EP63. How Parabens kickstarted the Indie Beauty Movement

Have you ever stopped to wonder where the Indie Beauty sector suddenly came from? It wasn't here 20 years ago. It wasn't here in its current form 10 years ago. What was the trigger that caused Indie Beauty to become such an impactful movement? I've been asking myself this question for a while now, and last year I took the time to really delve into the history of Indie Beauty. I read articles, I dug out old newspapers, I looked at how much things have changed, even in the decade that I've worked in this sector. And when I put everything together, the answer was staring me in the face. The Indie Beauty sector started because of parabens. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make and sell your natural beauty formulations. We tackle topics that will make you think and encourage debate about Green Beauty with your friends, followers or customers. I'm your host, Lorraine Dalmaier. I'm a chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award-winning online organic cosmetic formulation school, Formula Botanica. We have thousands and thousands of students in over 175 countries around the world who study with us to become organic beauty formulators and entrepreneurs. Visit our website at formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. So this podcast episode is slightly different because you've just got me. And I'd like to tell you how parabens started the Indie Beauty movement. So I hope you'll join me, settle in for the duration and listen as I share the story of how it all started with a parabens. Cosmetics that are branded as parabens free now outsell cosmetics branded as natural. Despite being an illegal cosmetic claim in certain regions of the world, such as the EU, the parabens free claim is here to stay and one of the indisputable drivers in cosmetic sales. Being parabens free is now so popular that the marketing term parabens free cosmetics might be the difference between getting a beauty product on the shelf and keeping a beauty product on the shelf. In fact, the parabens free movement has now grown so big that beauty manufacturers are abandoning these traditional synthetic preservatives in droves. It's also given rise to an entire industry of Indie Beauty brands. Natural ingredients have been around for millennia. Long before the first synthetics effectant was invented, people were already making their own beauty products using fats, oils, pigments, milks, waters and most importantly plants. There's a reason much of this plant knowledge is still known to us today because a lot of it works. Many of us have grown up being taught what to do when we sting ourselves on a nettle. We grab a nearby dock leaf, which plants can stain our skin if we use them. Be true, turmeric and which local plants can help with wound healing if we ever cut ourselves. However, the natural's movement did not take off online because people had been using plants since the dawn of time. Instead, it all started with a parabens. If you haven't heard of parabens before, unlikely I know, they are a group of chemicals synthesized in a lab to preserve consumer products such as cosmetics, foods and pharmaceuticals. They've been used as preservatives since the 1920s and can be used in tiny quantities in cosmetic formulations to give beauty products a long shelf life. I am not a chemist and I am not here to teach you about parabens chemistry today, but it's important that you understand that there are many different types of parabens and that they are all different chemicals, which means that they all behave differently when used in cosmetics or other consumer products. Most importantly, whatever your knowledge of understanding of parabens, you don't need to have an in-depth understanding of these chemicals to know that they have been the catalyst for the natural and indie beauty movement. In 2004, a study was published by a researcher called Philip Adabre, Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading in the UK, which was the defining moment of which the natural movement started to go mainstream, as well as the foundations being laid for the current indie beauty sector. The reason for this research having such profound implications is that Professor Adabre's study found traces of parabens in breast cancer tissues, which went on to rock the beauty industry. It's important to note that no definitive evidence was presented in Professor Adabre's study to demonstrate that parabens were actually causing breast cancer. The research didn't look at non-cancerous tissues, what researchers call control samples, to demonstrate the presence of parabens, which meant that it wasn't possible to draw any definitive links between parabens and the cancerous tissue in the study. However, the study provided an interesting insight into how ubiquitous parabens are, and it posed more questions for further research, which is why, as with many scientific articles, this one concluded by recommending further studies. However, an unfortunate modern phenomenon is that media outlets seek headlines that grab people's attention, which means that science communication is not always undertaken with the greatest of care. As a consequence, various media outlets and blogs wrote about this study using words that suggested the existence of conclusive evidence that parabens caused breast cancer, despite the researchers not having made such bold claims. Headlines such as the deodorant safety guide, how picking the right brand could save your life in the Daily Mail in 2007, or is your make-up making you sick in the telegraph in 2005, published in the years following the study's publication, gave