We all have a favorite beauty product: our go-to lip color, the body lotion you can’t live without, a concealer that erases a poor night’s sleep. But what do you do when you learn that your beloved item is made from ingredients known to be harmful to health? Dump it? Or use it anyway and take the risks?
One woman decided we shouldn’t have to choose between health and beauty. Meet one of my heroes: Gregg Renfrew, CEO and founder of Beautycounter, a company that’s leading the clean beauty movement and changing an industry.
Watching the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was an aha moment for Gregg. “I came to realize we were doing things that were truly detrimental to the earth. Fast forward watching friends fall ill, struggle with fertility and give birth to children with significant health issues, I knew things had gone terribly awry.”
Feeling compelled to make change, Gregg started Beautycounter in 2013. “The world didn’t need another beauty brand, it needed a movement,” she often says. That movement is powered by an army of 50,000 passionate independent consultants throughout the U.S. and Canada, each driving the company’s mission to get safer products in the hands of everyone.
Gregg was shocked to learn how woefully lagging the U.S. is in regulating toxins in our personal care products. The E.U. bans 1400 ingredients, Canada bans 600, but the U.S. only restricts 30. The FDA has very limited authority in what goes into our cosmetics or how misleading advertising and labels can be.
With its “Never List,” Beautycounter bans more than 1800 potentially harmful ingredients from all formulations ensuring its high safety and transparency standards. Many of these ingredients are known carcinogens, allergens, neurotoxins and hormone disrupters that we unknowingly expose ourselves to daily in our personal care products like shampoo, lotion, soap, skincare, deodorant, makeup, and fragrance.
