Greater awareness of climate change has driven customers as well as investors to go “green”, and this trend has extended to beauty products. Many beauty products tout themselves as being “eco-friendly”. This is something of importance to a brand like Avant Permanent Cosmetics. The terminology may be widely used but its precise meaning is relatively unknown. The blog Frends Beauty tackled the meaning of “eco-friendly” in the context of make-up brands, which will help you understand what goes into terming a product eco-friendly. .
They found that the term “eco-friendly” does not have an exact definition, so legally, there are no hurdles to jump in order for a beauty product to call itself “eco-friendly”. In terms of general usage, the term encompasses many different things. Essentially, an eco-friendly brand or company attempts to minimize damage to the environment or to have a net-neutral effect on the environment. How a company achieves this can be found on their website. A make-up brand may decline to use animal testing, or it may use packaging from recycled materials, or it can try and reduce waste and pollution its its manufacturing processes. The specific ways a brand becomes eco-friendly are numerous.
A make-up brand may attempt to be cruelty-free, which essentially means that they will not test their products on animals. This is not the same as saying that a product will not have animal products. A product can have animal products and still be cruelty free if it did not employ animals during its testing processes.
A vegan product is not only cruelty free, it also does not use any animal products. So, for example, a brush would not use any animal fur, but use synthetic bristles and will not have been tested on animals.
All-natural products are something that eco-friendly brands may produce. There is no legal definition of “all-natural” so a brand has a great deal of discretion here, so what one brand may consider all-natural may be objectionable to another party.
It is important to read labels, check ingredients and, when in doubt, call the manufacturer to understand how they decide what is eco-friendly.