From Meta's astroturfing operation to vinyl labels on my own tins - why the beauty industry's sustainability problem starts and ends with us.
I think this is going to be a blog about greenwashing in the natural skincare industry. I say "I think" because, like everything I write, it starts somewhere else entirely and meanders its way to the point.
I know social media is complex. We all love to hate it, and unless you're one of the lucky few who've managed to wrestle the algorithm into submission, you can end up in some pretty crazy places. I speak from experience.
But then there are the other times, the times something surfaces that genuinely shifts the way I think. Case in point: I stumbled across an article by Brian Lenney, an Idaho Senator - the chances of me ever knowing he existed without social media are less than a million zeros. He wrote a brilliant piece exposing Meta's multimillion-dollar astroturfing operation (fake grassroots movement, I had to look that one up, too), which got me thinking about greenwashing in the natural skincare industry. Yes, my mind wanders. It takes its time getting there. If you've read my blog about ice baths and boiled eggs, you already know this about me. If you haven't, here is the link.
Anyway, back to Brian Lenney's brilliant article. He exposes how Meta secretly funds supposedly "grassroots" parent advocacy groups - like the Digital Childhood Alliance - to push legislation that shifts child safety responsibilities onto Apple and Google's app stores, rather than onto Meta itself. He points to the very real and ubiquitous cynical corporate strategy where Meta keeps the outrage pointed at competitors while its own platforms continue doing documented harm to children's mental health. Lenney's conclusion is straightforward: real child protection comes from parental responsibility and direct platform accountability, not from corporate-funded campaigns positioning themselves as a movement.
One of the things I noticed over the years, from when I transitioned out of the shipping industry into the cool, yoga, hippy, awake-and-conscious world, was this amazing path that activists took. I remember a few I knew who started off with HIV, then moved on to water and now are shouting on the rooftops about one angle of the crazy state the world is in right now. The issues they started with aren't resolved; they need as much attention as ever, so why the shift? Take Greta Thunberg. She started with one message, and it was powerful. A teenage girl, on her own, outside the Swedish parliament, demanding action on climate change. Hard to argue with that. But somewhere along the way, climate became a whole lot of other issues, and I am not saying those aren't important causes. I'm saying that when you become the face of every cause, you become the face of none. The original message drowns. And with it, a lot of the credibility.
This, of course, takes me straight to greenwashing in the beauty industry, because that's how I think we got here. When activists are so easily pulled toward the loudest issue of the moment, attention fragments, accountability thins, and the space left behind is predictably and reliably filled by cynical corporate strategy. Whether it was conscious or not, the beauty industry noticed. And it took full advantage.
What greenwashing actually is.
Okay, so now we are clear that greenwashing and potential subterfuge are challenges we face in the world of activism, but how does this look in the natural skincare industry? Well, it's very much alive and well in the natural skincare industry, too. And in my experience, it happens in two very distinct places: the packaging and the ingredients. Both dressed up and delivered with such confident, clever marketing that most of us don't stop to question what's actually inside or on top (showing my age, love that Cremora ad, but needless to say, won't touch it). I've written about both of these at length, but for now, let me give you the short version.
How the beauty industry does it:
Ingredients
On the ingredient side, the problem starts with the word "natural" itself. There is no legally binding definition for it. None. Which means any brand can slap it on a label, and nobody is coming to check. This blog goes deep into the unregulated wild west of the beauty industry - including the time a prize I won at a boogie-boarding competition came with a "100% all-natural" cream that contained sodium laureth sulphate. The INCI transparency simply wasn't there, and the misleading claims were hiding in plain sight.
The labels are our first line of defence. When we look at natural skincare product labels, the cleaner and clearer they are, the easier it is to make choices based on our values. It gets complicated fast, which is why I've landed on one non-negotiable starting rule: petroleum-free. If it's in there, I'm out.
And before I go all "high horse", I am the first to hold my own hand up with our own limitations. Our labels on our glass bottles are vinyl, which is printed plastic, and they're not recyclable. The tin itself is infinitely recyclable, but stick a vinyl label on it, and you've immediately complicated the picture. There are other options, and I am always exploring them, but this is where we are right now. My firm belief is that we are all doing the best we can with what we have.
Packaging
On the packaging side, it's a different kind of smoke and mirrors - the beautiful unboxing experience designed to make you feel like you've chosen something special and conscious, when the reality is mountains of printed paper heading straight to landfill. I went into this here, and I will never be over it. Just think about this for a minute: the average UK family throws out the equivalent of six trees' worth of paper every year. Six trees sounds almost reasonable if we just stop there. Take it up a step: with 29 million households in the UK, multiply that out, and the UK alone is discarding the equivalent of nearly half a million trees every single day. Even writing this, I start feeling slightly hysterical, like the worst hangover I have ever experienced in my wilder days. That beautiful unboxing experience has a very ugly morning after.
And that's just the paper. The actual product packaging, the beautiful bottles, the satisfying pumps, the perfectly weighted jars, tell an even bigger horror story. The global beauty industry produces more than 120 billion units of plastic packaging every year. Of that, 95% is thrown away after a single use, and only 9% is actually recycled. Not sent to recycling, which is another minefield, but actually recycled. The rest heads straight to landfill, or worse, into our oceans. So the next time a brand wraps its "natural" skincare in a gorgeous bottle topped with a plastic pump, sealed with a plastic collar, wrapped in a printed cardboard sleeve and calls it conscious beauty, ask yourself what happens to all of that the morning after. Because that right there is greenwashing in skincare at its most brazen. It looks beautiful, but it costs us dearly.
And then there's the recycling minefield itself. Some brands use post-consumer recycled plastic, PCR, which sounds like the responsible choice, and to be fair, it is better than virgin plastic. It uses less energy, fewer fossil fuels, and diverts waste from landfills. But here's what they don't tell you: in most cases, PCR plastic cannot be recycled again. It’s a once-and-done scenario. It is not a loop, it's a detour. And that's before we even get to the liquid plastics hiding inside the formula itself - the silicones, the dimethicones, the invisible polymers that rinse straight off your skin and into the water supply. I went deep on that one here. Add to that the reality that beauty product tubes, pumps, and mixed-material containers are notoriously difficult to clean and sort, which means even the plastic that does make it into your recycling bin is often too contaminated to process. The recycling triangle on the bottom of your bottle is not a promise its just a possibility.
What we can actually do
I know this is a lot. But here's the thing - it doesn't have to be depleting. We are the consumers. We make the choice, our daily actions are exactly the piece that activism consistently leaves out. And the good news is that we don't need to wait for activism to catch up, for legislation to land, or for the beauty industry to develop a conscience. The power has always sat with us - the consumer - and it lives in the daily choices we make.
Intentional skincare shopping is not complicated, but it does require us to slow down. Read the INCI list before you buy, and if you can't find it, that's already your answer. Ask who made it, where, and with what. Buy less and choose better. Look for brands that can tell you the full seed-to-skin story of every ingredient, not just the ones that look good on the front of the bottle. Favour petroleum-free, fragrance-free, and packaging that doesn't require a recycling degree to navigate. Conscious beauty isn't a trend, it's a practice. And like all practices, it gets easier the more you do it.
This is exactly why AYA exists. Every ingredient we use passes one test: would I put this on a newborn? Not a certification body's standard, mine. Raw fermented papaya, beeswax straight from the hive, food-grade oils from seed to skin. Clean beauty, South African made, packed into a plastic-free tin, petroleum-free, and nothing to hide. That's not a marketing claim - it's just the reality of what's in each tin of AYA Balm.
