In the three years that the Clean at Sephora program has been in place at the iconic, international beauty boutique, it has shaped the way much of the industry defines the unregulated and ambiguous concept of clean beauty. (Allure has its own standards for what we consider clean, and while much of the list overlaps with Sephora’s, even we don’t fully see eye to eye on which ingredients need to be absent in order to qualify for the classification.) Clearly steering how brands are formulating their products, Clean at Sephora now welcomes nearly twice as many brands to carry its seal as it did in 2018, despite making its “formulated without” list nearly four times as long.
And now, in an effort to extend Clean at Sephora’s focus on personal wellness into environmental wellness, Sephora is launching a new category: Clean + Planet Positive. The initially very exclusive club — it’s kicking off with only 18 brands — builds upon the original Clean at Sephora standards and ups the ante to prioritize ecological, sustainable approaches to creating and selling beauty products, both inside and outside the tube.
“Clean + Planet Positive includes everything that is in the Clean at Sephora program — looking at ingredients — but it also adds four different elements of the way the brands are doing business and bringing their products to market,” Cindy Deily, Sephora’s vice president of skin-care merchandising, tells Allure in an exclusive interview. “That includes a climate commitment, sustainable sourcing practices, responsible packaging, and environmental giving.”
The retailer didn’t reach these new standards arbitrarily. Deily tells Allure that the program has been in the works for a long time and that what will ultimately be educational for the Sephora shopper has been educational for the Sephora team as well. “We went through a process of talking to a lot of experts in a lot of different spaces,” she says, including packaging experts and suppliers to get a better understanding of where raw materials are coming from, and experts climate commitment who focus on how companies can have a lot of impact. “There’s been a lot of time spent consulting with people who have deep, deep expertise in that space. We also have an in-house expert on ingredients and environment that has really helped guide this program along and has helped develop really deep subject-matter expertise.”