As 2023 comes to a close, Allure dives into those moments when beauty took center stage this year: the trends, the people, and the technologies that filled our feeds and captured our imaginations. As always, we're here to chronicle, to celebrate, and to make sense of it all — or at least try. Welcome to the Year in Beauty.
Alex Padgett had been tasked with a big project: removing all the parabens from a skin-care line. It was Padgett’s first job as a cosmetic chemist and though there was nothing technically wrong with the current formulations — and no reports of negative effects — the year was “between 2017 and 2018” and people were pissed about parabens. The brand in question had decided they needed to reformulate “because the presence of parabens would likely limit the retailers they could work with,” Padgett recalls. Doing so turned into “a three-month process substituting parabens out for a different preservative system that used phenoxyethanol,” she says.
Phenoxyethanol, however, didn’t play as well with the rest of the formula at hand. For the most part, “parabens are water soluble, really easy to work with, and highly effective,” Padgett says. (When talking about preservatives, “effective” means preventing the growth of bacteria.) By trying to swap in a preservative without the public-relations baggage, Padgett faced “an appearance and consistency issue” in the formula. For these products and others that Padgett has been asked to de-paraben, “sometimes the preservative systems that brands would want us to use would crash,” meaning the formula would become unstable and separate. All of this, Padgett says, was a waste of time and money brought on, essentially, by a misinterpretation of the available scientific evidence that spread across the internet quicker than bacteria spreads through an expired jar of moisturizer. Yes, scientists had found parabens in breast cancer tumors, but they couldn’t determine that the parabens came from cosmetics. Or that the parabens had caused the tumors. Parabens can mimic estrogen in the body but, as of press time, there is no indication that parabens used at the level deemed safe for cosmetics would increase the cancer risk.
Padgett says parabens have been shown to be safe at “exaggerated levels” beyond what would be used in a cosmetic formula; phenoxyethanol has less of this type of toxicology data. “I make the analogy that there have been cases where someone drinks way too much water at once and dies. This has never happened with apple juice,” Padgett says. “But we don’t tell people that water is bad and apple juice is safer. There just haven’t been any instances in which someone drank extreme amounts of apple juice.” Lucky Sekhon, MD, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist and ob-gyn at RMA of New York, says the existing data on phenoxyethanol seems to show less potential for irritation than with parabens, but agrees that it doesn’t appear to be more or less safe than other preservatives. (She personally uses beauty products that contain parabens.)
According to the 11 cosmetic chemists Allure recently interviewed, this type of potentially unnecessary (at least from a safety perspective) tweak on product formulation is extremely common. And by far the most annoying part of their job. Neither Dr. Sekhon nor Yana Delkhah, MD, an emergency medicine physician who specializes in functional medicine (and was in the ER during the COVID-19 era of conflicting information), could comment on the annoyance part, but they agreed that the cosmetic ingredients the FDA currently permits to be included in beauty products could generally be considered safe. (We reached out to several toxicologists as well, all of whom either declined to comment or did not respond to requests.)
“I joke that, as cosmetic scientists, we are always going to have jobs because we can wake up every week and people will be afraid of something new,” says Mark Chandler, president of ACT Solutions Corp. and the Society of Cosmetic Chemists. To prove his point, try texting three friends and asking them to name a beauty product ingredient that they’ve heard bad things about. Parabens and sulfates will almost certainly come up; phthalates and silicones have a high chance of being mentioned too. Over the last decade, an ever-growing corner of the beauty industry has turned being “free of” these ingredients a positive marketing claim, despite a lack of concrete scientific evidence that they’re problematic when used in cosmetics. And yet, reformulation projects like the one Padgett was tasked with persist.
“The customer is always the customer.”
For as long as there has been scientific evidence, there have been people claiming to have found equally effective alternatives that “they” don’t want you to know about. From Linda Hazzard’s starvation diets to the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’s ivermectin obsession, what all of these movements have in common is that they are very good at making compelling arguments. You can’t blame a person for thinking twice about their sunscreen when they’re repeatedly served the same 90-second clip of someone frantically claiming the cream is leaking poisonous substances into their bloodstream. Ultimately, making beauty products is a business. The brands requesting these paraben-, silicone-, sulfate-free formulas from chemists are typically just trying to produce what the largest (or, perhaps, loudest) percentage of their customer base is asking for. As Chandler puts it: “The customer’s not always right, but they are always the customer.”
