recycled plastic and still label it as PCR. Others may cut corners in the recycling process, resulting in lower quality or contamination. And look, let's be honest, some might just stick a PCR label on it and call it done because
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it's very hard to track. There's also the fact that obviously recycling is not a carbon neutral process. It still takes energy and resources to collect and clean and reprocess that plastic into something usable. And because the supply chain for PCR is often global, the environmental cost of transporting it is high.
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I'm actually all for PCR plastic, but I would love to see a lot more transparency and clarity from brands around where they source it. As for bioplastics, don't fall for the hype, don't fall for the bullshit. I have done several episodes on why it is a total have. Now, if we go back to glass, it's just not as good as you think it is. I know you're going to throw microplastics in my face, and yes, microplastics are obviously
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kind of terrifying, but glass is hugely energy intensive to produce, and despite being recyclable, it hardly ever gets recycled with global rates way lower than you think they are. And it actually scores much, much worse on most measures and life cycle analysis and put against plastic. I'll say it a million times, I will die on this hill.
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Single use plastic is better than single use glass. And for all those people on that Instagram reel asking me what I mean by single use glass, I mean, every single glass of drink that's in a bottle, you know, beer, wine, all of that is single-use because no, most people don't ever reuse them. Anyway, putting that aside. We also need to think about over-packaging, right? So think about
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all those bottles that come in unnecessary cardboard boxes, they're wrapped in plastic again. It's all about the aesthetic because the beauty industry, of course, has to be beautiful. The number of times I had retailers ask me to wrap our bars in plastic because that's just how we do it or something similar. It's a bonkers industry in so many ways. And then of course there's all the packaging associated with getting it to you or to the retailer, all the stuff we don't see that is throughout the supply chain. The bottom line is that the beauty
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industry's packaging problem is massive and it's way bigger than what we just throw away. It's about the full life cycle of a product from the raw materials all the way to how it's disposed of. So fast beauty pushes us to consume more, which means more packaging, more resources used and ultimately more waste. How did we actually get here? Well, it's all driven by very clever marketing designed to make us think we need more than
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we actually do. So the history of beauty marketing goes back a long, long way, but it really exploded in the 20th century. So as a quick history lesson for you, in the early 1900s, there were companies like Pond’s and Helena Rubinstein who were among the first to start mass advertising to sell their beauty products. Because back then, beauty marketing was all about what you needed, right?
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So simple things like moisturisers for dry skin or makeup to enhance your natural features or, you know, lead to melt them off. The messaging was fairly straightforward with an emphasis on hygiene and elegance and doing what your man told you to. But everything changed in the 1950s and 60s when television advertising started to appear. So companies like Max Factor and Revlon began pushing this idea of aspirational beauty.
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So instead of just selling a product, they were selling a lifestyle. Is this is ringing a bell because this is what companies now all do. The idea that using their product would make you more glamorous, more desirable, and we all want to be glamorous and desirable, right? So the language started to shift towards promises of youth and femininity and romance, and it wasn't just about the product, it was about who you would be if
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you used that product. Genius. Manipulation 101. By the 1980s, beauty marketing took sort of another bit of a turn with more focus on the idea of luxury and exclusivity. This is the idea of the little treat because this isn't new. Everything we do is cyclical, right? This is the era of Estee Lauder and Chanel. They dominated the market with high-end products. They often marketed them as must-have items for women who wanted to be seen as stylish and sophisticated.
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There was supermodel culture in the 80s and 90s fed into the same idea that beauty was tied to unattainable standards, and if you wanted to look like models who some of you will never have even heard of, like Cindy Crawford or Linda Evangelista, you better buy those products or you had no chance. So fast forward today, and the strategies have evolved, but the core idea is exactly the same. It's all built on aspirational beauty,
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selling you the idea that you need this stuff to feel confident, look youthful, be attractive, because as you are, you are just not. You are totally lacking. This is where things get really clever with psychological tricks like FOMO,
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which is the theory of missing out, of course. Brands now create limited editions and seasonal collections to push us into buying products before they disappear. Or they'll say it's the secret to perfect skin, making us feel like we're missing out on something
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if we don't have it. And you may think you don't fall for it, but I promise you the vast, vast, vast majority of us do. We all have societal expectations so deeply ingrained that we don't even know they're there, and marketing messages play straight into it.
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Then of course there's greenwashing, which is a more recent marketing tactic that has grown with the rise of consumer awareness about these issues. Brands are now throwing around terms like natural and clean or eco-friendly and these claims are absolute rubbish 99.99% of the time.
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Don't get me started on clean, it's nonsense. Natural doesn't mean safe, hello arsenic and uranium. Natural doesn't mean effective, scientifically produced ingredients tend to create better results and natural sure as hell doesn't mean sustainable. Not to mention, companies putting natural on their labels may not be at all. You can slap natural on a product that contains a tiny percentage of plant extracts in many countries, but is mostly synthetic and no one
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will blink an eye because there aren't yet regulations governing these terms in most places. Although this is changing. Just remember, just because something is labelled as natural or clean does not mean it is better for the environment or for you. They are just marketing tools to try and make us feel better about buying more stuff. There are of course good companies out there. I just personally don't believe the majority of companies out there are good, yet.
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But I wanna have a talk about the darker, much less beautiful side of the beauty industry, because this is a big issue and it's actually rarely talked about, but I think it's vital to understand. We talk about this a lot when we talk about fast fashion,
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but we talk about it much less in the beauty world. And there's two main areas, ingredient sourcing and human rights. And they are, of course, intrinsically linked. If we first have a look at ingredients, though, so the oils, the minerals and other ingredients used in cosmetics often come from regions where environmental standards are less stringent. Palm oil is a wonderful example.
