Clean Before Use

Millennials don’t really trust anyone, according to research conducted in the US by Harvard University. They’re especially suspicious of big businesses and, with all the knowledge in the world available to them online, they’ll meticulously research any purchase long before they make it.

This, coupled with the movement towards self-care and green living, is fuelling people’s love of everything clean and conscious – first with food; and now, beauty. As Cissy Chen, founder of local clean beauty brand Frank Skincare puts it: “Information is now so readily available, and we empower ourselves to make more conscious life choices, rather than buying blindly into brands.” In the mid-noughties, a number of studies made connections between common beauty additives and serious health problems. The US is famously permissive about what can be used in cosmetics (just 11 ingredients are banned, compared to over 1,000 in the EU and Asean countries, including Singapore). Consumers there began to take notice of this, and became concerned about what exactly was in their products. They sought alternatives that contained only simple ingredients, but found very few.

Most were unsatisfactory – they looked bad, smelt bad, or just didn’t work. So, people began to make their own makeup, skincare, body care and haircare products without suspicious ingredients. They were mostly botanical based, but there was no compromise in quality, efficacy or good looks: brands like Tata Harper, Vintner’s Daughter, Beautycounter and RMS Beauty are luxe, expensive, and work as well as their mainstream counterparts. Initially, their makers used terms like green, ecofriendly, organic, non-toxic or natural. But none of those encompassed the ethos of the movement: that products should contain only ingredients that are nourishing for the skin and be free from anything that might potentially cause harm, and that brands should be transparent and clear in their labelling.