people understandable cause for alarm. The combined force of the natural community quickly latched on to what they viewed as evidence that parabens should be avoided at all cost. Parabinoia took hold, and as a result, people were quick to dismiss these common preservatives in their personal care products, overlooking that they are used in many foods and commonly ingested. Many consumers branded parabens as dirty, toxic, and of course, carcinogenic. This hype drove a number of people to start writing about the dangers of cosmetic preservatives in general. The discussion around parabens suddenly turned into a very black or white debate, where you either bought toxic or non-toxic cosmetics, and there was nothing in between. The beauty industry initially welcomed the 2004 study, but as media hype grew, lashed out by finding flaws for the study's methodology, and eventually in some cases, even condemned the research and its researchers. Their initial scientific interest quickly turned to rejection. After all, they'd been working with parabens for 80 years without anyone complaining, and now suddenly, everyone was demonizing the very ingredients that had preserved their cosmetics. The industry's response was one of horror. Since 2004, I have read many articles about parabens, preservatives, and natural cosmetics, which can only be described as angry rants by chemists, academics, and beauty industry association members, reacting angrily to the people questioning the safety of their industry. The discussion has moved well beyond that of scientific scrutiny. Although I don't condone the tone used by many of these chemists, nor do I condone the sensationalist headlines used by the media, I do understand how having their ingredients thrust into the media spotlight led to many people feeling very unhappy. After all, the safety of our cosmetics is not determined by public court. Furthermore, the modern beauty industry has no interest in selling dangerous cosmetics to the public, so naturally, I can understand why anyone would feel infuriated at being told that they were designing, making, and selling toxic, or even carcinogenic cosmetics. The original authors of the study put out a further response eight months after its original publication date to make clear that they didn't claim that the presence of parabens had caused breast cancer. However, by that point, it was too late. And the two camps had become firmly entrenched on both sides of the fence. In the years since the original 2004 study, further research has been undertaken, and no scientific evidence has yet suggested that all parabens need to be removed from cosmetics. That lack of concrete evidence hasn't, however, had much of an effect on public opinion. I don't think anyone in the beauty industry could ever have predicted the wide-ranging ramifications of this single scientific study and the way it was reported by the media. Let's not forget that 2004 coincided with the dawn of social media and the proliferation of blogging, which meant that both unbalanced news reports and conspiracy theories suddenly had a faster way of traveling unchecked. Social media users now had a means for picking up on a scientific study, discussed on news sites or blogs, drawing incorrect conclusions from it, and then swiftly condemning an entire industry. Had the beauty industry known what was going to happen, perhaps they would have defended their ingredients differently. Perhaps they would have used language that appealed more to consumers instead of blandly writing rebuttals using scientific terminologies such as safety margins and adverse effects. Perhaps they could have prevented the slow vilification of their own industry. However, it's always harder to defend yourself when facing a predetermined court of public opinion, so they were on the back foot from day one. Their defense fell on deaf ears. Instead, the growing paraben discussion caused a domino effect, whereby different cosmetic ingredients were now publicly reviewed for their safety. These reviews sometimes took the form of giving chemicals safety scores, assuming that incorporating 1% of as a factant in a shampoo is the same as immersing yourself in a bath of sodium lorrid sulfate. Inevitably, these reviews were undertaken with little regard for dosage or exposure, which meant that the scientific community heaped scoremon onto well-meaning but ill-informed attempts to protect consumers when buying beauty products. Ingredients such as sodium lauret sulfate, thalates, peg compounds and mineral oils were soon publicly added to lists of chemicals that should be avoided at all costs. Long lists of vilified chemicals were published by news outlets, bloggers, companies, even certain lobbying associations and charities. For long, Google was flooded with articles claiming that you were using antifreeze in your moisturizer, that mineral oil could clog your pores and that's the fact that it could make your hair fall out. Natural skincare, hair care or makeup had been relegated to the sidelines until that point, viewed as an interest of crunchy people, who sought an alternative or hippie lifestyle. Many of the natural formulations that existed on the market up until that point lived up to those expectations too, as they were often quite heavy, greasy and sometimes even unpleasant to use. However, suddenly the natural movement found itself thrust into the limelight and told to step it up. Suddenly, parabens weren't the only ingredients people were seeking to avoid in their cosmetics, which meant that the natural movement took hold by default. A logical side effect of someone telling you that your skincare is going to kill you is wanting to