Angela Onuoha, a trichologist who’s currently studying to be a cosmetic chemist, often responds on her social channels with her own, scientifically backed responses to videos spreading misinformation. But she tries to be understanding. “I don’t want to insult the person that posted [the original video] because they really think they’re doing a good job,” she says. “There are no ill intentions. I don’t want to bash someone.”
The United States is notorious for having fewer explicitly stringent rules about what you can and can’t put into your cosmetic products. Stated without any additional context, this would give just about anyone cause for concern. The fact that the US Food & Drug Administration bans or restricts only 11 ingredients in cosmetics while the European Union’s list is much more extensive (“over 2,400 ingredients!” we’ve been told, often) is nearly universally cited among the clean beauty set.
Less frequently mentioned is the FDA’s caveat that it is against the law to add an ingredient that makes a product harmful when used as instructed, regardless of whether or not the ingredient is explicitly banned. And almost never mentioned is that many of the EU’s banned ingredients are things like jet fuel, fertilizers, and pesticides that were never used in cosmetics in the first place. "If you do a survey of beauty products in Europe and compare similar products in the United States, you're rarely going to find a chemical that doesn't overlap,” cosmetic chemist Perry Romanowski previously told Allure. “The truth is, big companies are following the EU rules anyway, so the vast majority of products people use are following those regulations."
Yes, the FDA puts the onus of safety testing on individual companies. But those enterprises understand that selling a product that kills or injures customers is bad for business. (Whether or not a product is as effective as the company claims is another story, but we’ll get there.) Both Dr. Sekhon and Dr. Delkhah say they’re more likely to recommend a patient buy a product from a larger, well-known (but likely not “clean”) brand, since it would typically have more resources dedicated to safety testing — and is more at risk for big lawsuits, thanks to the aforementioned resources. Still, it seems many brands have decided it’s easier and cheaper to reformulate an already-safe product than spend marketing dollars on educating an anxious consumer base that might not have the time or interest to learn all the nuances of cosmetic ingredient safety.
Even the increasing digital clout of industry experts like Javon Ford, a cosmetic chemist who frequently posts videos that address (and often debunk) ingredient concerns, can’t completely stop the spread of misleading information. Ford estimates that his followers tag him in “10 fearmongering videos per week.” In some cases, Ford agrees with Onuoha about the original posters’ intentions. “If somebody makes a review saying a product caused their hair to fall out, they're valid in that concern because, honestly, no product is without fault,” he says. But he’s always on the lookout for ulterior motives: “I've noticed a lot of times people who are fearmongering are not doing it from a place of authenticity. They usually have some other product that they're selling in the background that's linked on their profile.”
Dr. Sekhon, who has nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram, is always hesitant to post anything about ingredient safety because of the very limited nuance that social media allows for. “Anytime your message on social media becomes complicated, [viewers] lose interest,” she says. Plus, “people are only going to watch the first 20 seconds of the video.”
“Fearmongering is so prevalent because it is effective,” says Romanowski, theorizing that a headline saying “Your Baby Shampoo Is Perfectly Fine” is going to get fewer clicks than one that says “Your Baby Shampoo Might Be Killing Your Baby.” The fearmongering, he says, has a natural advantage, “and really no amount of scientists saying [a product] is perfectly safe is gonna convince everybody.”
How companies pivot to meet “safety” demands
In 2021, DMDM hydantoin fell into TikTok’s bad graces. The ingredient — a “preservative used to protect cosmetics from microbial spoilage throughout their shelf life,” cosmetic chemist Kelly Dobos previously told Allure — was the subject of several class-action lawsuits in which plaintiffs claimed products containing DMDM had caused scalp irritation and hair loss. This, as Allure reported at the time, caused at least two of the implicated brands — TRESemmé and OGX, whose parent companies were named in the lawsuits — to make formal statements assuring customers that they would not use DMDM in new formulations, despite the fact that the ingredient had been proven to be safe. Even the Cosmetic Directive of the European Union has approved the ingredient for use as a preservative at a concentration of up to 0.6%, says Dobos.
