💬 "Putting Beauty Products under the Microscope"

Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[5:25] SK: "Harvard Business School [defined] the beauty industry [as] cosmetics and fragrances, but also deodorants, haircare, oral hygiene, skincare.[...] Forbes puts it at a $530 billion industry with the US as the largest beauty market followed by China and Japan. [...] The FDA defines beauty classically as products intended to cleanse or beautify [...] and they do not require these products to receive any kind of approval, or oversight from the FDA."

[10:44] RK: "We estimate there's about 121 billion units of beauty packaging annually. [...] Most things, in general in any industry are not recycled. At most 7 to 9% of plastics are recycled and most beauty packaging is plastics. But what makes beauty packaging squeezable, portable, twistable, generally attractive, and what makes them stand out on a sea of options is creating lots of different types of parts of even one individual product. So then you get into the disassembly issue. Recycling is all about aggregating uniform volumes of materials, so you can sell it. It's a commodity."

[19:18] SK: "In general, as an industry, one of the challenges about it is that it's underregulated and under-looked. [...] The US bans about 30 ingredients from the beauty industry versus the European Union, which bans about 1,400. So we're really far behind the rest of the world. And again, this comes at a cost to consumers and planet."

[21:05] RK: "In 2018 Kourtney Kardashian, famous founder of Poosh, a website that's dedicated to sort of natural fashion and beauty [...] appeared before Congress with the Environmental Working Group to pass a bill that would require cosmetics companies to disclose all ingredients and give FDA new oversight over harmful ingredients. And this bill has yet to pass. [...] Companies like Claire's may be against it who produce children's makeup. And some of these companies are the ones who have come under the most fire for having things like trace amounts of asbestos in children's makeup."

[24:19] SK: "by Humankind [...] [is a brand with] very minimal packaging, nothing is single use plastic. And their toothpaste and mouthwash come in tablet form. And then they're on a subscription refill method. [...] I thought that was an interesting model to take a look at."

Rating: ☁️☁️