At Beautycounter, our mission is to get safer personal care products into the hands of everyone. We are enthusiastically renewing our support of the United Nations Global Compact and its ten principles outlining corporate responsibilities in the areas of human rights, labor, environment, and anticorruption. At Beautycounter, safety has always been our priority. This past year the world changed and as a result we doubled down on our mission and our commitment to providing safe and trusted products to everyone. We’ve established 12 safety standards that our formula and manufacturing partners must comply with. Through science and research, we continue to be leaders in clean beauty, devoted to our Never List™ which is made up of more than 1,800 chemicals that we promise to never formulate with. But for us, the pursuit of clean extends beyond our products.

Aligning Sourcing with Our Values

We have worked hard to build a responsible sourcing program focused on ingredients with increased risks for negative environmental and human rights impacts. Beginning with packaging materials and key risk ingredients like mica, palm oil, and vanilla, we are leveraging our purchasing power to improve the lives of the people along our supply chain.

We prioritize business partners who share our vision for fair labor standards and work closely with those partners to deepen our commitment to responsible sourcing, especially as it relates to labor and human rights issues. We have strengthened our commitment to human rights and fair labor through working with our manufacturers to sign our Supplier Code of Conduct, which delineates prohibited behaviors and offers best practices for topics ranging from antidiscrimination in hiring to anticorruption. It also requires compliance with all local, federal, and international laws designed to protect people from unjust working conditions, such as the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act. Additionally, we have verified 100 percent of our suppliers with our Blueprint for Clean, which highlights 12 important safety standards that our partners must comply with.

To continue leading the clean beauty movement, we are doubling down on our responsible sourcing strategy, starting with mica. To date, Beautycounter has audited 100% of our trusted mica suppliers in person. We launched a short documentary, Transparency: The Truth About Mica which has had over 60 million impressions and has helped us share our journey towards responsibly sourced mica far and wide. We created the Responsibly Sourced Mica Toolkit, that we have made available to the entire beauty industry to share best practices and promote responsible mica sourcing.

Another key ingredient is palm oil, which when harvested can have serious environmental damages and has a less than transparent supply chain. Last year we joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which helps businesses source more socially and environmentally friendly palm oil. In addition to prioritizing RSPO certified ingredients when possible, we have also been working closely with our contract manufacturer partners to become RSPO certified – a vital step in the RSPO certified process. We have already transitioned 43 products to include responsibly sourced palm, and plan to add more by the end of the year.

Vanilla is another key risk ingredient we are addressing. Harvesting vanilla is very labor-intensive, and the industry is historically notorious for human rights issues. This is why we introduced our ECOCERT organic vanilla, which is responsibly sourced from a women-owned supplier. Using a respected third-party auditor, we can ensure that the vanilla meets our high standards and contributes to improving the quality of life for farmers in the community.

Climate Action

We are committed to focusing and improving our practices to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. This goal will require transformational change as a brand and within our entire value chain, but we are up for the challenge. In 2020, we achieved zero net emissions at our HQ and retail locations and significantly reduced associate commute and business air travel to further reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

We also focused on reducing our environmental impact throughout our supply chain. Building on our previous efforts to understand the brand’s environmental impacts, we worked with our supplier partners to map and quantify emissions from our supply chain. Supply chain activities constitute the majority of our environmental impacts, making this work critical for our progress towards carbon neutrality.

Beautycounter recognizes the impact of climate change on communities around the world. It is our responsibility to support these communities by investing in responsibly sourced ingredients and choosing more sustainable packaging materials wherever possible. We will continue to focus our efforts on sourcing, manufacturing, packaging, and climate justice.

Rethinking Packaging

In the past year, we have improved and innovated our product packaging to minimize waste and maximize recyclability. We continued to leverage full life cycle assessments in order to design packaging with minimal environmental impacts and identify opportunities to innovate further. In addition, we are educating consumers on how to properly recycle and dispose of used items through our partnership with How2Recycle® to ensure clear instructions on every product. This year we launched our first refillable product – by purposefully designing and custom tooling the package, we saw a 47 percent reduction in its water use, fossil fuel use, and greenhouse gas emissions. Moving forward we will continue to innovate and explore refillable options for our products. Additionally, we have recently launched our first product packaging using post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic, sourced from curbside recycling and other recycling programs. We continue to transition more of our packaging into widely recyclable formats like glass. For example, by transferring one product from plastic tubes to glass bottles, we avoided an estimated 235,000 plastic tubes from entering landfills and waterways in 2020. Our goal by 2025 is to seek 100 percent recycled, recyclable, refillable, reused, or compostable packaging. Last year, we achieved over 50 percent.

Safety and transparency are at the forefront of our values, with this in mind we developed a Packaging Scorecard to ensure that our packaging decisions meet our high standards regarding sustainability, performance, and logistics. We’re looking forward to continuing to learn from other UN Global Compact signatories on innovative product solutions.

In recognition of our efforts around climate, packaging innovation, and ingredient sourcing, Beautycounter received the CEW Sustainability Award for 2020.

Always Advocating

At Beautycounter we are always advocating for more health-protective legislation. Last summer, we helped pass the Safer Fragrance Bill (SB 312) and the Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act (AB 2762). The Safer Fragrance Bill requires companies to disclose fragrance allergens to the California Department of Public Health, where this information will be stored public database. The Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act protects consumers by banning the use of 24 harmful ingredients in personal-care products. It is our hope that these bills will have a ripple effect throughout the U.S. and impact the behavior of companies on a global scale. Beautycounter is dedicated to green chemistry, and we have worked closely with the Sustainable Chemistry Alliance to support legislation and this year we helped pass the Sustainable Chemistry Research and Development Act. The passing of this bill will result in federal funding for green chemistry initiatives and research, with the goal of discovering safer and more sustainable ingredients.

We are working hard to advocate and address racial health disparities, research has shown us that a higher incidence of chronic disease connected to toxic chemical exposure is more common in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). With our partnerships with Black Women for Wellness and the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative we continue to advocate for legislation that will urge companies to innovate and create safer products for women of color.

We believe in the power of advocacy, and we will continue to collaborate with supply-chain partners, industry peers, and fellow signatories of the UN Global Compact to further advancements in better practices and policies. At Beautycounter our mission of getting safer personal care products into the hands of everyone is our guiding principle, and we look forward to continuously improving the standards of corporate responsibilities with our renewal of support of the United Nations Global Compact.