Unanimous observation during the Lipids & Cosmetics congress, organized by Cosmetic Valley and Iterg on January 29th and 30th in Bordeaux: consumers today are looking for more naturalness, sustainability, eco-responsibility… This trend is carried and amplified by cosmetic applications, which give, in a label scan, a clear-cut opinion on products. The industry can only take this into account and adapt. And this largely involves a reformulation of “black-listed” products and the search for “greener” ingredients. Several suppliers presented the results of their work to replace silicones and other mineral oils. While wondering whether green and natural are still the most sustainable and responsible solutions…
Green, natural, renewable, sustainable, clean… preservation of natural resources, respect for the planet and for health, biodegradability, eco-responsibility, ethics, transparency…: today, consumers, media, cosmetic applications and political leaders have only these words in their mouths… Thus, they also had to be on the labels, in the claims made by the products.
Faced with the green wave, the industry has no choice but to respond to these expectations, and has embarked on several types of steps to ride the green wave:
• The control of supply chains to source renewable and sustainably, ethically and responsibly grown plant raw materials
• The improvement of production processes to save energy and water resources and to limit chemical solvents as much as possible
• The evolution of formulas and packaging to increase their biodegradability and recyclability
• The redesign of formulas to make them more minimalist and without ingredients that are disparaged or poorly rated by applications
• The development of tools to better communicate the naturalness of products, such as the ISO 16128 standard that allows naturalness indexes to be calculated (an alternative to COSMOS or Ecocert certifications)…
But being “green” is not enough: in order to win the support of consumers, products …
