Sephora, Ulta, and other major beauty brands have joined a groundbreaking collaboration to establish data-driven clean beauty standards.
A landmark collaboration between leading beauty companies, including Sephora, Ulta Beauty, and Credo Beauty, has just delivered the clearest picture yet of what’s inside the products lining American bathroom shelves.
The 2025 Beauty and Personal Care Ingredient Intelligence Report, produced by the Know Better, Do Better (KBDB) Collaborative and led by the nonprofit ChemForward, analyzed more than 1.25 million ingredients across 48,000 personal care products. The findings reveal that while 76 percent of ingredients have now been assessed for safety, nearly a quarter remain uncharacterized — meaning their potential risks to human and environmental health are still largely unknown.
Redefining “clean”
The report’s release marks a pivotal moment in beauty’s effort to move beyond the marketing haze of “clean.” “Despite its widespread adoption and significant market presence, the term ‘clean beauty’ lacks a single, universally accepted or legal definition,” Heather McKenney, science and safer chemistry lead at ChemForward, said in a statement. “This ambiguity creates a fundamental paradox: while consumer demand for safety drives the clean beauty market, the absence of clear, enforceable standards allows for varied interpretations across brands and retailers and among consumers.”
McKenney notes that consumers often assume ingredient transparency equals safety. “However, we know this is not always the case. Many chemicals in common use have not been fully assessed for human and environmental impact, and under current regulations, most chemicals are presumed ‘innocent’ until proven guilty.”
The KBDB Collaborative, whose members include Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Credo Beauty, Beautycounter, The Honest Company, Dow, Inolex, and the Environmental Defense Fund, represents a rare cross-industry alliance. Its dataset is five times larger than the one analyzed in 2023, and draws from ChemForward’s shared Chemical Hazard Data Trust, a growing repository of ingredient safety information verified by independent toxicologists.
Within this expanded dataset, the group found that 24 percent of ingredients remain uncharacterized. Stacy Glass, ChemForward’s co-founder and executive director, calls this a “major blind spot” in the beauty industry’s safety narrative. “The industry is largely still operating from a place of regulation and restricted substances. The report demonstrates a significant change in the narrative for the participating brands and retailers. It is now possible to move beyond regulations and restricted substances lists in the pursuit of safer ingredients and clean beauty.”
Glass adds that collaboration is the missing link. “Many hands make light work, especially when we are creating a shared dataset to enable the transition to safer chemistry.” The more companies contribute to ChemForward’s shared data system, she says, the faster the entire industry can close its knowledge gap.
The chemistry of change
Among the areas of greatest concern are lip colorants, emollients, and surfactants — three categories that form the backbone of countless beauty formulas. Lipsticks and glosses, for instance, continue to rely heavily on synthetic dyes flagged as high-hazard ingredients. “The dataset revealed that there is an opportunity to innovate alternatives to organochlorine and organobromine colorants that meet performance criteria. The trend of more high-hazard chemicals was only observed in lip color,” McKenney says.
Emollients, used for softness and glide in moisturizers and foundations, present another challenge. The report found that cyclic silicones such as cyclopentasiloxane and cyclomethicone appear in nearly 15 percent of the products analyzed. These compounds can persist in the environment and bioaccumulate over time, underscoring the need for safer substitutes that maintain the same sensorial payoff consumers expect.
Surfactants — the cleansing and foaming agents in shampoos, conditioners, and wash-off products — show a similar tension between performance and sustainability. While many are considered safe for human health, they can harm aquatic ecosystems once rinsed down the drain. The report frames this as a “performance-versus-sustainability challenge,” one that will require fresh innovation to balance efficacy with environmental responsibility.
Beyond identifying problematic ingredients, the KBDB Collaborative grades each chemical from A to F based on toxicological assessment. Independent reviewers from ToxServices, NSF International, and Gradient verify each evaluation. In this year’s findings, 3.7 percent of ingredients fell into the “chemicals of concern” category — slightly higher than the previous year due to three newly assessed substances that scored lower than expected.
According to McKenney, these ingredients are often used not by choice but by necessity. “Suppliers are best positioned to know and address chemical hazards in their formulations,” she says, urging them to provide standardized and independently verified hazard assessments for everything they sell into the personal care market. Glass agrees, adding that “these market-validated calls for innovation are critical to complete the transition to safer chemistry.”
This momentum toward transparency reflects a broader shift happening across the global beauty sector. Last year’s edition of the report revealed that about one-third of personal care ingredients lacked adequate safety data. Today, that gap has narrowed, but the absence of universal standards still clouds consumer understanding.
At the same time, many retailers are quietly recalibrating their “clean” programs to emphasize measurable impact over moral signaling. In its 2024 sustainability update, Sephora confirmed that it now reviews product claims for environmental substantiation, while Ulta Beauty has integrated ChemForward data into its Conscious Beauty program.
The 2025 findings demonstrate that progress is possible — but also that the definition of “clean” is still evolving. As Glass puts it, “Consumers and investors alike can expect, and should insist upon, science-based, data-driven reporting of ingredient safety on both human and environmental impacts that was just not possible before.”
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