As consumer values and needs evolve in an increasingly crowded beauty marketplace, more brands are turning to third-party seals to validate their ingredient, safety and environmental claims.
This growing movement is partially fueled by consumer awareness around greenwashing outpacing regulation, said Laney Crowell, founder and CEO of Saie, a cosmetics and skin-care brand certified by a variety of environmental groups including Climate Neutral, Leaping Bunny and Plastic Negative.
“Beauty consumers are becoming more educated every day, and they’re very aware of greenwashing and brands claiming, ‘Oh, there’s this ingredient in our product,’ when 90% of the ingredients are something that’s not good for their skin,” Crowell told Glossy. “I wanted to get certified for my own mental confidence that we were making all of the right choices in terms of being as sustainable as possible.”
The growth of brands seeking certifications is also linked to what many experts describe as an uptick in consumers reporting sensitized skin due to the complicated, multi-step personal care routines that became popular in the last decade. They largely revolve around exfoliation.
According to the U.S. National Institute of Health, “sensitive skin has been described as unpleasant sensory responses to stimuli that should not provoke such sensations” and includes itching, burning, stinging, tightness and dryness. The government agency reports that around “60 to 70% of women and 50 to 60% of men report having some degree of sensitive skin.”
This is on top of other common skin issues like eczema, rosacea, psoriasis and acne, which together impact more than 100 million Americans combined, according to the American Academy of Dermatology and The National Eczema Association.
These figures don’t include undiagnosed skin issues, including everyday rashes and reactions to common products, dry skin due to a disrupted skin barrier, and mild cases of the above conditions that are treated at home without a doctor’s visit.
According to Statista, the global market value for “clean beauty” was valued at $6.5 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $15.3 billion by 2028. Meanwhile, content tagged on TikTok with #sensitiveskin have 3.8 billion views.
Brands say seals build trust among this growing subset of shoppers when printed on packaging and in-store displays, across social media, and in other marketing materials.
“I can tell [a consumer] all day long that I made products that are for sensitive skin and that it matters to me because I have a background [managing my own eczema], but why should they believe me?” said Amy Liu, founder and CEO of Tower 28, a line of cosmetics and skin-care products sold at Sephora, Credo and direct to consumer. “My hope is that [Tower 28’s National Eczema Association Seal of Acceptance on select products] is a reinforcement of the reasons to believe [in the brand].”
The NEA’s seal, for example, was one of the first of its kind when it was introduced by the advocacy non-profit in 2008. It denotes that a product has passed strict ingredient and formulation standards established by the group’s scientific oversight committee, which includes a panel of dermatologists, allergists and other experts. Before being certified, products must go through in-depth testing on people with sensitive skin for sensitivity, irritation and toxicity, plus there’s a review of ingredient and formulation data beyond what’s required by the FDA under MoCRA, including ingredient amounts.
“I’d say about 98% of the brands that apply for the seal are approved,” Christine E. Anderson, director of the NEA’s Seal of Acceptance, told Glossy. This is thanks to detailed testing and ingredient parameters. “If you’re a company that follows our instructions to a T, there’s no real reason why the product shouldn’t be accepted. If you have ingredients [on our ‘do not use’ list] or if there is any sensitivity reported [in your clinical trials], don’t apply. If they’re meeting the guidelines, they will pass.”
There are currently 483 products with the NEA seal across from more than 122 indie brands and parent companies, many of which have several brands with the seal, said Anderson. This includes Cetaphil, CeraVe, Peach & Lily, Murad, Olay, Summer Fridays and, as of this year, Dove.
“[This] seal helps provide peace of mind for those with sensitive skin,” said Kimberly Day, associate director of R&D at Unilever, about Dove’s newest body wash range, which is NEA-certified. The collection includes formulas designed for acne, dry skin and eczema, the latter of which feature the NEA seal.
But a seal can do more than attract shoppers with specific conditions — it can also provide a general feeling of trust, said Liah Yoo, founder and CEO of Krave Beauty, a DTC skin-care brand targeting shoppers overwhelmed with complex skin-care routines. Krave Beauty launched the NEA seal earlier this year on two products: its Great Body Relief Body Lotion, which retails for $12.50, and its Great Barrier Relief Serum, which sells for $28.
“This was driven by our customers; we would get so many customer emails or DMs asking, ‘Is this eczema-safe?’, so [getting the seal] was more of a straightforward and simple way to convey this to people,” Yoo told Glossy. “But I’m also hoping that we become associated with more gentle formulas and as a more nourishing skin-care brand in general. Trend-wise, [shoppers] are resorting to more gentle and soothing skin care overall, so hopefully this demonstrates that our brand is great for sensitive skin.”
NEA’s seal, which is one of the more popular ones in the beauty space, has since been followed by other seals including The National Psoriasis Foundation Seal of Recognition in 2012 and The Rosacea Society’s Seal of Acceptance, which launched earlier this year.
Meanwhile, popular vegan certifications include The Vegan Trademark by the Vegan Society and Certified Vegan by Vegan.org, while Leaping Bunny and Beauty Without Bunnies denote no animal testing, or ‘cruelty-free’, for many beauty brands.
The Skin Cancer Foundation Seal of Recommendation is also popular among sun-care brands, while the Environmental Working Group’s Verified seal offers a way for consumers to help lower one’s exposure to the group’s ingredients of concern, such as suspected endocrine disruptors, parabens and ’forever chemicals’.
