Why Your Clean Beauty Launch is Failing Before It Begins
Let me paint you a picture. You’ve got a killer idea for a “clean,” “natural,” “made-with-love-and-moon-dust” product. Your marketing team is already planning the Instagram captions.
Your product developers are sprinting toward the perfect texture, scent, and Pantone 186C lipstick red—but wait, you can’t use FD&C dyes? Uh-oh. You wanted this to be “green,” but suddenly it’s looking more chartreuse meets lawsuit.
This is the kind of chaos that used to unfold all the time when I was formulating for the big brands that are sold in Target, Walmart, CVS, and Sephora. These brands had budgets the size of some small countries, but even with that, there was always one Achilles’ heel: misalignment. The product development team, the formulators, and the marketers were often not just on different pages—they were in entirely different books, possibly written in different centuries.
And if you’re wondering who kept me sane during all of this?
Gay Timmons & Sheri Allen: The Fairy Godmothers of Organic Reality Checks
Gay and Sheri have been mentors to me and countless others in this wild world of beauty and personal care. Both women are regulator-whisperers, ingredient sleuths, and walking encyclopedias of what’s actually sustainable, organic, or CLEAN (versus what just has a leaf on the label). And let me tell you— they do not mince words. They make mincemeat out of what you think you can claim, versus what you can claim.
Gay once told me, “If someone says their product is 100% anything, you should be 100% suspicious.” And she’s right. Plants are messy. Formulas are messy. Life is messy. And if you think a botanical extract isn’t carrying a little Hermes bag filled with residual solvents, stabilizers, or a few broken dreams, you’re living in fantasyland.
The Clean Beauty Plot Twist
So here’s how it usually goes: A product brief is created. Great! It includes some dreamy language like “clean,” “sustainable,” “preservative-free,” and “packaged in a jar made of starlight and recycled fairy wings.”
Then the chemist is handed this and asked to do the impossible: make it feel like whipped silk, smell like eucalyptus in Bali, and never separate or grow mold, even if left in a hot car for three years. Also—can it be 100% organic? And cost under $1.25? And oh yeah—be ready for global distribution as well?
At one point, I was working with a global product development icon who had previously worked for Victoria's Secret. I was thrilled to work with her until I saw the product brief and benchmark formula. To this day, this project contributed to the development of my nasolabial folds, as I often held my face in a downward frowning position. The demands were outlandish. I couldn't believe that someone working at a high-profile business like VS would propose this without knowing the proper compliance required to launch in the EU. The kick in the gut is that this happens.
What happens is more like a chaotic game of corporate telephone. Product developers tweak ingredients mid-formulation, chasing the perfect texture or that one magical shade of red, without using FD&C dyes, of course. Iron oxides try their best, but bless their little mineral hearts, they just can’t cut it. Still, the team shrugs and says, “Eh, close enough,” and passes it to the chemist like it’s fine. Six months later, someone finally squints at the INCI list and realizes—surprise!—the formula no longer meets clean standards. Cue panic. Thousands down the drain. Everyone’s back at square one, sadder and significantly more caffeinated.
I’m not much of a line dancer, but after chasing shifting demands so often, I might as well teach the Boots Scootin’ Boogie on weekends. One minute it’s “clean beauty or bust,” the next it’s “but can we make it shimmer like a unicorn’s eyelid?” They want compostable packaging—just don’t expect me to wait for stability test results before the launch deadline. And my personal favorite: “We love it, but it’s too expensive.” By the time I untangle all that feedback, the only thing steady is my lifelong love affair with caffeine and chaos.
Death by Format Change
I once worked on a lip scrub for a very famous makeup artist. A lip scrub that—brace yourself—took over four years to develop. Yes, four years. That’s a presidential term. That’s how long it takes to become a doctor in some countries. We had three different people managing the project over the years—basically a relay race of slowly mounting chaos.
We finally crawl to the finish line, confetti in hand, and ALAS:
“Actually... can we put it in a 10 ml jar instead of the tube?”
A jar. Not the format we’d been developing for the last four years, but sure, why not throw the entire formula out the window? So we start to reformulate for the pot... only to realize our equipment can’t even fill jars with lip scrub. We were essentially trying to bake a cake in a toaster.
The project was scrapped and never launched. And to this day, I hear faint whispers of it in the dead of night. A ghost scrub, haunting my career with exfoliating regret.
The lesson: Know your product specifications and component choices before you develop, people.
Shea Butter & the Myth of Purity
Take shea butter. Beautiful, versatile, nutrient-rich shea butter. People love to slap “100% shea” on a label like it’s a badge of purity. But here’s the truth: Shea doesn’t come pre-packaged in a sanitized lab. It’s harvested by hand, often by women in rural African communities, roasted, pulverized, and then sent to Europe for refinement, where it’s filtered for metals, treated with a touch of citric acid to extend shelf life, and made fit for formulation.
At this point, calling it “100% shea butter” is like saying a croissant is “just flour.” Technically not wrong, but also very, very inaccurate.
Documentation, Or: How to Not Get Sued
Gay always taught us: If you can’t prove it, don’t claim it. And proving it means paperwork. You need your Certificates of Analysis, SDS sheets, trace documentation, and processing flowcharts—the full Monty (see outline in next post & stay on the edge of your seat). Not some napkin scribble from a guy named Gary at the supplier’s booth at Expo West, who is trying to launch a mama & baby line despite knowing very little about women in general.
And here’s the kicker: Even with documentation, it’s nearly impossible to substantiate “100%” or “all natural” claims. Because materials change. Molecules shift. Ingredients react. And nature, bless her chaotic soul, does not play by marketing rules. Nature works at Earth speed - helloooooo. Can we all agree 100% that anything is a bit of a facade?
Your Formulator Is Not a Magician
So before you ask your formulator for something that “smells like heaven, feels like clouds, and has a 10-year shelf life with no preservatives,” remember: your formulator is a scientist, not a Hogwarts graduate.
They’re balancing ingredients that are high in linoleic acid and stearic acid, checking temperature phases, managing emulsions, and trying to keep your formula from breaking up like a bad relationship under stress. Every change you request (new scent, new packaging, new supplier) impacts their carefully built structure. Respect their craft—or prepare to reformulate endlessly, costing you thousands in development costs.
If You Want to Sell in the EU, Read This Twice - PLEASE
The U.S. is, let’s just say, playing JV when it comes to cosmetic regulations. The EU? They’re the Olympic team. Korea? Basically, regulatory ninjas. Canada? Don’t even try to sneak anything by them—they will find it, document it, and politely decline your application, eh.
If you’re planning to scale internationally, you have to plan and formulate for that from the very beginning. That means sourcing from compliant suppliers, having full traceability, and knowing what ingredients will fly—and what will get you banned faster than glitter in a “clean” product line.
Ask better questions. Align your teams. Respect your chemist. And did I say - ASK BETTER QUESTIONS!?
Product development is not just about dreamy branding, unique components, or smooth textures. It’s about integrity, transparency, and reality-based claims. The earlier you loop in your formulator, the better. And the more you invest in understanding your ingredients and documentation, the less likely you are to end up with a launch delay, a recall, or worse, a product that no one can legally sell outside of Kentucky.
Being in the beauty industry didn’t just teach me how to read an SDS—it taught me how to see through the noise, question the hype, and make something actually clean.
This isn’t just a process—it’s a responsibility. Because every ingredient tells a story, every formulation carries intention, and every product connects us to the land and the hands that nurtured it. When we honor that, we honor the legacy we all share.
And that, my friends, is worth way more than a perfect Pantone match.
With magic and moxie,
Monique (aka Sneaks)