What is Clean Beauty?

Clean Beauty refers to nontoxic products made without long, ever-growing lists of ingredients linked to adverse health effects.

Though this definition seems straightforward, the concept of clean beauty is surrounded by a lot of confusion and debate in the personal care industry. To begin with, this industry is largely unregulated. While the FDA theoretically regulates the personal care industry, there are currently no laws against using toxic chemicals in personal care products. Companies can and do fill products we use daily (mascara, face wash, lotion, etc.) with toxic ingredients, even antifreeze (propylene glycol)!

In fact, companies can legally use whatever language they want to describe their product — natural, green, botanical — even if this language does not reflect the ingredients it contains.

How do you choose ingredients? How can I choose ingredients? 

If you want to clean out your beauty cabinet, or just know more about what you put on your skin, here is a list of references you can use: 

• The EWG’s Skin Deep Database
  Here you can search by product or ingredient and get a “score” of toxicity. Each score corresponds to studies that show how these products and ingredients affect our bodies and why they are toxic.
• madesafe.org Toxic Ingredient Database
• Campaign for Safe Cosmetics' Chemicals of Concern

The EWG ranks ingredients on a scale of 1 to 10, but any ingredients scored above a 1 can be considered to possess potentially toxic properties. 

Be careful with labels! For example, many toxic chemicals happen to be vegan, so when seeking vegan products, make sure each of their ingredients meet your standards.

Vegan: No animal products used (but could be toxic to humans) 

Cruelty-free: No animal testing, and generally excludes a lot of animal products     (including beeswax)

At Circe, we go beyond Clean Beauty. While avoiding the bad, we use ingredients that are proven to heal, enhance, and beautify skin and hair, because you deserve a lot more than just a label on a bottle.

Our NO list includes over 1,500 common ingredients, including:

• Endocrine disruptors, or prostaglandins

• Carcinogens

• Parabens

• Fragrance

• Formaldehyde

• Heavy metals

• Hydroquinone

• Mineral oils and petrolatums

• Paraffin

• Phthalates 

• Siloxanes

• Triclosan

We could not formulate real clean beauty products without being sensitive to our impact on the earth, as well. That's why we don't formulate with polymers that are toxic to the environment and are not biodegradable, such as:

• Petrolatum

• Silicones

• Polyethylene

• Polyethylene Glycol

• Polypropylene

• Polystyrene

• Polymethyl Methacrylate

• Polyvinyl Pyrrolidone

• Polyurethane