However, one deterrent to embracing seals is cost, so most brands focus on certifying a few select products. These skin condition-focused agencies often assess products individually, while some environmental seals will award the entire company with a seal.
For the skin condition-focused seals used within the beauty and personal care space, costs start with third-party lab testing, which is done by a brand at a lab of their choosing and submitted with their application. These tests often include HRIPT (human repeat insult patch test) or CIT (cumulative irritation test) tests, which cost upward of $10,000 per product and can take months to complete, depending on a variety of factors, brands told Glossy. Then there is the application fee and, if approved, a licensing fee to use the seal across packaging and marketing.
These fees are often structured as a sliding scale based on a brand’s yearly revenue. For example, according to a brand that recently applied for NEA’s seal, brands that exceed $10 million in yearly revenue are charged $15,000 per product application. That drops to $5,000 for brands that prove yearly earnings between $1 million and $10 million, and $2,500 for brands beneath that threshold.
Currently, the NEA approves skin and body-care products, plus it added deodorant and lip products earlier this year. As for color cosmetics? “We’re still learning [about how these products impact our community], but we’ll probably start with foundation soon,” NEA’s Anderson told Glossy.
As for the National Rosacea Society’s new Seal of Acceptance, which launched at the end of January, the application fee is $1,500. Once granted, licensing for the seal costs $2,500-$10,000 per year, depending on the company’s revenue, Andrew Huff, president and executive director of the National Rosacea Society, told Glossy.
“More than a dozen brands have requested applications or more information in the three weeks since the Seal launched [this January], and we expect to receive quite a few applications in the weeks ahead,” Huff told Glossy in February.
As NEA’s Anderson mentioned above, because there is visibility to certification requirements, it should be clear to a brand whether a product will make the grade. But it’s unclear how many brands seeking a seal don’t end up applying after products fail preliminary tests. According to Emily Spillman, EWG healthy living science program manager, about a third of applicants who start the process with EWG to gain its Verified seal never complete it.
What’s more, even after approved, formula updates may be required to retain the license for a seal. “The science is always evolving and always changing, so our team of toxicologists do annual science reviews to update [the Verified program] to track emerging ingredients of concern,” Anderson said. “The industry moves a lot slower than we would like, so we allow products to see out the end of their contract, which is typically two to three years. At the end of their contract, the formulation is reviewed against whatever the current criteria is.”
While this is good for moving the industry toward better-understood ingredients, it also presents a challenge for brands as to where to print a seal because updating packaging is costly.
“[Our seals] are very prominent on our packaging,” said Saie’s Crowell. ‘We invest so much in them that I want people to see them and really read them.”
Every brand Glossy spoke to for this article used their seals in one marketing program or another, with most brands deciding to print them on secondary and primary packaging, as well. Sara Mitzner, vp of brand marketing at AS Beauty Group, said timing around packaging redesigns to display Laura Geller Beauty’s many seals is something she has carefully timed out over the past year knowing the approval timelines were all different.
“It’s a heavy lift to go into all the packaging files, especially on a foundation that comes in several shades,” Mitzner told Glossy. “We try not to change our art too often, so even though we had the license for the Psoriasis seal [for our Laura Geller Beauty Baked Balance-n-Brighten Color Correcting Foundation], we waited a year for the [rosacea seal] to do our redesign.”
Mitzner’s advice for other brand leaders seeking a specific seal is to go into the formulation process of a new product with the parameters in mind. That’s how she’s approaching a soon-to-launch range of Laura Geller Beauty foundations that were approved by several of the seals discussed in this article. “When we’re doing [these compliance steps] at the development stage, there’s still room to work [with the chemists] to update the formulations, if need be,” she said.
Glossy spoke to many brand executives who shared that, likewise, they had an easier time navigating a seal application process during product development, when product changes could be tweaked as needed. Older products, especially those that have been around for decades without a reformulation, can include ingredients that are now concerning to experts and a reformulation could alienate the product’s longtime customers.
To create a fragrance that would appeal to those wanting ingredient transparency and reduced allergens — a common issue in the fragrance industry — Marilou Hamer, co-founder of Rosy & Earnest fine fragrances, used the EWG’s Verified parameters as its benchmark when starting her line. Even still, the strictness of the certification forced her and her co-founder to reformulate one of the brand’s first two scents before being accepted. Currently, only 27 fragrances have been approved for the EWG Verified seal. Hamer told Glossy that the process was lengthy, expensive and time-consuming, but ultimately worth it to prove to consumers the brand’s clean fragrance claims.
An additional benefit to these seals includes being placed in the searchable databases run by the group issuing the certification. EWG’s Skin Deep database, which is arguably the most well-known in the lot, receives approximately 700,000 monthly views from prospective shoppers, according to the EWG. And on Tuesday, the EWG launched a dedicated Instagram page @ewgverified to help drive additional awareness.
“We were seeking a way to foster deeper connections with our community and our partners through social media,” said Olivia Wagner, EWG Verified social media manager. “People flock to Instagram to learn more about the latest health and wellness trends, look for product recommendations and discover what’s new in the clean industry space … [and] we are committed to meeting people where they are on their clean living journey.”
