“Clean beauty” may be a vague term, but its principles could come to define the future of the beauty industry. It’s an approach that’s focused on providing a purer approach to beauty care while also minimizing the negative effect that our habits have on the environment around us. But if you aren’t convinced by an elevator pitch, we’re ready to dig a little deeper. Here are the advantages that clean beauty products can offer you.
They’re Free From Chemicals
The most obvious advantage of clean beauty is that it’s free from harsh chemicals that can negatively affect your hair, scalp, and body. There are a lot of synthetic chemicals that are packed into beauty products, and many of them can be quite scary at first glance. Shampoo and other beauty supplies pack in formaldehyde as well as chemicals that have correlative relationships to cancer.
That’s not to be alarmist. The density of chemicals in most of these products aren’t going to have a noticeable impact on your health, but they can stack up over time. And that’s especially worrying considering how many of these ingredients recur across multiple products. That can add up, and the benefit of moving to clean beauty products can be especially noticeable if you have a more rigorous hair or beauty routine.
They’re Likely to be Fresher
Parabens are some of the most consistently recurring synthetic components in beauty products, but they don’t actually serve a purpose in maintaining your health or beauty. Instead, parabens are added as a way to preserve synthetic beauty products and ensure that they can last on the shelf for longer.
But there are plenty of reasons to be wary about parabens. These synthetic chemicals are ubiquitous in both food and beauty products, but they can exacerbate dryness and irritation for people who already have sensitive skin. More worryingly, they can potentially throw off your internal hormones. Parabens are known to increase your estrogen level, and that could affect the reproductive and sexual drive of both women and men. But even if there wasn’t a health risk involved, parabens indicate a sloppy approach to beauty product design. Because while they may help products from growing toxic and expired over long periods of time, the efficacy of minerals and nutrients still fades over time. That means that if you’re picking an older bottle off the shelf, it could produce lackluster results, even if it’s not even close to reaching its expiration date.
It’s Kind to the Environment
Clean beauty is all about offering a more natural solution for treating your hair, skin, and body, but it’s also designed to be kinder to the environment. In the most obvious practical sense, that means that you don’t have to worry about potentially harmful chemicals making their way through your pipes to the larger oceanic ecosystem. Considering that some of these chemicals are used in the embalming process, that’s a sensible consideration.
But you can generally expect a higher level of ecological consideration from companies that are committed to clean beauty principles. Brands like WOW are completely vegan and are committed to never testing their formulas on animals. Clean beauty isn’t just about helping you maintain a purer sense of beauty. It’s about spreading that purer sense of beauty to the larger world.
That doesn’t mean that you should grab the first product off the shelf with a “Clean Beauty” label. It’s not an officially certified designation, so you never know what you’re getting based on those two words alone. Seek out products that are genuinely clean and which are genuinely considerate of their ecological footprint.