Sustainability and clean beauty sound like the same thing — but for many brands, they’re two completely different standards. Here’s what that gap actually means for consumers.
You pick up a serum in a glass bottle, or a foundation from a brand that publicizes its carbon-neutral shipping and recycled packaging, and the assumption follows naturally — this must be the responsible choice. The clean choice. It’s an understandable leap to make, especially when the beauty industry has spent the last decade training consumers to associate green cardstock packaging with green formulas. But buying a sustainable product is not the same thing as buying a clean one, and understanding the difference changes everything about how you read a label.
This distinction is particularly striking at the luxury end of the market. L’Oréal has pledged to become a global leader in sustainable cosmetics, with commitments around carbon neutrality, packaging circularity, and renewable energy across its production sites — a portfolio that includes YSL Beauté, Lancôme, and Kiehl’s. Likewise, Estée Lauder has invested in green chemistry programs, published a corporate ingredient glossary, and committed to reducing its environmental footprint across its entire brand roster. These are real investments, backed by real reporting. But none of them necessarily mean the formula inside the bottle meets what most consumers would define as “clean.”
So, why not?
Two labels, two completely different standards
Clean beauty, loosely defined as formulas that exclude ingredients linked to health concerns — parabens, phthalates, synthetic fragrance, to name a few — is a category built almost entirely on marketing, because no regulatory body actually defines the term. Neither the FDA nor the FTC has issued guidance on what qualifies a cosmetic or personal care product as “clean,” and the same regulatory gap exists across the EU and most global markets. That leaves brands free to use the word however they choose, with no required substantiation.
Sustainable beauty operates on a slightly different axis. It measures environmental impact — the carbon footprint of manufacturing, the recyclability of packaging, the ethics of ingredient sourcing, water usage at production sites. A product can hit every sustainability benchmark and still contain synthetic fragrance compounds linked to hormone disruption. And a formula with a flawless clean ingredient list can arrive in layers of virgin plastic with no recycling program attached. “Transparency is no longer optional — it is the foundation of a successful clean beauty strategy,” Rachel Raphael, a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP who specializes in cosmetics law, wrote in Happi. “Substantiation of claims, whether through third-party certifications, scientific testing, or rigorous internal reviews, will be critical for navigating the increasingly complex regulatory landscape.” Without that substantiation, both terms — clean and sustainable — remain largely self-defined.
Sustainability pledges, complicated results
L’Oréal’s sustainability record offers a useful case study in both the genuine ambition and the complexity of executing it. The company reduced carbon emissions by more than 70 percent between 2005 and 2022 while increasing output by 45 percent — a meaningful decoupling of growth and emissions. Its European production sites reached 100 percent renewable energy in 2025. But the company missed its 2025 packaging targets significantly, achieving only 49 percent recyclable, reusable, or compostable packaging against a stated goal of 100 percent, and only 37 percent of packaging made from recycled or biobased materials against a 50 percent interim target.
It has also faced scrutiny over how it communicates the progress it does make. The Changing Markets Foundation, an advocacy group that investigates corporate environmental claims, flagged L’Oréal’s Elvive shampoo bottles as misleading — the prominent “100% recycled plastic bottle” claim on the packaging applied only to the bottle itself, not the cap or label.
Estée Lauder has moved more carefully on ingredient transparency, publishing a corporate glossary of more than 100 key ingredients and developing a proprietary Green Score program that guides its formulators in assessing raw materials across its skin care, makeup, and hair care lines. But Green Score measures environmental sustainability — biodiversity impact, sourcing ethics, ecological footprint — not the absence of ingredients that consumers typically associate with “clean.” The framework is a meaningful step, but it is not a clean beauty certification, and the company has not presented it as one.
The fragrance loophole that changes everything
Of all the places where sustainability and clean beauty diverge, fragrance is the starkest — and the least transparent. A single word, “fragrance” or “parfum,” on a product’s ingredient list is legally permitted to represent a blend of more than 3,000 chemicals, according to the Environmental Working Group. That is because a loophole in the Federal Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1973 allows manufacturers to protect proprietary fragrance formulas by listing them only under that single umbrella term, with no further disclosure required under federal law.