learn how to make your own beauty products using safe ingredients. After all, if you can control what goes into your lotions, creams and cleanses, then you can make sure that your ingredients are the ones you want to have in contact with your skin and hair. And this is exactly what happened. The desire to avoid synthetic chemicals led to people wanting to become DIY beauty formulators. Following the paraben controversy, there was first a proliferation of books teaching people how to make DIY beauty using fresh fruits and vegetables. You might be familiar with such recipes, where you, for instance, mash up a banana and some strawberries and then mix it up with some fresh yoghurt to apply as an instant face mask. And there is nothing wrong with that. Blog posts then started appearing everywhere to tell us that the skin's soothing, nourishing and healing qualities of the fresh produce in your fridge. They also frequently discussed the dangers of preservatives, so encouraged you to make homemade fresh skincare instead. What many of these articles failed to do, however, was warn their readers of the dangers of unpreserved cosmetics that are meant to have a shelf life of anything longer than a couple of days. The DIY movement took off with an vengeance. Lip balms, bodybutters, scrubs and oil recipes were shared across the internet. Once Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram took off, so did the rise of the DIY beauty infographic, teaching you how to make natural creams emulsified by beeswax, which isn't possible. Natural lotions without preservatives, which is dangerous. And natural serums packed full of dangerously high dosages of essential oils, which are amazing ingredients, but they are potentially sensitizing to the skin when used in the wrong quantities. The global economic downturn of 2008 then further encouraged many people to go down the homemade crafting and grow your own route. For some of us, this DIY revolution has been a valuable lesson in resourcefulness that our grandparents knew only too well. It's helped to understand that many of the items we buy in the shops can easily be grown, sewn, built or replicated at home. It's also shown us that we can easily make our own cosmetics using natural ingredients. The cosmetics industry has for the longest time given us the impression that our beloved beauty products are complex chemical formulations, which are impossible to replicate at home. However, the recent growth in the natural cosmetic sector has shown us that when consumers demand natural organic products that are free from certain chemicals, our skincare label suddenly start to list ingredients, which we're all too familiar with, such as honey, oats and sunflower oil. Our ancestors would have laughed to see us go full circle. Before the multinational cosmetics sector found its feet, people used to make their own beauty products from natural ingredients. Everyone has heard the story of Cleopatra bathing in milk and the tale of her beautifully radiant skin. Legend has it that she required 700 lactating donkeys in order to supply the milk for her daily bathing regime. It was said that in milk lurked a magic which would dispel all diseases and blights from your beauty. Nowadays, of course, we know that milk contains lactic acid and alpha hydroxy acid, which will gently dislodge dead skin cells. Three books are full of little snippets about beauty through the ages, which give us an insight into the birth of today's cosmetics industry. It shouldn't come as a surprise that our kitchens are actually full of interesting ingredients which you can use on your skin. The four cosmetics adverts blinded us with techno-babel about products containing synchronized recovery complex two or pro-retinal A plus elastiflex. People used vegetables, fruits, pulses, grains, dairy products and herbs to name a few of the ingredients upon which today's beauty products are based. Because that's the irony of modern cosmetics. Companies are desperate to tell you that their skincare product is fundamentally different and will halt the aging process thanks to their secret recipe, while simultaneously ensuring you that they contain lots of botanical extracts and are really very natural. In reality, many of the mainstream skincare products you buy in the shops today contain almost identical ingredients for the few added tweaks. Fitting your own skincare is easy. I realised this years ago when I first started crafting my own beauty products. It all started with a simple face mask and now 10 years later I run a large online education institution that trains people how to make professional organic cosmetics. As a result, people all over the world are crafting their own skincare and haircare formulations and turning those formulations into a business. But most of all, people are having fun with it. Formulating is fun. It's empowering and it makes you appreciate your beauty products more than ever before. It took a while for the DIY movements to come to the attention of the beauty industry. But once it did, the chemistry community generally reacted to the DIY movement in the same way that they had reacted to the chemophobia that had already taken hold of the natural community. With ridicule and scorn, after all, according to their thinking, why would you apply mashed up strawberries to your face when the shops are filled with perfectly good beauty products? We once wrote an article to showcase why you can't make an emulsion using beeswax, because beeswax is not an emulsifier. And I famously remember one chemist saying to me, "Well of course beeswax isn't an emulsifier. Why would you even write this blog post? Because he simply had