Rewound geekery: Demonised ingredients...
...featuring my thoughts on Yuka and other apps that claim to tell you whether your beauty products are safe or not (spoiler, they're ALL safe), plus the truth about parabens...
I wish I weren’t on holiday because I have SO much to say about Estée Lauder Companies giving the Deciem group Origins to manage (and my take is very much NOT the take that BoF had — let me know if you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on it when I’m back.) That BoF feature also reminded me that, at some point I also want to write about Niod, The Ordinary’s super clever and really misunderstood older sister. (Again, if you’re keen on that, let me know in the comments.)
BUT, I did promise myself that I would try to have a proper break and so this week, you’re getting an archive newsletter about one of my pet subjects and something that I know a lot of people felt really strongly about when I first published it. It’s about “clean” beauty, negative marketing, demonising ingredients (and the consequences of all that). And it starts with Yuka. Because when I start talking to people about what I do, nine times out of ten, someone wants to talk about Yuka, so let’s revisit the issue where I dug into it and why I have such an issue with it…
What is Yuka?
Launched in France in 2017, Yuka claims to be a “100% independent app that scans food and cosmetic products in order to know their impact on your health.” The idea is that you scan a product and based on the ingredients — each of which “is assigned a risk level according to its potential effects on health or the environment” — you get the Yuka score out of 100 for it, and a traffic-light coded assessment: Bad (red) less than 20; 20-50, Poor (orange), 50-75 Good (green) and 75+ Excellent (dark green).
Their cosmetics ingredient database contains almost 13,000 ingredients and this page explains the scoring system in detail.
Rani Ghosh is a toxicologist. It’s literally her job to assess whether a beauty product is safe and the way that that is done is far more complicated than looking at a single ingredient in isolation. I really liked her Instagram post on the topic that really spelled it out…
But Yuka — and other apps like the Think Dirty app have serious sway. Yuka say they refuse to partner with brands and so make most of their money — more than $7million in 2024 — from paid subscriptions, which means a significant proportion of their estimated 70 million users (who include Robert F Kennedy Jr, President Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, and the brains behind the “Make America Healthy Again” movement) are not only using the app, but paying to use it.
The Yuka effect
And the app is changing the way that shoppers behave. According to this Washington Post piece, Yuka says survey data suggests 94 percent of its users put products back on the shelf after the app shows them low scores. As a result, it’s changing the way that products are formulated. In France, where apparently 1 in 3 people have downloaded the app since launch, Intermarché, one of the big supermarket chains, has reformulated more than 2,300 private-label products to improve their scores in food.
And now this seems to be happening in the world of beauty too. I don’t know enough about the food side of the app to make a judgement call on whether helping people buy products that are less processed and lower in sugar is as good as it seems (although instinctively it seems too simplistic), but I know for sure that when it comes to beauty, judging a product based on a single ingredient is a recipe for disaster.
Iris Smit, founder of Australian brands Quick Flick and Quick Faced commented on James’ post saying “As a brand founder, we’ve been going back and forth with Yuka for years. We even offered to disclose our ingredient percentages to demonstrate that everything is used within safe, toxicologist-recommended levels. They refused, and openly acknowledged that their rating system doesn’t take ingredient percentages into account at all. The lack of willingness to engage with the science or have a genuine discussion is honestly pretty unbelievable.”
So far, so crappy pseudoscience. But for me what’s really problematic, for a number of reasons, is beauty brands rolling over and effectively endorsing crappy pseudoscience. As anyone who knows me knows, science is my religion. And whether “clean” (such a problematic word) brands like to admit it or not, beauty products are science. Products are formulated by cosmetic scientists, they are tested using scientific methodology to ensure that they won’t harm users, or deteriorate, if they work, it’s because scientists have evaluated the concentration of the ingredient that has a biological impact on the skin. I don’t know how many more ways I can demonstrate that science is fundamental to the beauty industry and the products that we use.
Science isn’t just a marketing tool
That’s why I get so infuriated when companies and individuals either undermine the science of beauty products, or betray it. The reason I originally started writing about Yuka in the newsletter was because a brand that had historically used science to sell its products was showcasing Yuka scores on their website. They’ve since U-turned on that so I don’t think it’s fair to name and shame them here, but when a “science” brand bends to bullshit pseudoscience, I’m out. I kind of feel like you live by the science and you die by the science. You can’t just pick up “science” and use it as a marketing tool when it suits you and then drop it when it doesn’t.
