The journalist Arabelle Sicardi has observed the machinations of the beauty industry from within as a writer for publications like Allure and Harper’s Bazaar. Her new book, “The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry”, published by WW Norton and out on Oct. 14, examines the systems of production, exploitation and marketing sanitisation powering a multibillion dollar cosmetic industry. In an excerpt from the book, Sicardi traces beauty’s impact on the climate crisis.
Most conversations around the beauty industry and the planet have to do with packaging waste, because there is certainly a lot of it: More than 120 billion units of packaging are produced every year by the cosmetics industry, contributing to the loss of 9 million acres of primary forest annually. The most common materials used in cosmetics are plastics with varying degrees of recyclability. The end packaging varies in terms of sustainability, but scan your beauty products and it is probably looking grim. Lipstick bullets? Right to the landfill. Plastic-tubed deodorant? That too. Only 9 percent of all plastic has ever been recycled.
But the cost of beauty is not just in terms of what containers are used to package them but in the carbon usage of all these processes and the production of the ingredients themselves. These are not typical costs companies admit to, but still, they’re there: The resources needed for farming and shipping, waste from water, crude oil to make plastic, oils distilled for use as an ingredient, the deforestation required for ingredients and factories, not to mention the pollution accumulated for a two-day rush order. These are all part of the story of every product in your makeup bag and on your face.
Marketing focusses on our individual consumption as the arbiter of environmental change, but none of that necessarily means a natural product is better for the planet than a “chemically laden” product such as, say, Cetaphil. An all-organic product may be less sustainable than a product with synthetic alternatives. Synthetics are commonly used in perfumes, for example, because many organic alternatives are hideously expensive due to being overhunted, incredibly rare, or labour- and resource-intensive to procure. It can take 4,500 pounds of flowers to produce one pound of essential oil. In these scenarios, a synthetic option is more feasible.
When it comes to skincare, if brands opted to use only the plant-derived form of high-demand ingredients like L-ascorbic acid (also known as vitamin C), it would require a mind-boggling amount of land, water and resources to get the number of plants required. “Organic” and “sustainable” are in these cases ideologically opposed.
Don’t trust anything that purports to be “chemical-free,” because that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how beauty products work. Every single product you use, even if it is water and olive oil, has chemicals. And olive oil doesn’t have only one chemical. It’s made up of chemical structures! We are made of chemicals and gore and electricity, and Earth is, too. Unlearning the fearmongering of “organic only” beauty marketing is one of the first lessons you’re taught in cosmetology school, because organic materials can harm your skin as much as synthetics can. Preservatives keep products stable longer, which can help minimise waste, maximise usage time, and prevent bacteria from causing skin infection.
In the years that I have been interviewing dermatologists and aestheticians, many have noticed an uptick in skin infections from clients who use “natural” skincare products. Dermatologist Dr. Anjali Mahto has observed a pattern in patients called “chemophobia,” when patients get confused and turned off by long chemical names and a fear of what they don’t know. Cosmetic chemists have jobs creating formulas in stable environments for a reason a DIY sunscreen has nowhere near the same stability or efficacy as one purchased. Some things are better off bought.
That being said, buying a “green” beauty brand from Amazon shipped from, say, Australia to a third-party distribution center in America and then to you requires a lot more fossil fuels than buying a locally-sourced product. The convenience of buying online is built on artificial costs the consumer would be happy to pay, not the actual cost to the planet or to people at large.
Oiling the Beauty Machine
Another complicated, sticky conversation around “eco-friendly” beauty products revolves around the fact that many of the base materials and systems the beauty industry relies on for ingredients are byproducts of fossil fuels.
Two of the most common personal care ingredients are petrolatum and mineral oils. Petrolatum is a by-product of petroleum that has been refined to become safe for skin. It’s an occlusive, which seals the skin off from water and air when applied topically, allowing the skin barrier to heal itself faster than it would otherwise. In other words, it seals in your serums and moisturizers and protects your skin. A journal article published by the American Academy of Dermatology recommends its use for injured skin as a means to reduce scarring. You’ll recognisze it in some household staple products, like Vaseline and Aquaphor, products that every dermatologist I’ve ever seen or spoken to advocates for as part of your beauty roster. Fossil fuel companies love that what was once considered a by-product of fuel extraction is now a very valuable commodity in and of itself.
The most valuable ounces of every cracked barrel of oil go to the beauty industry, which uses 0.3 percent of the petrolatum produced. It seems like such a tiny number in the scheme of things. Even with that marginal number, the beauty industry is still one of the biggest polluters on the planet, but there’s no international standard on how much information regarding recycling or product ingredients to share with consumers. While there is a Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action supported and researched through the UN’s Climate Change program, as of my writing, there is yet to be one for the beauty industry. Our ignorance might be our downfall; we’re running against the clock, having to rely on individual brand promises with few ways to hold them accountable on a global scale.
We should be ending our dependence on fossil fuels, not complicating our relationship to it further, but the onus isn’t on us as consumers but on the companies to prioritize large-scale changes that put the planet before profits, and to educate their consumers on the reality of what that choice entails. Fifty-five percent of consumers are willing to pay more for products that work to improve the environment already; companies need to heed that majority rule if any material change is going to occur.
Nicole Loher, an educator at New York University who teaches climate communications, is adamant about us collectively choosing a path where we stop trying to justify ourselves and focus on climate solutions: “Using by-products is not a solution in any way. The solve is to work towards not using fossil fuels for anything. All the energy that anyone, anywhere, spends on not solving this problem, is just trying to make a profit. To me, that is ethically wrong. Yes, we all have to make money, but at what expense? Killing humanity? Killing the world?”
Adapted from The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry. Copyright © 2025 by Arabelle Sicardi. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Arabelle Sicardi is a writer and consultant who focuses on beauty as an art form. “The House of Beauty: Lessons From the Image Industry” is her first book.
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