The clean beauty market is facing a significant challenge that may be hindering progress in this sector of cosmetics.
However, Iva Teixeira and Lena Skilarova-Mordvinova may have found a solution with their cloud-based platform, The Good Face Project. This database provides information about the ingredients used in nearly 76,000 commercial beauty products, including their safety, cleanliness, and effectiveness.
The Challenges Facing Clean Beauty
There are two sets of challenges facing would-be entrants to the clean beauty market. The first big challenge is similar to the one faced by consumers, what exactly are clean ingredients and how should they be used?
The second and bigger challenge is which clean beauty ingredients can be combined with other ingredients safely?
The Good Face Project
The first challenge was solved by Iva Teixeira and Lena Skilarova-Mordvinova. They worked together to develop a cloud-based database that would become known as The Good Face Project’s Index.
This database draws data from other independent scientific databases and looks at the ingredients used in nearly 76,000 commercial beauty products.
It then offers insight into the 100,000 different ingredients found in those products in terms of how safe each is, how clean each is and, as importantly for a consumer, how efficacious each ingredient is.
After all, there’s no point in buying eyeshadow that doesn’t actually do the job of eyeshadow very well.
The Good Face Project was a smash hit with consumers but the partners in the business were less sure as to how they might take their data and use it to add value to the product development side of clean beauty.
Once they learned to use the app, consumers could quickly gauge three things from the output, whether a product was safe, whether it was effective and whether it suited them.
This was, in part, because of a growing divide between the formulation side of beauty ingredients and consumer knowledge.
The Challenge
So, consumer education was growing, consumers wanted more and more insight into the ingredients they might put on their bodies but retailers often didn’t get this information, accurately, to the chemists and R&D people involved.
So, clean beauty was taking off, but the industry wasn’t seeing the maximum benefits of this rise. And with over $100 billion on the line, it needed to.
In fact, once they began digging the two women found that only around 3% of all investments in cosmetics are in research.
And this meant that the chemists involved were underfunded and many had very little data (apart from that gained first hand) on different ingredients and their potential interactions with each other.
Enter The Good Face Formulator
The Good Face Formulator is an extension of The Good Face Project but this time, for chemists and cosmetic designers.
It, essentially, allows for a “drag and drop” approach to building clean beauty products. A chemist can log on, search for the kind of ingredients commonly used in a given formula, quickly build a test version and then, they can devote their efforts to adding value.
By reducing the efforts required to develop basic formulations, the two entrepreneurs are enabling the easy development of clean beauty products. It also helps to reduce “greenwashing” (or maybe “cleanwashing”?).
And not only are these products safe but they can also be quickly matched with any standards demanded by a specific retailer and the regulatory standards of the market in which they are sold.
This saves huge amounts of effort (and investment) in the compliance phase of a product rollout and frees up more money for marketing and research.
As you might expect, the industry is keen and though The Good Face Formulator only launched in 2021, it already has a large portfolio of clients from massive Fortune 500 businesses to smaller more boutique cosmetic brands.
This, in turn, has led to a recent successful round of funding for The Good Face Project and the they have seen a $5.65 million investment to further develop the fusion of scientific data and practical insights into the cosmetic development cycle.
Enabling Clean Beauty By The Backdoor
One thing that Teixeira notes, when talking to the press, about all this is that the company now has plenty of clients who are unlikely to use the clean beauty label anytime soon but who are slowly changing the way they work in order to comply with consumer’s expectation of “clean” anyway.
What’s Next For The Good Face Project?
Cosmetics isn’t the only area of industry which might benefit from a cleaner approach. In fact, the cloud-based database can easily be extended to other areas.
There are plans afoot to touch on textile manufacture, agricultural chemicals, and supplements for consumption too.
As the founders note, the ability to bring all this data together in the cloud has made the impossible possible when it comes to clean products and formulation.
Any development which leads to cleaner products should be applauded and The Good Face Project’s potential is nearly unlimited when it comes to transforming the way that business is done in many industry verticals.
