Coachella activations, the state of ‘clean’ beauty, and Beautyfor’s mission to find a home for beauty products

Gabby Shacknai and Zoe Weiner were already veteran beauty editors when they debuted their nonprofit, Beautyfor, in June 2024. Like many people who work in the beauty industry, they’d long been surrounded by a surplus of products and felt there had to be a way to do some good with the excess.

Initially, they planned a sale with excess from their friends in the industry. But then, brands got wind and asked to donate products. “All of a sudden, Gabby’s apartment was filled with hundreds and hundreds of serums and moisturizers and things, and we were just kind of like, ‘Where is this stuff coming from? It’s great that brands want to donate this, but why do they have all of this stuff?'” Weiner recalled.

Now, the organization has formalized its processes. It hosts quarterly sales, which have become — a pleasant surprise to its founders — like community events. It just held its first online sale at the start of April.

Weiner and Shacknai joined Glossy Beauty Podcast hosts Sara Spruch-Feiner and Lexy Lebsack to talk about the organization’s founding, its process of redirecting products from landfill to shoppers’ shelves, its philanthropic work — donating the proceeds from beauty product sales to other nonprofits — and its dedication to maintaining a curatorial viewpoint with the products it takes on.

Below are highlights from the episode, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Waste in the beauty industry

“We found out that up to 40% of products that are manufactured by the beauty industry every year actually end up in landfills. We talk all the time about the trash that results from the packaging of the beauty industry, but these are perfectly good, brand new, in the bottle, in the box products that just never really make it into consumers’ hands. … There are really a few different reasons that contribute to this product waste. First and foremost, a lot of traditional retailers are very stringent about their expiration date windows. So most of them require their products be at least six months to a year out from expiration. [Beautyfor requires that products are at least three months from expiration.] … Other reasons [could be] that brands often need to reformulate, repackage or rename their products. … They often have limited edition launches that they can’t sell after a certain point. … And as much as there are these traditional solutions, like going to discount stores like TJ Maxx and selling them the excess, for a lot of brands, those are not really sustainable options — [sustainable] in a different sense of the word, because being in bargain stores can undercut their brand identities and certainly their pricing. So a lot of brands aren’t so cool with that idea. [Finally] when it comes to donating, it’s often really, really complicated and just not worth the logistical hassle of trying to meet shelters’ and charitable organizations’ requirements around expiration and the condition of products and even the types of products they accept.” –Gabby Shacknai

Sales that feel like community hubs

“[Our events feeling like community gatherings] was a piece that we were not at all expecting, to be honest. We had our [beauty editor] friends volunteering, [and they were] giving skin-care advice to our shoppers, and our shoppers were sitting around, playing with products, [hanging out] with each other and making new friends. And we were hosting a sale. We didn’t expect for it to be a social gathering, a community event. … But there was so much hunger for the girlies to just come and hang out and play with beauty in a way that I don’t know I’ve really ever seen in other spaces, except for editor events.” –Zoe Weiner

Keeping an edited assortment

“The truth is we’ve had a couple of brands reach out to us who, frankly, weren’t a fit for Beautyfor because their ethical practices [or] their sustainability practices weren’t aligned with ours. And that’s something that we really pride ourselves on. Obviously our priority is always to mitigate product waste at large, but we also understand that our customers, our shoppers, are coming to us knowing that they can trust the products we’re selling them. And that does set us apart from these traditional retailers, where shoppers often walk in and feel just really overwhelmed by how many brands and products [there are] — they just don’t know where to start. So we like that Beautyfor feels a little bit more curated and exclusive, while still focusing on these huge industry-wide problems.” –Gabby Shacknai