A recent FDA report identified 51 types of PFAS across 1,744 cosmetic formulations. Meanwhile, clean beauty is evolving into a freshly made wave, and the brands that marketed claims they couldn’t prove are facing a reckoning.
The clean beauty category spent a decade building a consumer base on the premise that certain products were safer, purer, and more transparent than conventional alternatives. For most of that decade, “clean” was definitionally whatever a brand or retailer decided it meant — the FDA has never issued a formal definition, which meant there was no regulatory floor and no consequences for setting the bar wherever marketing strategy required. That arrangement is ending. A recent FDA report found 51 different PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly called “forever chemicals” — intentionally added to 1,744 cosmetic formulations sold in the United States. Eyeshadows and foundations accounted for over 56 percent of those PFAS-containing products. These were not products marketed as chemical-laden or industrial-grade. Many carried “clean” or “natural” positioning.
The lawsuits followed. A class action against Supergoop, filed January 5, 2026, alleges that its mineral sunscreen products contained synthetic ingredients inconsistent with their clean marketing. An October 2025 class action against Ulta alleges that products sold under its “clean” designation contained banned ingredients. A class action against CeraVe filed earlier this year alleges harmful levels of benzene in its acne treatments. Grace Hager analyzed for the Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law in April 2026, writing that what’s notable about this litigation wave is not just the brands being named — it’s the expansion of accountability to the retailers certifying them. Sephora and Ulta are increasingly positioned as private regulators, running their own “clean” seal programs, and bearing the legal exposure that comes with that role. “[T]he era of self-regulated ‘clean’ claims is over,” she wrote.
The FDA’s new data changed the litigation math
Sephora’s “Clean at Sephora” seal launched with roughly 50 banned ingredients and has since grown to more than 100. Ulta runs its own equivalent program. These systems filled a vacuum the FDA left open by not defining “clean” in any regulatory sense, and they worked well enough as marketing infrastructure. What the recent FDA PFAS report did was provide plaintiffs’ attorneys with granular documentation that specific chemicals — identified by name, by category, by product type — were present in formulations at scale. That documentation — of more than 1700 products — dramatically lowers the evidentiary burden in subsequent litigation.
California’s AB 2771, signed into law in January 2025, bans the entire class of PFAS from personal care and beauty products sold in the state. Because it is operationally implausible for most brands to manufacture different product versions for different states, California’s ban functions as a de facto national standard. A product containing PFAS that is marketed as “clean” in California is not merely misleading — it is now potentially unlawful. And the FDA report established, with federal data, that PFAS-containing formulations were widespread across precisely the categories most closely associated with “clean” positioning: everyday color cosmetics, skincare, and sunscreen. The convergence of state-level prohibition and federal documentation is what has shifted the litigation landscape from theoretical to active.
Hager’s analysis frames the structural issue concisely. Moving forward, she argues, “‘clean’ must be measured in a lab rather than a retailers’ monthly marketing meeting, and companies that fail to keep a close eye on their supply chains to ensure that they have documentation supporting the claims will face increasingly costly days in court.”
‘Fresh’ as the next phase of the clean conversation
Even as the original wave of clean beauty faces legal scrutiny, the category is evolving forward. A cluster of brands — Exponent, Skinome, Skin at Peace, and Lush, which has operated this way for three decades — are building around the premise that formulas made in small batches, without conventional preservatives, and used within a short window perform better because their active ingredients haven’t degraded. “We see ourselves as the architects of fresh skin care,” Claire Constantine, Lush’s Global Retail Director, told Fashionista. “We’ve spent 30 years proving that beauty should have a ‘made-on’ date, not a three-year expiration date designed for a warehouse shelf.”
The expert response to freshly made claims is measured. Kelly Dobos, a cosmetic chemist and adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati, told Fashionista that the fresh skincare premise “contains a small grain of truth, but is largely overstated” — modern formulation techniques, including encapsulation, antioxidants, and pH control can stabilize sensitive actives in conventional formats. Perry Romanowski, a cosmetic chemist and vice president of Element 44 Inc., was more direct: “This is classic fear mongering marketing. Marketers treat any scary in vitro signal as if it proves consumer harm. That is not how toxicology works.” Larissa Jensen of Circana noted the category is likely to remain niche: “super‑fresh, short‑shelf‑life products aren’t for everyone. Because of this, fresh skin care will probably stay niche: cool for enthusiasts, but not the everyday consumer.” Whether the freshly made movement represents a scientifically meaningful advancement or a more sophisticated iteration of clean marketing language is, to put it plainly, contested. What’s not contested is that it’s growing, and it’s attracting a consumer base — particularly those with reactive or sensitive skin — who have concluded that the mainstream “clean” label no longer tells them enough.
The Packaging Problem the Category Has Not Solved
Eighty-six percent of used beauty and cosmetics products never make it to a recycling facility, according to data from the British Beauty Council’s Planet Positive Beauty Guide — not because consumers aren’t trying, but because most beauty packaging is too small, too composite, or too complex for standard kerbside collection. U.K. households generate an estimated 21kg of plastic packaging annually, with bottles, pots, tubs, and trays representing a significant portion of that volume.
The Great British Beauty Clean Up 2026, a nationwide campaign launched in March by the British Beauty Council and its Sustainable Beauty Coalition, is attempting to address the structural gap through a take-back infrastructure. MYGroup — the campaign’s waste management partner and the British Beauty Council’s first recycling patron — runs nationwide collection schemes with Boots, Harrods (H beauty), Cult Beauty, LOOKFANTASTIC, Selfridges, and Superdrug, and has diverted more than 40,000 tonnes of used products from landfill through those programs to date. “The industry knows it has a waste problem,” Steve Carrie, Group Director of MYGroup, said in a statement. “The Great British Beauty Clean Up is about facing up to it, and MYGroup is here to make sure that action leads somewhere real. The campaign does something regulatory pressure alone cannot: it creates a moment where the whole industry is pointed in the same direction.”
Victoria Brownlie MBE, Chief of Policy and Sustainability at the British Beauty Council, was sharper about the scope of the problem. “With the industry accounting for one-third of all landfill waste, simply recycling is no longer enough,” Brownlie said. “The 2026 Great British Beauty Clean Up is about reimagining waste completely.” A clean beauty product that arrives in packaging that cannot be recycled — regardless of how clean its formula is — is not, in any meaningful sense, a clean product. The category built its identity on ingredient transparency. The next phase is asking the same question about everything else: sourcing, manufacturing, and what happens to the packaging once it’s empty. The brands that have been doing that work are, right now, much better positioned than the ones that have not. The ones that have not are, increasingly, in court.
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