Sephora is proving that you don’t have to wait until Earth Day to clean up your act or your beauty routine.
On June 1st the retailer is launching a new category called “Clean at Sephora” as an easy way for shoppers to snap up beauty buys that don’t contain harmful ingredients like parabens, formaldehyde, mineral oils, and phthalates. According to Women’s Wear Daily, Sephora partnered with over 50 brands, including fan favorites like Drunk Elephant, Boscia, Supergoop, and more, with over 2,000 qualifying products that will receive a “Clean at Sephora” seal on the packaging and the products’ pages on the site as well as its own landing page. Plus, green beauty brands like Indie Lee and Go-To Skin Care will find their way to more Sephora shelves and employees will be educated on the new initiative so they can steer you in the right direction.
Photo courtesy of Sephora via Allure.
“Sephora continues to demystify beauty choices for clients, helping them find the right products for them, based on their lifestyle needs,” the brand explained in a statement to Allure. “Many of them are looking to shop brands and products that are ‘free of’ and Sephora is responding to help them do that, easily and conveniently in-store, online, and on mobile. Together with Sephora’s brands, industry experts, external council — including feedback from clients — Sephora has curated a partnership with its brands across cosmetics, skin care, hair care, and fragrance that stand behind the ‘Clean at Sephora’ category.”
So what kind of products ingredients wouldn’t receive the “Clean at Sephora” seal of approval? According to Allure, aside from the ones mentioned above, products containing ingredients like the sulfates SLS and SLES, retinylpalmitate, oxybenzone, coal tar, hydroquinone, triclosan, and triclocarban won’t be included. And the ingredient list grows when it comes to fragrances. The gloss also notes that beauty brands that qualify should have “less than one percent of synthetic fragrances and no undisclosed fragrances.”
While the news comes on the heels of other retailers like Neiman Marcus and Bluemercury taking similar steps to clean things up as well as Kourtney Kardashian‘s recent trip to Capitol Hill to call for updated cosmetics regulations, WWD says Sephora has walked this path previously in 2008 and has continually made efforts, especially with its . But the clean up won’t stop at just the shelves either, as the retailer is looking to install LED lights in all North American stores and even developed a zero-emissions delivery truck at its headquarters.
As Sephora’s Chief Merchandising Officer Artemis Patrick put it, all these changes came from listening to customers. The store’s studies found that 60% of shoppers peruse a product’s ingredient list before they buy, and 54% only stock natural or clean items on their vanities. (So remember that your dollar is your vote for what you want more of!) “We have identified some common chemicals that are in certain products that our clients have asked about. It’s not about whether it’s good or it’s bad, it’s about being transparent, ” he told WWD. “While this is not necessarily a new thing, what we have seen is that the efficacy of the products that are out there are at an all-time high, so you can actually get products without these ingredients if you so choose and still get the efficacy of the product that you want and love.”