Are Beauty Brands Intentionally Hiding Their Ingredients?
A look inside the beauty industry’s biggest loophole.
I’m a modern woman; I think I deserve the right to control my own body. What goes in it, what goes on it, what goes on inside it — you know, the basics. Part of this pesky, unrelenting need for total autonomy over my physical being includes obsessively researching the ingredients in my beauty products. Or trying to, at least.
It is impossible to identify a single substance in perfume — any perfume, from Marc Jacobs to Jennifer Lopez. Comprehensive ingredient lists are missing from the sites of luxury skin-care brands (La Prairie) and indie sun-care brands (Solid & Striped) alike. Sephora and Ulta Beauty both have ingredient sections for a selection of beauty products, which gets hidden or left blank for others; the former faced scrutiny earlier this year for adjusting the order of ingredients for Summer Fridays Super Amino Gel Cleanser to reflect higher concentrations of the headlining amino acids.
Considering the fact that a portion of chemicals in cosmetics have been found in blood streams and breast tissue, or are otherwise loosely linked to cancer, hormone disruption, reproductive toxicity, environmental damage, and garden-variety allergies and irritation (all of which disproportionately affect people of color), shouldn’t withholding this type of information be, I don’t know, illegal? Frowned upon, at least? Don’t customers have the right to know what’s in the beauty products they buy — and, incidentally, in their blood and breasts?
No, says the Food & Drug Administration. They do not.
“There are some laws in the United States around ingredient listing, however, there are major loopholes,” Lindsay Dahl, the SVP of Social Mission at Beautycounter, tells me. The biggest: Companies have no legal obligation to post ingredient lists online. The FDA does ask beauty brands to disclose ingredients on physical packaging, but those that solely exist on the internet — with no product in physical stores, as is fairly common in indie beauty — don’t even have to do that.
“The law that regulates ingredient disclosure is the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, and it was passed in the late 1960s, so it’s really before the advent of the internet,” Melanie Benesh, a legislative attorney for the Environmental Working Group, tells me over the phone. No updates have been made to the 1966 legislation to account for e-commerce, despite the fact that the internet accounts for a sizable portion of industry sales. Because of this, digital platforms are free to make their own choices about Web disclosure — and they often choose ambiguity over honesty.
“Just to be transparent, we don’t necessarily have requirements,” Memory Harkins, head of e-commerce at Beautyblender, tells me. The brand has chosen not to disclose the contents of its Re-Dew Refresh Spray or Bounce Foundation on its site, save to say they’re made with “all of the good” and “none of the bad.” This gives the impression that the products are very nice and safe. In reality, Beautyblender formulates with talc (asbestos contamination is a concern, leading many cosmetics corporations to “quietly move away from” formulating with the ingredient), PEGs (created through ethoxylation, a method that uses ethylene oxide, a known carcinogen, and can result in contamination from 1,4 dioxane, another known carcinogen), and fragrance (more on that later).
“We are constantly updating and adding, and just wanting to make sure we are as transparent as possible for the consumers,” Harkins says. She instructs customers to email customer service individually if they want to know what’s in the products they’re purchasing. Don’t expect the company to offer up the chemical composition of its famous Beautyblender sponge, though. That’s “proprietary,” Harkins says, and a “highly guarded secret.”
In the eyes of the law, this is fine. In fact, the whole “proprietary” thing is at the heart of the Labeling Act’s next major loophole: fragrance. “The individual constituents of fragrances and flavors don’t have to be disclosed under current law,” Dahl says — on physical packaging or digital displays — as fragrance and flavors are considered trade secrets. Those two little words could be masking any number of the 4,000-ish chemicals currently available to formulators. The most common are phthalates. Phthalates make scent last longer but also maybe, possibly contribute to breast cancer. (BreastCancer.org and Breast Cancer Prevention Partners recommend avoiding phthalates and fragrance, just in case.) They also “alter levels of cytokines, which are key players in the immune response to coronavirus,” as reported by The Guardian.
A 2010 effort from The Campaign For Safe Cosmetics called for fragrance ingredient transparency from beauty brands after a small study found undisclosed allergens and hormone disruptors — like diethyl phthalate, which might damage sperm and musk ketone, which infiltrates human breast milk — in two-thirds of the fragrance blends tested. The chief scientist for the Personal Care Products Council responded at the time by saying it would be “virtually impossible” to comply, since the sheer amount of ingredients in a single fragrance blend would not fit on a product label.
That pretty much proves the point of the campaign, but the EWG understands the reasoning. “That can be a lot of ingredients to put on a pack,” Benesh says. “But it’s not difficult to include all those ingredients on an online Web page. We think that companies large and small should go beyond what is required by the law and disclose the ingredients included in its fragrances and flavors, particularly online.”
One company that’s done so is clean beauty retailer Credo. In late 2019, it enacted a Fragrance Transparency Policy that requires its brands to fully disclose fragrance ingredients — or at least categorize them as essential oils, naturally-derived or certified organic (among other options). 71 companies have agreed to complete disclosure, including Herbivore Botanicals, Ursa Major and Marie Veronique. Industry activists hope the trend will track.
