🌿Clean beauty rant

The plague of clean beauty

Clean beauty is as ridiculous as clean eating. The phrase "clean eating" itself insinuates that if you're not eating clean, you're eating...dirty. Clean beauty is all about the same fear mongering for profit.

We have real reasons to be wary of ingredients, but companies will use this fear to sell you stuff with BS claims.

The claims

No preservatives, no chemicals, no toxins. In other words, "buy our $40 lipstick that goes bad in 4 months."

The ingredients are all natural, just like poison ivy or arsenic.

Clean beauty marketing creates this "us vs them" mentality in makeup skincare fans. There's definitely tinges of classism, where you're high class if you go for pure items in classy, minimalist packaging.

The results

People are surprised when their blush smells like french fries after a couple months. Sometimes the items are expired on the store shelf. Even if the makeup is still technically safe to continue using at that point, that makes for a fairly unpleasant experience.

More and more clean beauty brands pop up. Sephora is capitalizing on the trend and making up these silly certifications and categories. This means an increase in makeup prices as clean beauty brands charge much more than regular makeup.

Some of the people who work behind the scenes are forced by the powers that be to avoid certain compounds, leading to less effective results. All it takes is some influencers spreading misinformation about xyz ingredient and companies end up avoiding it.

What's classified as clean

Whatever you want as there's no regulation, oversight, or standards. It's marketing.

Hacks that don't work

Lemon as deodorant: The pH of lemons is too high to be used on your skin.
Essential oils: Extremely dangerous for pets. Natural != safe. Lots of people have bad reactions to them.
Coconut oil: Oops, turns out most people have bad reactions to this ingredient.

In-betweens

Alcohol isn't the end of the world.
Fragrance increases most people's experience when using skincare/makeup. I personally love fragrance in makeup and skincare. The vast majority of people are not sensitive to fragrances and the amounts used, even if you can smell them, are miniscule.
Vaseline is what hospitals use on burns and cuts to help them heal. Petroleum jelly is cheap and useful.
Lanolin is sort of but not really cruelty free... It's a byproduct of sheep that have already been killed for their meat.

Am I a hypocrite?

Of course... I own a couple lipsticks things from Merit that have lasted. Clean Reserve - Warm Cotton perfume is another one. Despite the name, I had no idea this was technically under the "clean beauty" umbrella. I thought it was just barnyard aesthetics.

Personally getting burned

Ilia skin tint. I'll never forget how this slowly turned bad. Granted it was about a year into use. It wore terribly and greasy on me, then started to smell too bad to use.
I tried a couple natural deodorant sticks that were aluminum free and had great reviews. Never again.

Caveat

If you don't have a lot of makeup and use what you have daily, clean beauty should be fine since you'll use up things before they go bad.

Toxins

As they say, the dose makes the poison. Just because an ingredient is hard to pronounce doesn't mean it's bad for you. This kind of applies to makeup and skincare.