How to Make Your Beauty Business More Sustainable
It’s a sad and scary fact that each year,120 million tonnes of single-use plastic is generated and dumped by the beauty industry, which ends up in landfill and oceans, upsetting ecosystems for millennia.
If you’ve known us for a long time, you’ll know how committed we are to doing what we can to minimise our own contribution to the huge amounts of plastic waste generated in this industry, in the hopes that we can help to slow down the effects of global warming, and be more thoughtful and sustainable as a brand.
What have we done so far?
- We're reducing the amount of plastic used in our lash trays by 100%, making them COMPLETELY recyclable. The main collection boxes contain no magnets, and have no UV spot print (that’s the shiny, embossed part on some packaging) which means that once you’ve used all the lashes from a box, you can recycle the whole box, and we're working on rolling this out among ALL of our lashes!
- We’ve worked hard to make our pretreatment packaging from recyclable glass, instead of non-recyclable plastic. There are times when plastic packaging is the only option, in the event of supply chain shortages, but we do everything we can to minimise this!
- We’ve also swapped out the packaging that our parcels go out in, in favour of much more environmentally friendly options, from completely recyclable boxes and envelopes, and foam nuggets which dissolve in water instead of taking thousands of years to decompose!
Our next move is a really good one - designed not only to helpus reduce our carbon footprint and reliance on single-use plastics, but to helpyou do the same! We’ve replaced our plastic lip applicator style brushes for pretreatment with metal handles, so all you’ll waste now is the brush head - that’s 80% less waste than the whole brush being made of plastic! Just to sweeten the deal, we’ve done the same with our silicone mascara wands, meaning that we can be more sustainable while we work, and we can even help our clients to be more sustainable when they look after their lashes at home.
How do they work?
You can purchase a pack of 5 reusable brush handles and the corresponding brush heads (there are two types of handle, so make sure you’re getting the right handle for the right brush head!) and simply swap out the brush head once you’ve completed that stage of your pretreatment.
If you want to help your clients be more environmentally savvy too, you can even retail the reusable handles to them, and swap out their silicone brush head after each visit - think Starbucks’ reusable cups vs. throwing away your cup every time!
When you’re done using your brushes you can remove the head with your tweezers and dispose of it safely, then sanitise the handles the same way you clean your tweezers, be it with sanitising liquid, barbicide or an autoclave - if you’re retailing these to your clients, they can cleanse the brushes with their foam cleanser and some warm water. When the handles are clean, leave them hole end down to prevent water/cleansing fluid being left in the reservoir.
This is a simple swap for you to implement, but it’s the little things that we do which have a big overall impact on our environment!