If all evidence pointed to DMDM being safe when used as intended, then why was it being blacklisted? Many of the videos on social about the lawsuit “revealed” that DMDM is in a class of ingredients known as formaldehyde releasers — a term that sounds absolutely terrifying until you learn that the average level of formaldehyde released in these products is about the same as what you get from eating a pear. “If someone is afraid of a certain class, you’ve gotta develop new things, new ingredients, new formulation techniques to respond to that,” Chandler says. “The decision-making process for buying and repurchasing is rational and emotional.”
Even if there isn’t a specific lawsuit to cite, you’re likely familiar with the trend of legacy brands launching new versions of classic products that focus on what isn’t on the ingredient list. A few examples that Allure has covered: Kiehl’s paraben-free reformulation of its Ultra Facial Cream, Clairol’s Natural Instincts Line getting “upgraded” to be made with 80% naturally derived ingredients, Pantene getting rid of sulfates in its Gold Series Shampoo. And that list doesn’t even touch on the myriad new brands that have recently launched with their main points of differentiation being that they are “clean” (usually meaning the products don’t contain parabens, sulfates, silicones, or other ingredients that have gotten a bad rap).
Muddling through the clean morass
Perhaps the root of 2023’s bewilderment — or at least one of them — is what a broad range of products the word “clean” encompasses. “I don't really know what ‘clean beauty products’ mean,” Dr. Sekhon says, referring to the lack of a standardized definition. Dr. Delkhah agrees, saying, “I’m just confused.”
Some people are so confused they’re suing. Despite a clear list of ingredients banned from being used in “Clean at Sephora” products and no claims that these products are “safer” than others on the company’s website, a class action lawsuit against the retailer was filed by consumers who said they were misled into thinking the “Clean at Sephora” label was a declaration of product safety. (Sephora declined to comment for this story.)
“Cancer-causing ingredients or endocrine disruptors should not be lumped together with something that might just make your scalp dry,” says Krupa Koestline, a cosmetic chemist who specializes in clean formulation. “Once [the beauty industry] decided we are going to make this big thing about clean and that’s going to be a selling point, that’s when they started lumping everything together.”
Like many of the cosmetic chemists we spoke to, Gabriella Baki, PhD, associate professor and director of a cosmetic science program at the University of Toledo, in Ohio, finds this “free-from” marketing misleading. “I feel like companies are saying that because they don’t have this ingredient, the ingredient is super bad,” she says. “So, any brand that has the ingredient is a really bad brand.” If a company chooses to avoid parabens and use an alternative preservative system, fine, but Dr. Baki gets particularly frustrated when a product is marketed as “free from” an ingredient that would never have been in the formula in the first place. She cites the time she saw a blush being marketed as free from an ingredient — she thinks it was a type of surfactant, an ingredient category that is primarily used in cleansing products — that would never be used in blush. This is akin to proudly declaring your bottled water brand is gluten-free.
When “safer” formulas are actually more dangerous.
If customers feel more comfortable buying a product that’s made without whatever ingredient they find concerning, what’s the big deal with finding an alternative? Shouldn’t we be exploring new innovations anyway? “We should always be monitoring what we’re putting on our skin and trying to make sure we’re using the most safe and environmentally conscious ingredients,” Padgett says. However, “cleaning up” a formula can make ensuring product safety more complicated.
“When you do things like go from one preservative to another, that may affect the stability or texture of a formula,” Chandler says, cautioning against swapping in ingredients “that might not be as effective as what is safe but unpopular.” In some cases, “you can unwittingly make a product that’s less safe to make people feel safe,” he says.
Two examples of this conversation are the ones surrounding “natural fragrance” and “safer preservatives.” Yummy-smelling essential oils are, indeed, more natural, but they can also be trickier to work with. It’s not uncommon for consumers (this author included) to experience skin irritation from products that use them. Will contact dermatitis kill you? No, but dryness, redness, burning, and blisters are also probably not the result you’re looking to get from a fancy face cream.
