Feel good. Smell good. Begin your day with that ‘I just made the environment better before 9 a.m. stride’. All it takes is a small upgrade with refillable beauty brands to boost your sustainable morning routine. Do one. Or, do all.
| All products featured on The Wellness Feed are independently selected by our editors for their environmental and ethical impact. However, we may earn an affiliate commission when you buy something through our retail links. |
Get Clean
With its refillable glass jars and refills shipped in compostable mailers, Bite’s business model of reducing waste has gained a steady following over the years. Other brands on this list are honest about their sustainable efforts, goals to push further in the future, and their dedication to clean ingredients. Here’s a tip to enjoy longevity with their products: a little goes a long way.
Benefits To You: Buying refillable beauty brands reduces the amount of unrecyclable plastic packaging waste in your bathroom. Hold onto those heavy containers and reuse them. Then, visit popular retailers like Sephora to purchase refills or sign up for a brand’s subscription to have them delivered to your front door.
Benefits To The Environment: No heavy shampoo bottles! Did you know an estimated 550 million shampoo bottles are thrown into landfills yearly? The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that containers and packaging materials accounted for 29.4 million tons of waste in our landfills in 2015. Refillable beauty brands are one solution to reduce plastic waste and your carbon footprint.
Smell Good
Hailing from nature, these refillable beauty brands wrap sweet scents in planet-loving packaging. How sustainable are they, you ask? Le Labo’s box is made from recycled paper that is biodegradable and used in local farms as compost.
Benefits To You: Get lost in fresh rose, and espresso beans, and not a drop of harmful chemicals. These scents are as real as the women who wear them and provide scents more than they do hormone disruption. You may not realize it, but there are thousands of chemicals used by the fragrance industry to mimic those sweet aromas you enjoy so much. And, they come at a high cost to our health.
“The average fragrance product [Chanel Coco, Giorgio Armani Acqua Di Gio, + some] tested contained 14 secret chemicals not listed on the label. Among them are chemicals associated with hormone disruption and allergic reactions, and many substances that have not been assessed for safety in personal care products with troubling hazardous properties or with a propensity to accumulate in human tissues.” The Environmental Working Group.
Benefits To The Environment: Plastic containers can be refilled. Paper boxes are FSC-certified or made from recycled materials. Some brands even use soy-based inks so that packaging can be recycled or composted too.
Look Good
Break up with disposable plastic. These business models are built around the idea that reusable products are better than single-use. And with state-of-the-art and all-natural formulas, you can expect the same quality that you would from conventional brands.
Benefits For You: RMS’s Hydra blush nourishes and soothes skin with wildcrafted buriti and organic jojoba oils. Merit’s Foundation Stick is Clean+ EU-compliant. Attitude’s formula improves the skin tone and is packaged plastic-free. Other items on this list feature other good-for-your-complexion ingredients without the chemicals that seep into your body and into the environment. The investment and cool-looking reusable tubes in your bathroom are also worth it.
Benefits To The Environment: Plastic from our daily personal care routine helps to make up 34.5 million tons of plastic hitting our landfills in the U.S. These refillable beauty brands admit that their solutions aren’t perfect, but they’re a step in the right direction. They’ve calculated that switching to their products will reduce 5 pounds of single-use within 12 months.