Clean Beauty—and Why It’s Important
Clean beauty products are made without ingredients shown or suspected to harm human health. At Cassine, clean beauty also has to be luxurious, high-performance, and all-out enchanting, whether it’s a shower gel you use every day, a youth-boosting superserum that leaves your skin glowing, or a lip color you reserve for when you want to look and feel your prettiest. There’s no compromise to be made anymore—the tech has gotten that good—so there’s even less of an excuse for conventional beauty companies to keep making products with potentially harmful ingredients.
While it’s hard to believe that conventional beauty companies would ever include such ingredients in their products, the fact is that they do—it’s still common practice and perfectly legal. The conventional beauty and personal-care industry is minimally regulated in America. To give you an idea of where we are, consider that there are 11 cosmetic ingredients currently banned by the FDA, while in the EU, over 1,300 ingredients are banned. Companies operating in the US face much less stringent regulations than those in the EU. So they continue to pack the products that we use every day (mascara, face wash, shampoo, et al.) with potentially harmful ingredients that can include known carcinogens, irritants, and endocrine disruptors.
GREENWASHING AND CLEAN-WASHING
Even with FDA and FTC regulations in place (like the FTC’s Green Guides), companies continue to use many adjectives to market and greenwash these potentially harmful products—”natural,” “green,” and “eco,” for example, have no clear definition.
WHAT CLEAN MEANS AT GOOP
At Cassine, we’ve created our own strict standards of what we call clean beauty, which you’ll see in action in our own beauty lines (skin care, fragrance, hair care, and body care), in all the products sold on Cassine.shop, and in all of our editorial stories as well. Clean, for us, means a product that is made without a long (and ever-evolving) list of ingredients linked to harmful health effects, which can range from hormone disruption and cancer to plain old skin irritation. To name a few of the offenders we avoid: parabens, phthalates, PEGs, ethanolamines, chemical sunscreens, synthetic fragrance, BHT, and BHA.
We look to scientific studies as we make our decisions about which ingredients we can live with and which we can’t. The science can be murky, but we go with the clear offenders: Do you want antifreeze (propylene glycol) in your moisturizer? We’re going to guess no.
Do we love luxurious, incredible-smelling, super effective, beautifully pigmented beauty products? We do—and we make them, sell them, and write about them. Clean beauty involves no compromises in terms of quality, efficacy, or luxury at this point; it’s a beautiful thing.
Our ultimate goal? That more people vote with their dollars (at Cassine or elsewhere) so that someday, we won’t ever have to wonder what’s in this perfume or that face cream, because all of it will be clean and safe (more on that below).