It’s one of the reasons that I stopped talking about The Inkey List. Back in 2020, they suddenly started suggesting that we should be wary about parabens (more on parabens below) and as I wrote in an email to the PR at the time, “I feel really let down that a brand that says it’s about science and education would continue to perpetrate the idea that one needs to be cautious about parabens. As far as I’m concerned they’ve totally shot themselves in the foot with this one. What were they thinking?” They back-pedalled, but for me the damage was done. This was a brand that I’d championed, in part because they were science-backed and then suddenly they weren’t.
In 2021, after another social media-based kerfuffle (kerfuffle seems the right word, it wasn’t anywhere as significant as a scandal) involving the same company, I talked a bit about this in what was then called an IGTV. It’s a long video but I’ve linked it below because I think the comments on it are really interesting. In the video I talk about the fact that we as consumers (and also as journalists) have emotional relationships with brands and why we feel so betrayed when what we thought were shared values turn out not to be.
Or, perhaps more accurately, appear to be values that can be dropped if it’s going to sell more product. I have no idea if The Inkey List’s apparent change of tack back in 2020 was in any way related to the fact that Sephora went big on the whole clean beauty thing and being in Sephora, one of the world’s biggest beauty retailers, is something any young beauty brand would aspire to.
Look, I’m not naive. I know that the beauty industry is essentially a capitalist endeavour. Brands, whatever their back story (and I have a lot to say on origin stories but that’s for another time) exist to sell product and make money. I can only assume that brands that embrace Yuka think they’ll sell more product that way than by sticking to the science, because pseudoscience and fearmongering sells.
And me saying I won’t cover a brand because I feel they’ve sold out probably makes very little difference to their bottom line but I think it’s important to call out this bullshit, and to talk about what’s really driving it. Because, when the tail wags the dog, we’re fucked.
Parabens: a cautionary tale (but not in the way you think)
Let me explain a bit what I meant by that. Consumers are largely not experts. Consumers are largely not cosmetic chemists or toxicologists. I’m not saying consumers should sit down, shut up and blindly believe in “Big Beauty”. I think consumers should have the right to make informed decisions. But what worries me is that — thanks to pseudoscience, misinformation, social media, and a whole load of other things — consumers aren’t making informed decisions, they’re making scared decisions that are forcing brands to make poor decisions.
Take parabens.
First a quick explainer from brand founder, Sam Farmer:
“Paraben esters are found in plants and fruits such as blueberries, they are part of our natural world. We have been using them in cosmetics for nearly one hundred years without an issue and they are an incredibly effective and safe preservative, preventing the spoiling of products. We have been giving liquid paracetamol products to our infant children for decades, most of which are preserved with paraben esters. If it’s scientifically proven that paraben esters are safe for infant ingestion then where is the evidence it is not safe for topical application?”
And yet parabens became demonised after a much-criticised 2004 study suggested a relationship between them and breast cancer. Despite the fact that the vast weight of evidence suggested that the parabens used to preserve beauty products are entirely safe when used in the quantities found in beauty products, this insidious lie took hold and, aided and abetted by high profile proponents — hi there, Gwyneth Paltrow — social media, chemophobia, the fact that fear sells, and a growing mistrust of authority, and brands suddenly began dropping parabens like an embarrassing uncle that’s brought shame on the family.
And yet products still needed a preservative system. So what happened? What happened was either that inferior preservative systems were adopted, that protect products for a shorter period of time, and against fewer microbes, and/or preservative systems, such as methylisothiazolinone (MI) that cause contact allergies were introduced.
Basically in the rush to get away from using perfectly harmless parabens, brands started using an ingredient that had the potential to cause dermatitis. The result? Dermatologists saw a huge increase in incidents of MI-related dermatitis — in the UK and beyond — which led to changes in EU regulations, banning its use as a preservative in leave-on products and restricting the concentration that could be used in rinse off products. (If you’re interested in a deeper dive into this, Janna Mandell’s Washington Post feature from 2022 is a great read on the topic.)
And THAT’S why I say if brands allow fear and pseudoscience to dictate formulation we’re fucked. As I say, I get it. In 2017, I was at the launch of a huge brand’s new “botanicals” haircare range. Needless to say it was “paraben-free” and when I asked the chief scientist why they weren’t using parabens when they knew they were safe, they told me “that battle is lost.” But it was lost because the very companies that make money from science refused to stand up for it.
I could — and will — bang this drum for a really long time, but I’ll stop there for now. Please let me know in the comments if you have any comments or questions and I’ll do my best to answer them (or find someone who can.)
Until next week…