no idea of the conversations that people were having in online discussion forums. In other words, the DIY movement took place without much attention from the mainstream beauty industry, who presumably did not see the relevance to their work. But the DIY beauty movement was most definitely relevant to the mainstream beauty industry. In fact, the indie beauty sector we know and love today has arisen as a direct result of the DIY beauty movement. I know that, because the thousands of beauty brand owners I've worked with over the years, people started by following a basic recipe on a blog or on Pinterest or on Instagram. It goes something like this. You're told by a friend or contact about dangerous chemicals and cosmetics, which leads you to look online for information about natural skincare. You then stumble across DIY recipes on social media, decide to try one out and realize that it's fun and easy. Before you know it, your family and friends have tried your recipes, they love them and they start encouraging you to sell them. Voila, your indie beauty brand is born. I estimate that there are now tens of thousands of small indie beauty brands around the world, selling skincare, soaps, hair care, deodorants, makeup and perfumes, many of which have arisen as a direct result of the DIY and natural movements. I want to try to follow every single indie beauty brand I could find on Twitter and I found that the lists seemed endless. Initially, the mainstream beauty industry treated this proliferation of indie brands as inconsequential. Despite their own founders, including Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden, Madame C.J. Walker or Helena Rubenstein, having started the indie beauty brands of their day in their own kitchens, they couldn't see how these tiny startups would be able to compete from their home spun formulation labs. And yet, that's exactly what some of them did. Customers started looking for lotions, cleansers and butters that didn't contain any of the synthetic ingredients they'd read about, and instead of returning to the big retailer shelves, they found a natural home with small businesses who were tapping into the consumer mood. Those small businesses had to step it up quickly, though, no more greasy gloop for their discerning customers. Within a few years, the natural movement had started to perfect their high-performance lotions, foaming cleansers, lightly whipped butters and fragrant body lotions. Concern around synthetic ingredients had begun to spread like wildfire at this point, which meant that the indie beauty sector was poised for liftoff. Paired with the relative ease of setting up a business online, the indie beauty movement was born. It was only a matter of time before the big players started to pay attention, once some of these indie brands started making serious money. And that's exactly what happened. Beauty brands such as Drunk Elephant, Glossier, Tata Harper, Tatcher, Ren Skincare, Burt's Bee's Beauty Cancer, Frank Body, Pye Skincare and many others have entered our beauty vocabulary as global brands that now hold their own among the mainstream heavyweights. You can't have missed the news stories of Unilever, La Riael, Estée Lauder, Proctor and Gamble, buying up indie brands across the world. Over the last few years, these huge beauty corporations have spent billions on acquiring these businesses and adding them to their own portfolios. I frequently heard the natural communities online say, rather cynically, that these multinationals acquire indie brands to eliminate the competition or to modify popular natural formulations with their own synthetic ingredients. However, it's important to understand that many of these made in multinationals are not really beauty companies in the conventional sense of the word. Instead, they are marketing companies and they want to add successful businesses to their portfolios, which is why they see such huge potential for acquiring indie brands. It's also not just the big players who have embraced indie beauty either. The trade press, major exhibitions, global ingredients suppliers, manufacturers and consultancies now also open their arms to indie brands and welcome them into their publications and client bases. If you attended an industry trade show in 2015 as an indie brand, you were generally not taken that seriously, but now you are viewed as a viable business prospect. Nowadays, it's fair to say that a large part of the mainstream beauty industry and some of its players welcome indie beauty brands into the fold. Natural ingredients are now not only prolific on the market, but they're also generally provided in smaller, minimum order quantities, decayed to the indie sector. And those ingredients suppliers are now racing to develop new natural and next generation preservatives to cater for the fact that many brands no longer want to use parabens. We truly have come full circle. So although that same industry initially bulked at the idea of vilifying parabens and other synthetic ingredients, they've now come to grudgingly accept the natural movement, its corresponding indie sector and the consequent reinvention of the entire beauty industry. Indie Beauty is now a global movement, thanks to a parabens. I hope you enjoyed my soapbox moment and I'd love to hear what you think. Please do come and leave me a comment on the Formula Botanica channel so that I can hear your opinions. Thank you for joining me for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica @F Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or LinkedIn. We are everywhere. Visit our website at Formula Botanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today. [Music]