As for the so-called safer preservatives that brands are putting in their “clean” beauty formulas, some paraben alternatives recently started having some of their own PR crises when the products they were used in started growing mold. Granted, at least in the Kosas concealer case that got the most recent press, it appears that the majority of the mold reports came from consumers who were holding on to the products well past the date when the period after opening (PAO) symbol recommended tossing it.
For some consumers, a shorter shelf life is a fair exchange for getting rid of certain ingredients. “People are more, I guess, compassionate toward Kosas,” says cosmetic chemist Jane Tsui of the brand’s recent controversy. Sure, there was fuzzy green stuff in some of their concealers, but at least they were formulating without parabens. Many of the responses Tsui saw online defended the brand, saying, essentially, this is the trade-off you get when you buy a clean product. Dr. Sekhon says she personally does not find the mold risk worth it, especially when it comes to paraben-free baby products.
Amanda Lam, a cosmetic chemist who works for a chemical distributor, finds ingredient anxiety particularly concerning in the sunscreen category. “Our job [as chemists] is to create a sunscreen that will protect you from skin cancer,” she says. “But [today] we are also trying to create a product for consumers who are scared of using sunscreen.” Research has definitively shown that the sun’s UV rays are the primary cause of skin cancer; the jury’s still out on whether or not chemical sunscreen poses any risk to humans.
And even if the product is just as safe, sometimes these alternative ingredients just kinda… suck. Padgett fondly recalls the days when brands weren’t afraid of formulating with polyethylene glycols (PEGs), a type of commonly used ingredient that got the stamp of disapproval from many on the clean beauty scene because of a vast range of concerns, including skin irritation and cancer. (Neither has been proven; even the notoriously cautious watchdog organization Environmental Working Group labels PEGs as low risk.) “PEGs can make great emulsifiers that can really hold a formula together,” she says. “Some of the alternatives do not do that very well. It’s very frustrating because we have the tools to create a really nice formula that’s cost-effective. But because of greenwashing and fearmongering that’s going on in the industry, we’re being forced to turn to inferior options.”
While Koestline is equally fed up with fearmongering, she believes that part of the reason these formulas fail is that the chemists aren’t properly trained on how to use alternative ingredients. For this, she has an analogy: “I’m a vegetarian. I know that if I go to a steakhouse where the chefs are trained to make steaks and I order a dish there, it will be a totally different dish than if I go to a vegan restaurant.” It’s not that the steakhouse chefs are bad cooks. They just have a different skill set than the ones at the vegan spot.
Although Dr. Baki confirms that the course content at her cosmetic science program is continually updated to reflect “current trends and formulations in demand,” she also notes that it’s really up to the ingredient suppliers who make these ingredients to educate working chemists on how best to use their products. She emphasizes to her students how important it is to reach out to suppliers early in the process “to get technical support and learn the best way of formulating with new ingredients.” Koestline acknowledges that it’s “definitely not easy” to use these alternative formulations to create high-quality products but, “I’ve been doing it for 12 years. It’s possible.”
The retail perpetuation of “clean”
Even if it makes them roll their eyes, cosmetic chemists understand that coming up with clean formulas is part of the job (at least for now). But there’s absurdity to it when “clean” has vague connotations and no one definition. When a client requests a “clean” formula, “We’re just going to look at you and be like, ‘Okay, what retailer do you want to sell it in? Sephora? Ulta? Target?” Tsui says. “Clean doesn’t really mean anything to us besides a list from a retailer.”
For the record, Allure also has its own definition of clean for a seal we award to certain Best of Beauty Award winners that are free of 14 specific ingredient classes. In 2019, as we tested thousands of products for our annual awards, we realized we needed a way to guide our many (and multiplying) readers who were looking to avoid certain ingredients toward winners they felt comfortable with. So we went about defining what Allure means when we say “clean.” We looked at the ingredients that beauty consumers were expressing concerns about and spoke to toxicologists and epidemiologists and chemists about where those concerns were coming from.
