Where to Shop for Clean Beauty
Sephora
The Clean at Sephora program was recently expanded to now include over 50 “formulated without” ingredients, and was most recently updated March 31, 2022. Products that fit the bill of clean are marked with a custom logo and organized into an easy-to-shop area in stores and online.
Target
Target has over 4,000 products from beauty to household cleaners that fit the bill of being Target Clean—meaning they’re formulated without ingredients like phthalates, propyl-parabens, butyl-parabens and sodium laureth sulfate (SLES). The products—like Honest Beauty Liquid Lipstick—are clearly denoted by a “Target Clean” icon online and in stores. The company pledged to achieve full ingredient transparency by 2020 for the products in the beauty aisles, including pulling back the curtain on “trade secret” ingredients like fragrance.
Follain
Follain has one of the most comprehensive banned ingredient lists in the industry, with every product they carry online and in stores passing a rigorous approval and ingredient review process. Stop by their store in Boston, shop their namesake collection at Ulta or Anthropologie, or pay a visit to their website to get to know some new clean beauty brands.
Credo
The team at Credo has created their own standard of clean beauty, one that bans all the ingredients you want to avoid but allows for some wiggle room on others like beeswax, fragrance, and the preservative phenoxyethanol. They work closely with the brands they carry to view safety data and sourcing information of some questionable ingredients to ensure the products are not just clean but also highly effective. Check out their website or stores in California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts.
CAP Beauty
Focused on inner and outer wellness, CAP Beauty is a retail store and spa located in New York (as well as online). The products they carry are all-natural, with no synthetic ingredients at all. We love that they carry beauty products as well as snacks and supplements.
The Detox Market
With locations all over California plus some in New York and Toronto, The Detox Market is both a store and an online retailer that makes buying EWG-approved clean beauty products a breeze. We love visiting the “Top 5” section of their website to narrow down the best-of-the-best picks—but you’ll still have so much fun scrolling through the bounty of choices.
Integrity Botanicals
This online retailer carries everything from natural makeup, hair care, and skincare to baby-safe and wellness products and vets everything through the EWG’s ingredient database to make sure it’s safe for you and a conscious choice for the environment.
Department Stores
Bloomingdale’s has a clean beauty boutique called WellChemist both in stores and online that stocks over 35 brands free of parabens, phthalates, and sulfates. Nordstrom’s natural beauty and wellness department is stocked with beauty products and supplements free of sulfates, phthalates, parabens, petrochemicals, mineral oil, silicone, and talc. Saks Fifth Avenue has the most rigorous natural beauty guidelines of all the department stores in their Clean & Green Beauty shop, eliminating the ingredients above plus formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing agents, SLS and SLES, retinyl palmitate, oxybenzone, coal tar, hydroquinone, tricolosan, and triclocarban.
Subscription Boxes
Birchbox has an ingredient-conscious option so you’re only sent products without parabens, phthalates, sulfates, and petrochemicals in a monthly beauty box. But there are many subscription boxes focused only on providing the best of clean beauty: Petit Vour sends four curated products of high-performing, animal-free, and nontoxic cosmetics and skincare; Beauty Heroes has an exhaustive banned ingredient policy and sends a full-size product and mini samples from a single clean beauty brand each month; Boxwalla’s bimonthly Beauty Box includes full-size products from clean and cruelty-free beauty brands you wish you’d discovered sooner; The Detox Market sells The Detox Box box highlighting a single clean brand each month (plus you earn points to shop the site); Love Goodly’s bimonthly box of four or five full-size products focuses on nontoxic, cruelty-free, and vegan beauty and skincare—plus sometimes they throw in a cute accessory or healthy snack.
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