Laboratory tests commissioned by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and analyzed by EWG found 38 undisclosed chemicals in 17 name-brand fragrance products. Chanel’s Coco registered 18 undisclosed compounds; Giorgio Armani’s Acqua Di Gio, 17. Among the most common offenders: phthalates, used to extend a scent’s longevity and associated with disruption of the male reproductive system, and synthetic musks, which accumulate in aquatic ecosystems and have been found in breast milk. Ninety percent of beauty brands use fragrance ingredients, yet 72 percent do not disclose the specific compounds they use. The environmental impact of synthetic musks is documented and significant — they persist through wastewater treatment, enter the food chain through bioaccumulation, and pose risks to marine life that have been studied for decades. A luxury fragrance that ships in FSC-certified paper from a carbon-neutral facility can, under current law, include an undisclosed blend of synthetic compounds that carry a fraction of the regulatory scrutiny applied to the box they arrived in.
Retailers moving the needle
The most practical attempt to bridge clean and sustainable in one place has come not from the brands but from the retailers. Sephora’s Clean at Sephora program bans more than 50 ingredient categories — parabens, phthalates, sulfates, formaldehyde, and others linked to health concerns — from any product carrying its Clean seal. Its companion Planet Aware designation covers the other side of the equation: sustainable ingredient sourcing, responsible packaging, and corporate environmental commitments. The Clean + Planet Aware seal combines both, requiring brands to meet at least 32 mandatory criteria across four categories, and by 2024, more than 3,000 products across the retailer met Clean criteria. Sephora has also banned four classes of packaging chemicals — including PFAS, bisphenols, silver salts, and mineral oils — effective December 31, 2025.
Still, the program has limits worth understanding. Synthetic fragrance remains permitted under Sephora’s Clean standard, provided it meets the full banned ingredient list and stays under one percent of the total formula — a threshold that still allows undisclosed compounds to appear. Because Planet Aware also operates as a tiered system, not every brand that carries the seal meets every criterion. Lindsay Dahl, former head of mission at Beautycounter and chief impact officer at Ritual, has argued that the stakes of ambiguous claims have only risen: “It is becoming increasingly risky for companies to make bold claims about safety or sustainability without backing them up,” she told Business of Fashion.
Credo Beauty’s standard is the strictest available from any major U.S. retailer. Its Dirty List prohibits more than 2,700 ingredients — far exceeding Sephora’s 50-plus categories, and surpassing even the EU’s roster of roughly 2,490 banned cosmetic ingredients, which the U.S. federal list doesn’t approach (the FDA bans just 30). Credo prohibits chemical sunscreens, cyclical silicones, and ethoxylated ingredients that Sephora allows with caveats, and it requires all products to meet European Union cosmetics safety standards as a baseline. But Credo’s standards are entirely voluntary, and they apply only to the brands that choose to sell there — making them meaningful for the consumers who shop specifically at Credo, and effectively invisible everywhere else.
What the consumer is actually shopping for
The practical result is that a consumer trying to do well by both their body and the planet is navigating two separate checklists that may never overlap on the shelf. Most products sit somewhere in the middle — some sustainability wins, some ingredient gaps, little consistency, and no universal standard to measure against. Voluntary certifications from third parties like EWG Verified or Ecocert exist, but they are not uniformly required, and their presence on a product is the exception rather than the rule.
California’s 2023 ban on 26 cosmetic chemicals and the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act — which expanded the FDA’s authority to require safety substantiation from brands — represent meaningful regulatory movement. But without a legal definition for “clean,” the word remains unanchored, available to any brand willing to put it on a label. At the scale of L’Oréal or Estée Lauder, that distance between a sustainability report and a genuinely transparent formula is still wide enough to get lost in — which is precisely why reading both the front and the back of the bottle remains the most useful thing a consumer can actually do.
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