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It's something I have an absolute beaut of an episode coming up in the next couple of weeks with two fabulous experts. It's found in everything, moisturisers, soap, shampoos, toothpaste, you name it, it's in about 95% of your cosmetics. And as someone who ran a cosmetics company that was certified palm oil free, I can promise you it's very hard to avoid. And while palm oil is an exceptionally efficient crop, producing more oil per hectare than anything else, its production still has
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a devastating environmental impact. Vast areas of ancient tropical rainforests in places like Indonesia and Malaysia have been and continue to be cleared away to make way for palm oil plantations. This is leading to massive biodiversity loss with endangered species like orangutans and Sumatran tigers losing their habitat. Not to mention, obviously, deforestation on this scale contributes hugely to climate change. You'll hear more about palm oil soon as a boycott isn't actually the answer, so watch out for the next episode. Palm does get a lot of attention, but it's not the only ingredient.
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Coconut oil, another common ingredient in beauty products, is also problematic. It needs about four times the land that palm oil does to produce the same amount of oil, so huge impact. But there is also something particularly off-putting about coconut oil I had never considered until a few years ago. You may have heard of the practice of using monkeys to harvest coconuts in some parts
0:15:11
of the world. Yeah, monkeys, I know, you heard that right. I remember a customer reached out to us a long time ago and asked if we use monkeys to harvest our coconuts. And one of our customer service team turned to me totally baffled and I just laughed because I thought, this is insane, surely not, people wouldn't do that.
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Silly me, of course they would. People never cease to surprise me. We have always sourced our coconut oil from fair trade plantations in Samoa, but yeah, it turns out monkeys are used in some places. They are of course mistreated, chained and forced to climb trees to harvest coconuts for hours on end. There have been investigations and it definitely happens, though it is rare.
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But it's a reminder that just because an ingredient is plant-based or natural, doesn't actually mean it's harvested in a sustainable or ethical way. Mica is another example. It's used to add the shimmer and the sparkle to make-up. You'll find it in your eyeshadows, your highlighters, blushes, most colour cosmetics and even things like shampoo. But around 25% of the world's mica is sourced from mines where child labour is common, particularly in regions like India. Children as young as
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five work in dangerous, unregulated mines to collect this mineral which ends up in products designed to make us look beautiful. Doesn't that seem the height of gross to you? Mica has been talked about a lot and there are lots of investigations and things you can read about online, so I'm not going to go too much into it as there is a fair bit of work being done to end this practice, but it is something to ask your brands about. And that leads nicely into the people part of the supply chain.
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Many of those ingredients we find in our beauty products are sourced from regions where workers' rights are, how should we say, not a priority. Palm oil, again, not just an environmental disaster, it's also linked to human rights abuses. Indigenous communities are often displaced to make room for palm oil plantations. Workers, including children, are sometimes forced to work hours for very little pay under harsh and unsafe conditions. And farmers can't leave, they're locked in.
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But it's not just palm oil. Shea butter, which is used in moisturisers and hair products, is often sourced from West Africa, where women are predominantly responsible for harvesting and processing the nuts. And while there are fair trade initiatives trying to improve this, many women in the supply chain still work in poor conditions, earning far less than a living wage for their labour. Cocoa butter is another example.
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We all know the chocolate industry is pretty foul by and large, and I have an episode on that too. And that's a very common ingredient in cosmetics. It doesn't stop there. It goes on. In the rush to make products cheaper and get them to market faster, brands are cutting corners. The supply chain for
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ingredients like minerals and oils and all these other raw materials is incredibly opaque and transparency is by and large lacking. So it's really hard to know whether the product you're buying has been ethically sourced because companies either don't track it or they don't tell you. And often they themselves don't ask because it's easier not to know. The bottom line is the beauty industry isn't just problematic because of packaging and overconsumption, it's also got really serious issues as to where ingredients are sourced
0:18:08
and the human cost of this production. The beauty industry is just as problematic as the fast fashion industry and it is talked about infinitely less and I don't know why. It's pretty clear we really need to rethink how we engage with the beauty industry and with beauty products. I'm obviously not saying we need to stop using these products altogether because we're going to buy stuff. That's fine, but we do need to be more conscious about what we're buying and how often we're buying it and where these products come from. We all
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need to stop being lured in by influencers and these hauls and new trends and I get it. I fall for it all the time too and frankly, I of all people should know better, but it is very compelling marketing that we can only do better when we know better. And after listening to this, I hope that you know a little better. Well, I've depressed you a little bit and now I'm ending the episode because in the next one, I'm going to be talking about some of the solutions, the innovations that are
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trying to change the beauty industry for the better because there are some really cool things happening and I'm looking forward to sharing them with you. But until then, I encourage you to go and have a look at the products you use. How much packaging are they using? Are they sustainably packaged? Where are the ingredients from, what information do those brands have about where they source
0:19:16
their ingredients? Because being aware is the first step to making better choices. I will see you next week. Thanks for listening. Kaitiaki. Mā te wa. And there you go. I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn't about everything in your pantry matching with those silly glass jars or living in a commune. If that's your jam, fabulous. But sustainability at its heart is just using what you need. If you enjoyed this episode please don't keep it to yourself and feel free to drop me
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a rating and hit the subscribe button. Kia ora and I'll see you next week.
