The rise and rise of clean beauty

Your fridge is full of courgetti, your kitchen cupboards are stocked with almond butter and your wardrobe is kitted out with sustainable fashion.

Now, it’s time to turn to your attention to your bathroom shelf — because while ‘clean eating’ and ‘conscious fashion’ were the buzz phrases of last year, it’s the ‘clean beauty’ movement that’s causing a stir.

Remember when eco-brands were a bit of a joke, derided for their New-Age formulas and clumpy hemp packaging? Today, enticingly Instagrammable and eco-conscious labels such as This Works, Vanderohe, Björk & Berries, Pai and Romilly Wilde — which forgo synthetic ingredients in favour of naturally occuring botanical sources and not only smell divine but also come in packaging that would make Coco Chanel purr — are being taken very seriously indeed.

According to trend forecasters The Future Laboratory, the UK natural cosmetics market is currently worth just over £54m, and is set to reach £34bn globally by 2019. Natural beauty stores are flourishing: in the US, new chain Credo, akin to Sephora and selling brands that use ‘safe, sustainable, and ethically sourced ingredients’ already has popular branches in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Here in London, chic natural tinctures can be picked up in Content Beauty on Marylebone High Street, while Holland & Barrett around the capital is becoming the new destination to buy your tinted lip balms thanks to a trendy image makeover. Online, the Beauty Counter is a modern Avon for those after natural skincare.

And much like the makeover that healthy eating underwent thanks to the Hemsley sisters, Amelia Freer and Deliciously Ella, the clean-beauty movement has a new cast of soigné ambassadors, too. Burberry make-up artist Wendy Rowe has written a guide on how to use your diet to nourish your skin called Eat Beautiful, while Londoners Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic, who mix up their own organic face oils and sell them for £35 a bottle via their website, have just published their first book, Clean Beauty.

‘The woman buying into it is already conscious about what she eats: skincare and make-up are the natural next steps,’ explains New York-based make-up artist Kirsten Kjær Weis, founder of the eponymous Kjær Weis, a line of organic cosmetics housed in refillable silver trinkets. Disappointed by the lack of high-performance natural brands in her kit, she developed her own 95 per cent organic pigments (meaning the ingredients come from organic farms and are grown in organic soil untouched by chemicals for at least three years) using minerals such as the light-reflective ‘micas’ group which add shine.

But this isn’t just about feeling healthy and virtuous. ‘We live in a society where we want everything,’ says Kathy Phillips, ex-Vogue beauty director and founder of This Works, which uses natural and organic ingredients. ‘We want to say we are natural but also look half our age.’ Nothing drives sales like results and the natural ingredients used in some of these clean beauty players are as potent as many synthetics. The sustainably sourced Cacay oil that you’ll find in Oilixia’s Amazonian Oil (£48; thisisbeautymart.com) for example, contains an amount of retinol (about the only clinically recognised anti-ageing ingredient that reduces wrinkles via cell renewal) comparable with any non-natural retinol product on the market.

‘Natural can be scientific,’ agrees Susie Willis, who founded plant-based brand Romilly Wilde last year. She uses so-called ‘bio-identicals’ — that is, lab-grown ingredients comparable to those found in the wild — to make her products more sustainable. ‘The laboratory I work with takes one cell from the plant — algae, for instance — and instead of stripping the seabed for more, they stimulate the environment in the lab so the cell can be reproduced again and again.’

Sustainability is not just a buzzword for these new brands. ‘You need to think about the complete 360-degree footprint of your brand and try to use each choice as a potential solution to a bigger problem,’ says Marcia Kilgore, the founder of Soaper Duper, which launched last year using largely natural ingredients and recycled plastics and is currently stocked in Liberty. ‘We consider the net effect of the bottle or tube on plastic landfill, the net effect of the formulation on our groundwater resources, the net effect of the product on the person using it, and of course, the net effect of the personality of the brand on overall zeitgeist.’ This ethical stance is not the cheapest of life choices — her bath soaps come in at around £7.50 — but who said clean was cheap?

As with any prominent trend, copycat and less squeaky-clean brands will jump on the bandwagon. It’s impossible to tell from the label on the bottle, for example, whether your face oil contains frankincense sourced sustainably from a fair-trade farmer or whether it has been harvested by an exploited worker. And for a brand to advertise itself as ‘natural’, it only needs a tiny percentage of the formula to be natural (unlike ‘organic’).

‘It can be a green maze,’ warns Willis. The trick? Do your research — visit brands’ websites, as well as the Soil Association website, Paula’s Choice and Ecocert, where you can learn about different ingredients.

Look for third-party authentication stamps that prove how natural it is. Also look at the ingredient listing: the blanket word ‘fragrance’ is often a red flag for synthetics and if there are any unrecognisable words, google them.

With the right products, you can keep your conscience as clean as your complexion.