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The Honest Beauty® Clean Standard is a science-backed approach to creating products with three key pillars in mind - Safety, Sustainability, and Effectiveness. Before any ingredient is used, it goes through rigorous evaluation by our in-house toxicology team to ensure safety using a risk-based approach. Ingredients are further reviewed from a sustainability lens, with a strong emphasis on avoiding petro-derived ingredients when naturally derived alternatives exist, ethical sourcing, and formulating without microplastics and ingredients that may be persistent in the environment. Ingredients that do not pass this strict vetting process are added to our NO List™ of 3,500+ ingredients of concern. From there, our Clean Standard requires products to be Effective. This means a strong focus on skin biology and skin health; every ingredient in the formula serves a purpose, and the product must provide a clear benefit or address a consumer concern that is validated through clinical testing on humans, never animals. At Honest, clean means more than a 'made without list' of common offenders; it is a 360˚ approach to consciously curating products that minimize risk to you and are sustainability-minded, while maximizing product benefits. This approach to creating better-than-clean is our Honest Beauty® Clean Standard.
Toxicologist Audited means that our toxicologists have reviewed every ingredient and its associated contaminants for their health hazards and have ensured that at the ingredient's use level in the product, there is no safety concern with the use of the product as directed.
Our NO List™ is an ever-growing list of ingredients that our in-house chemists and toxicologists created and maintain to document ingredients that have been reviewed and do not pass our strict guidelines for safety and sustainability using a risk-based approach. '3,500+' may seem like a large number, but when an ingredient is flagged for concern, ingredients that are similar in structure are also evaluated and avoided. For example, formaldehyde is a commonly avoided and heavily regulated ingredient. While you won't see 'formaldehyde' on your ingredient listing, it often hides within formaldehyde-donor preservatives like DMDM Hydantoin, Imidazolidinyl Urea, Diazolidinyl Urea, Quaternium-15, and Honeysuckle Extract. At Honest, we prefer to minimize risk and prioritize safe formulas. Ingredients that are carcinogens and have the potential for reproductive toxicity, mutagenicity, endocrine disruption, or environmental toxicity are going to be a NO for us. While we all have skincare goals, you shouldn't have to choose between quality and effectiveness. We do our best to select ingredients that minimize potential safety risks to our long-term health (including reproductive and hormonal) and are environmentally conscious.
EWG Verified means that the product and its ingredients have been thoroughly vetted by Environmental Working Group (EWG) scientists, and they concluded that the product is free from EWG's chemicals of concern and meets their strictest standards for your health.
Before discussing what 'Clinically Proven Efficacy’ means, we should explain what ‘Clinically Tested’ means. The two are not the same, but they are related! ‘Clinically Tested’ indicates that our product has undergone a clinical study by a third-party lab to evaluate its safety and overall efficacy. ‘Clinically Proven Efficacy’ means the product has shown either a qualitative or quantitative improvement in the participants after the study has been conducted.
Most clean brands utilize external labs to create their formulas and, therefore, have only a few scientists internally to ensure they are maximizing their clean promise. This is why Honest built its own in-house lab with a team of chemists to create unique formulas. These chemists are highly trained experts in formulating without the long list of ingredients we avoid. Additionally, the chemists meet with ingredient suppliers regularly to find new, clean, sustainability-minded technologies to continue pushing our standard forward. While it is not easy replacing staple ingredients like PEGs, Acrylates (Carbomer), or Parabens, having an in-house lab exclusively focused on clean alternatives makes it much easier to create products that truly live up to our Honest Clean Standard.
Our products are designed for unique skin needs and deliver benefits regardless of gender, age, or ethnicity – making it easier to identify the products that will address your skin type and the primary benefits you are looking for in your skincare routine. We recommend using our Skincare Quiz to help you find a preset routine designed by our in-house skincare experts, using your skin type and primary benefit.