We finally published our definition and laid out the truth as we know it about the ingredients in question: Sulfates' biggest risk is potentially causing some scalp irritation, while formaldehyde is a possible carcinogen if inhaled consistently. We’ve tried to be as specific as possible — only cyclic silicones (the ones that can enter the water supply) are on our list; linear ones (like dimethicone) simply pose zero cause for concern — and to remain flexible. While PEGs were on our list initially, we removed them in 2023 because the more we learned about the science, the more we learned that there is just no safety issue there. We are currently reexamining sulfates and whether the most common detergent alternatives are really potentially less irritating. Are we playing into the fearmongering? By sharing our reporting on the ingredients we put on our list, establishing important context, we hope not.
The argument could be (and often is) made that retailers (and, yes, media brands) are just trying to help consumers find the type of products they’re already looking for. No harm, no foul, right? Not so fast, say the scientists. “I feel like brands are really just falling victim to the misinformation and perpetuating it,” says cosmetic chemist Esther Olu. “That does have an impact on consumers because, if they’re loyal to a brand, they’re gonna believe anything they tell them.”
Even Koestline is wary of slapping a broad-strokes red flag on any type of ingredient. “I don’t like lists,” she says. “I think lists are so limiting and stop your brain from understanding what the hell you’re doing.” She encourages her clients to outline exactly what they want to achieve — like creating a formula that sensitive skin types can tolerate — beyond hitting a retailer’s list of verboten ingredients.
Plus, scientific understanding around ingredient safety is changing almost constantly. Set-in-stone lists don’t allow for flexibility based on the most recent findings, Koestline says, such as “ingredients that we perceived were harmful, but are not as harmful as we thought, or ingredients that we thought were totally fine, but we find out later on are harmful to the environment.”
Going back to the gluten-free water phenomenon, when there’s a popular narrative in any industry that implies certain ingredients are safer than others, no right-minded brand executive would want to risk the chance that their products would be viewed as toxic. If your product is not Clean at Sephora… is it Dirty at Sephora instead?
Can consumer perception shift?
Consumers, understandably, want to spend their money on safe products that actually work. But can they be convinced that many of the ingredients the beauty industry has been using for decades actually fit that bill?
“It's unfortunate that a lot of the beauty companies in the US are put in this situation where they have to navigate this,” says Robin E. Dodson, associate director of research operations and research scientist at Silent Spring Institute, who coauthored a recently published study that found chemicals linked to cancer and endocrine disruption in more than 100 consumer products (including some personal-care products, like shaving cream and nail polish). If there were more explicit regulations around what can’t be added to beauty products — say, something closer to the EU’s model — Dodson argues it would be better for brands and consumers. Doing so would “mean that the industry is not left trying to react” to advocacy groups and consumer campaigns on social media. “I do think that there is a lot we could do on the policy side that would make this a lot easier for the beauty industry,” she says.
The passage of the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act (MoCRA) could certainly help. The law will give the FDA more regulatory control over cosmetics: Once it’s in full swing, the agency will be able to force product recalls, require more frequent testing for contaminants like mercury and benzene, and require ingredients that can irritate the skin to come out from under the mysterious “fragrance” umbrella on ingredient lists.
For people like Koestline who are seeking more government oversight, it’s a move in the right direction, even if it’s far from perfect. “It’s the first step that we haven’t even taken yet,” she says. As Allure has previously reported, most of MoCRA’s changes are supposed to happen by 2025, though the FDA is still working on an implementation plan.
There is other, more black-and-white legislation swirling around Capitol Hill as well. Dodson and one of her study’s coauthors, Kristin Knox, a data scientist at the Silent Spring Institute, also point toward the Safer Beauty Bill Package, which was reintroduced to Congress by Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky in May 2023. Along with creating increased safety protections for salon workers, requiring disclosure of fragrance ingredients, and moderating supply chain transparency, the package proposes banning 11 ingredients outright — including mercury, formaldehyde, and phthalates — leaving no room for debates about whether a chemical is safe as long as it’s used in a small enough quantity. (As Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, an organization that endorses the bill, notes, many retailers already won’t sell products with these ingredients.)
Although some chemists are worried legislation could further perpetuate the fearmongering (Romanowski previously noted to Allure that the new required testing could “reveal” trace levels of contaminants that are so low the ingredient wouldn’t be toxic to humans but could make for a scary news headline), it will likely help quell the fears of those who wish the US had EU levels of explicit regulations.
