What Is Sustainable Skincare?

A definition formed after watching small decisions pile up quietly, and then all at once.

Sustainable skincare isn’t something we typically criticize. It’s not about the color of the packaging, the words printed on it, or the tone a brand uses to appear “responsible.” Instead, it’s about a series of decisions made long before any product touches the skin. These choices often go unnoticed because they aren’t photogenic and don’t offer much of a side angle once they’re made.

Let’s take it from the top. Most brands begin with the product they want to sell, and then, somewhere between the vision board and the launch date, sustainability is folded in as a bonus feature. That order tells you almost everything you need to know.

The real, more intentional work starts earlier, in the part of the process no one wants to romanticize, where someone has to slow down and ask better questions.

Where does the ingredient come from?
Who handled it?
What did the land look like before it was harvested?
Does choosing it mean strengthening a place?
Are you extracting it because it genuinely matters, or because the paperwork provides a sufficient documentation trail to satisfy a certification?

Simply put, buying something because it fits a claim is efficient. Sourcing something because it holds up under scrutiny takes longer, costs more, and has consequences that don’t show up until much later in this year’s P&L.

What I’ve seen create the most environmental damage in skincare isn’t a single ingredient or even a single material. It’s restlessness. Labels revised because the sentence felt tired. Cartons were redesigned because the brand wanted to feel “new again” before the old stock was used. Components swapped because a holiday launch needed a win. A comma moves, and suddenly there are pallets of packaging that can’t be used, certifications that have to be resubmitted, and inventory that ends up in a dumpster because it no longer matches the story being told. Hundreds of thousands of labels and unit cartons are thrown out every day because of another hasty decision.

No customer ever notices that chain reaction. The waste still sits in heaps behind manufacturing plants.

Ingredient choices follow a similar pattern. There are countless ingredients that meet certification standards yet contribute very little to skin health. These ingredients are often moved to the front of the line because they’re affordable. I once worked with a high-end client selling a CBD serum at Saks Fifth Avenue for $180, and it cost $1.30 to make, if you catch my drift. Once you see these leading ingredients for what they are, you can’t unsee them. Go ahead and look at how many expensive beauty brands rely on sunflower oil, safflower oil, and water the next time you walk the beauty aisles.

Packaging is where most of the formula budget ends up, unfortunately. Overpriced looking packaging sells. Elaborate displays, textured cartons, gold foiling, and visual drama are often prioritized over the product’s functionality. That same brand had all the features, but the product itself never matched the appearance. They no longer have a skincare line, to say the least.

It’s comical how quickly sustainability disappears once a price is attached. “Oh, this is forty cents more? PET components will be fine for now.” Glass breaks. Plastic lingers longer than it should, so compostable must be the answer, right? In theory. In practice, compostable materials cost more than most pricing models allow for and are difficult to source. Many compostable systems in cosmetics require industrial composting, which costs more and is rarely accessible, and most people aren’t composting them correctly anyway. There is no perfect answer here, only better questions to ask during product development. Every choice has a downstream effect, whether a brand acknowledges it or not.

Sustainability that doesn’t include the people who grow, harvest, distill, and process raw materials is incomplete by default. This is why I source from partners who prioritize these factors. How many people can we impact by buying one raw material? The answer is still being tallied, but it’s approximately 7,000 people worldwide. We purchase from Fair Trade initiatives and establish long-term relationships with reforestation efforts that have planted over 500,000 trees.

We partner with women’s co-ops and small family farms because when people can stay on the land and make a living tending it, soil and community improve. Our farmers are the single most important part of our ecosystem, alongside bees. So I choose to honor this. I choose to honor our farmers first and tell their stories. Without biodiverse soil, we are nothing. These things are connected, whether the industry likes it or not.

So when I talk about sustainable skincare, I’m not talking about perfection or purity or the illusion of having solved something permanently. I’m talking about consistency, restraint, and accountability. While other brands are running a dirty race, I’ve repurposed more than seventy-five pounds of magazines from landfills while resisting the urge to constantly tweak and repackage a shit sandwich.

Sustainable skincare is not flashy. Most days, it looks like me, elbow deep in recycled newspapers, tape stuck to my fingers, wondering how many times a box can be used before it finally gives up. I’m not shouting from rooftops or selling salvation, but I am waving just enough to be noticed, because something has to shift, and if it couldn’t happen inside the brands I built for, then it had to happen inside the one I was willing to stand behind, my own.