Clear Is The New Clean

Forget green, organic or even natural it seems all we really want is transparency. Shannon Peter hunts out the new upfront beauty brigade

FROM VEGAN TO organic, clean to green, the beauty world has reached peak buzzword and, frankly, it’s left us all slightly bewildered. These markers were supposed to make our choices easier, to help us identify what is right for our skin and our morals, but just as we manage to wrap our heads around one term, another more saintly ethos appears. When it comes to beauty shopping, things have never been quite so confusing. What we really need is a revolution – and one might be on the horizon: welcome to clear beauty.

Not to be confused with clean beauty, clear beauty isn’t about staking a claim on one area of ethical beauty, it’s about providing an unprecedented level of honesty and operating with full transparency. According to new research by New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), it’s the new frontier. ‘The time has come to replace the proverbial “mirror” with clear glass,’ the Clean Beauty Report reads. It found that nearly three-quarters of consumers want a brand to explain exactly what its ingredients do, while 42% feel they aren’t getting enough information on ingredient safety. We need to trust the products we invest in, which is why the most honest brands are catching our attention.

DAZED AND CONFUSED

No longer is it good enough to simply tell us what’s in a product – transparency isn’t just about taking us behind the red velvet curtain of the industry, it’s about ripping the curtain down altogether. Savvy consumers are now demanding full disclosure on everything, from price to ingredient percentage, sustainability to packaging materials, influencer marketing deals to the company’s stance on animal testing.