And what about the rare instances where an ingredient we thought was safe turns out to be potentially dangerous? That’s where each individual consumer’s risk threshold has to come in. “The safety of any ingredient can be summarized as ‘based on what we know now, it is safe to use,” Romanowski says. “This means every ingredient in cosmetics could potentially be found to be unsafe in the future.”
In the recent case of J&J’s talc-based baby powder, Padgett explains that the issue wasn’t the talc itself. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit claimed that the talc was contaminated with asbestos that led to cancer. Similarly, recent recalls of aerosol sunscreens and dry shampoos were not due to the inclusion of harmful ingredients, but to the fact that the formulas had been contaminated with benzene during the manufacturing process. Dr. Sekhon also flags the recent research that links hair relaxers to increased risk for uterine cancer, which focused on women who use straightening products more than four times a year in salons with poor ventilation, and frequent use increasing risk even further. Knox notes that, in terms of endocrine disruptors specifically, there are “windows of susceptibility” — such as during puberty or pregnancy — when a person might be more at risk for negative effects from exposure. Really, as Romanowski says, the only way to completely mitigate the risk of harm from cosmetics is not to use them.
As of now, however, “there are no epidemiological studies that link cosmetic use to any cancer,” Romanowski says. The study Dodson and Knox worked on found chemicals that California’s Prop 65 list has identified as potential carcinogens openly included on the ingredient list of everyday products. But they did not have access to the brand names or the amounts used in each formula during their research, so could not assess whether these ingredients are used at levels above the FDA’s current safety threshold. And the scope of the study was not designed to prove a causal relationship, or even correlation, between beauty products and cancers.
Again, it behooves beauty brands to make products that won’t kill their customers, right? Not everyone agrees with that statement, says Romanowski: “A lot of times people compare beauty companies to the cigarette companies that were selling a product that wasn’t safe.” But he notes the big difference: There is no way to make a safe cigarette. We’ll note another: Cigarettes contain an addictive stimulant that some people are willing to pay for even though they know full well that their purchase harms them. If beauty products were making people sick, manufacturers wouldn’t have repeat customers.
Cosmetic chemists wish that beauty brands would also see that it behooves them to put resources into making their customers understand that certain ingredients won’t hurt them. “I’ve had a few people in my comments section saying things like, ‘You guys put all this toxic stuff in our skin care’ or just generally accusing chemists of doing things we definitely aren’t doing,” Tsui says. Olu’s dream is that beauty brands would “ invest in education” about why an ingredient is safe and effective, rather than “continue to perpetuate the cycle of misinformation” by trying to reformulate without clean beauty’s newest buzzy no-no.
Moving away from “free-from” marketing and toward conversations about what’s actually in the product would also be a big step forward. “I always tell people, instead of looking for products that are free from this or free from that, educate yourself on why those ingredients are in products in the first place,” Tsui says. Chandler wishes there were more “dose makes the poison” conversations happening, too. “I like spicy foods, but you’d do well not to have a dinner of ghost peppers,” he says, referring to claims that a certain topical cosmetic ingredient is toxic to humans because lab rats who were injected with a lot of it got sick or died. As Padgett puts it: “We don’t argue against ‘clean beauty’ because we want to keep products harmful. We argue against ‘clean beauty’ because we want to keep products safe.”
Right now, the version of “clean beauty” that is an undefined marketing term is only creating resistance in the scientific community to doing more research into ingredient safety. Koestline hopes a shift away from the term could also help get formulators to be more “open-minded to all the new systems that are available that are better for the environment and safer for the individual.” (And on that note, Koestline would love for the industry to focus even a fraction of all this “clean beauty” energy on the very real, very provable effects the beauty industry has on the environment.)
“I don’t think clean is going anywhere because it shouldn’t go anywhere,” Koestline says. “But this whole marketing thing that goes on with clean needs to stop. There are chemists who are trying to do right and there are marketing people who are fearmongering. There’s a big difference between the two.”
Read more beauty industry deep dives:
We Are Gathered Here Today to Say Goodbye to CBD Beauty
Inside the Complex World of Fragrance Dupes
Now watch cosmetic chemist Javon Ford analyze different makeup formulas:
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