“We’ve consistently seen that the market has rewarded companies who are transparent with consumers, rather than those that try to preserve the status quo,” Dahl says. “I think in this time of transition, though, you’ve got some laggards that are trying to keep their dirty secrets from the public eye. They’re just not going to do it until they’re told.”
“In my opinion, brands who do not display their ingredients are most definitely doing this intentionally,” Emily Parr, the co-founder of the “holistic functional” skin-care brand HoliFrog, tells me. Sometimes, it’s to protect profits. “If you’re going to spend $300 on a single product, you are more likely to read all the information provided because it’s not an impulse buy,” Parr explains. If said product includes, say, possibly-carcinogenic butylated hydroxytoluene and potentially-hormone-disrupting parabens (as is the case with La Prairie Skin Caviar, $510, the ingredients of which are not available on La Prairie’s site), consumers may be quicker to ask questions and slower to spend money.
Other times, it’s to hide a low-quality formulation. “You can buy a vitamin C serum and find out it only has one to two drops of the active ingredient, with the rest of it being water,” says Rex Chou, the founder of skincare brand Ghost Democracy, “just so they can claim, ‘serum with vitamin C!’” This is a common industry practice, and cosmetic chemists call it “fairy dusting” or “pixie dusting,” because they sprinkle a little bit of a buzzy beauty ingredient into an otherwise bland base.
These may seem like issues the average consumer wouldn’t necessarily notice on a product listing, but today’s beauty enthusiasts are increasingly ingredient-savvy. The emergence of brands with a single-ingredient focus — The Ordinary, The Inkey List — has turned customers into amateur cosmetic chemists, able to dissect a product formulation in seconds. So while the old guard — Estée Lauder, Clinique — clings to old rules, a new wave of exceedingly transparent companies is coming for their customers.
“We’re really proud of the ingredients we sourced for each formula and we wanted to trumpet that,” Parr shares. The HoliFrog site was designed with this in mind. “The product description page was really an area I was extremely precise about with my developer,” she explains. For one, she did not want visitors to have to click a drop-down menu or external hyperlink to find the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients list (INCI list, for short) for each product — that’s all listed in plain sight. It also displays ingredients in an itemized fashion, rather than paragraph-style, to make them more readable. “I thought that if we made it easy on the eye with a list, the customer wouldn’t feel as though reading the INCI was such an undertaking.”
Ghost Democracy takes it a step further by “actually putting the exact [ingredient percentages] on the front of the pack, so consumers know exactly how concentrated the formulas are,” Chou says. “Consumers deserve transparency, so I put our ‘secret formula’ right on the front.”
That level of transparency is admirable, but it also begs the question: Who polices how transparent this perceived transparency actually is?
Take Olay, for example, a brand that not only includes the full INCI list for a portion of its products online, but links out to the third party program SmartLabel to give customers “instantaneous access to detailed information” about the function and safety of each individual ingredient. But in clicking on the first ingredient in the first product on Olay’s site — the avobenzone in Olay Regenerist Whip Face Moisturizer SPF 25 — a problem presents itself.
“Avobenzone. Sunscreen,” it reads. “Help[s] To Protect Skin From UV Damage.” Conspicuously missing is mention of the fact that avobenzone is known to absorb into users’ blood at potentially toxic levels when applied as directed; not necessarily proof that the ingredient is unsafe, but something conscientious consumers might like to know. A footnote on SmartLabel’s site may explain why: “Ingredient descriptions have been provided by Olay.”
Further digging reveals that SmartLabel is backed by the Consumer Brands Association (formerly the Grocery Manufacturers Association). The Consumer Brands Association’s Board of Directors includes Carolyn Tastad, a Procter & Gamble executive. Procter & Gamble owns Olay — a conflict of interest that complicates claims of “transparency.”
At minimum, “We would love to see all beauty brands listing their full ingredient lists online and on their packaging where possible, and that includes both fragrances and flavors,” Dahl says; “That helps give consumers the ability to [independently] look up ingredients in their products” — even those from seemingly forthcoming companies — “and make decisions that are right for themselves and their families.”
It’s a lovely vision, sure, but a vision that’s very unlikely to unfold without government interference. “The Personal Care Product Safety Act, introduced in the Senate by Senators Feinstein and Collins, includes a provision about ingredient labeling loopholes,” says Benes; but the bill is pending with just a 3% chance of being enacted, according to Skopos Labs. The Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act, a California bill, is closer to passing — it made it through the Assembly floor in June 2020 and will be voted on by the Senate by August 2020 — but while it would ban the use of a slew of potentially toxic cosmetic chemicals, it does not address ingredient disclosure. (To support the bill, California residents can text TOXICFREE to 52886.)
Until laws that prioritize public health over proprietary blends and false transparency are in place, Dahl recommends contacting companies directly. “We always encourage people to ask informed questions of brands, because that’s going to change the behavior at those companies,” she says. “Consumers can ask, ‘Why do you not disclose fragrance ingredients?’ or ‘Can you send me all of the ingredients that make up this product?’ It’s very telling immediately, based on the companies’ responses, if they’re going to be forthcoming with you.”
And if they’re not? Well, as Benesh says, “I would probably not want to buy a product if that company just wasn’t willing to level with me.”