EDF’s Clean Beauty Roadmap Offers Long-Needed Guide to Credible Claims of Safe Products
EDF’s Clean Beauty Roadmap Offers Long-Needed Guide to Credible Claims of Safe Products
Third-party assessments are a key practice to restoring consumer trust in what is “safe.”
The Environmental Defense Fund’s newly released Clean Beauty Roadmap supplies a key missing piece in transforming not only the beauty and personal care products available on shelves, but the entire system of how chemical decisions are made in this industry and beyond.
This roadmap is a clear framework for companies making clean beauty claims to restore and build confidence in their products. It equips them to move beyond the practice of claiming to be “free of” a group of hazards or restricted substances -- no matter how extensive -- and instead offer the credible assurance that ingredients have been thoroughly and credibly assessed and found to be free of hazards.
As the industry has struggled with defining “clean,” in a way that builds credibility, formulators have also faced scarce information fueling the risk of regrettable substitutions. The information they need to guide the selection of safer ingredients has been incomplete, expensive and often hidden in proprietary silos. ChemFORWARD is proud to be the leading nonprofit source of comprehensive, affordable and verified assessments of chemical hazards and safer alternatives.
While the cosmetics industry is like most consumer-goods sectors in facing minimal regulation of chemical inputs, it fills a uniquely broad and personal role in peoples’ day-to-day lives. We put beauty and personal care products on our bodies, faces and hair, we breathe them in as we apply them and throughout the day, waking and sleeping. We trust these products to be beneficial to ourselves and our families – to keep us clean, healthy and well-groomed.
Organizations ranging from narrowly focused industry groups to the United Nations Environmental Programme confront these obstacles when searching for data-backed safer chemical options to replace hazardous chemicals. Last year, ChemFORWARD worked with EDF in collaboration with cosmetics retailer Sephora in a trial program to identify safer alternatives with comprehensive toxicity data and which meet manufacturers’ functional requirements with low human and environmental health hazards. That collection has grown to hundreds of ingredients, transforming formulators’ access to the information they need to follow EDF’s roadmap and create safer products.
Using chemical hazard assessment methodology based on the UN’s Globally Harmonized System, ChemFORWARD worked with leading toxicology firms to assemble actionable data including comprehensive human and environmental impacts and safer alternatives into its globally harmonized repository.
This growing, verified dataset is available by subscription. For each portfolio, ChemFORWARD researches safer alternatives, creates a short list of functional alternatives that are likely to be safer, and then conducts full chemical hazard assessments with leading toxicology firms. The data then undergoes a peer-review process and is subject to a technical challenge process before being posted on the cloud-based repository.
The clearinghouse can serve as a resource for product manufacturers, brands and retailers considering safer alternatives for chemical replacements, and as a place for chemical manufacturers to demonstrate their safer alternative options. Ingredient suppliers who value transparency are also invited to initiate their own assessments through ChemFORWARD and have them listed by trade name in the system.
This rigorous process and vastly improved accessibility serves as a critical piece of supporting infrastructure for brands and retailers implementing EDFs Clean Beauty Roadmap. With no meaningful regulatory guide or standard, retailers and consumers alike have been left on their own to develop a shared definition of clean. EDF’s excellent and thoughtful guide, backed up by real, trustworthy and comprehensive data on hazards and safer alternatives, offers much more than a start in this critically important journey to healthier products.
