Reusing your beauty products is on the rise, with brands positioning their refill initiatives as a sustainability win. But it really?
Allow us to paint you a picture. It’s 8am. You’ve just poured yourself a coffee in your KeepCup (you’ve already switched to compostable coffee pods), filled up your water bottle and you’re heading out the door with an extra tote bag in hand should you need to nip to the supermarket. Into it, you throw three amber bottles; the labels read SPF, moisturiser, cleanser. There’s a refill shop en route – and why do an online haul when you can top up your favourite products on your lunch break? While some aspects of this scenario will replicate your routine, others feel a bit far-fetched. But – if beauty brands leading the refill revolution have anything to do with it – they won’t for long.
Refillable beauty is being positioned as the silver bullet to beauty’s packaging problem. And it’s quite the quandary. It’s estimated that the beauty industry produces 120bn units of packaging every year, the vast majority of which is made of plastic. Given as much as 91% of plastic doesn’t get recycled* (possibly the most depressing stat that you’ll read today?) chances are that packaging is still on the planet somewhere. Considered in the context of every mascara wand, foundation pump and lip balm tube you’ve ever purchased, even your own packaging footprint can feel utterly overwhelming. In fact, it’s the reason consumers are voting with their wallets. In recent years, solid sustainability credentials have become a non-negotiable for beauty brands; today, most beauty consumers would pay 35% to 40% more for a sustainable version of their regular beauty or personal care product, according to a report published last April by the insights company LEK.
Sustainability credentials have become a nonnegotiable for beauty brands
Enter: refillable beauty. While the concept has been around for a while, it’s seen massive growth in the past two years, particularly in the beauty sector. Sales of refillable prestige beauty products increased almost 50% between January and July 2022 alone, according to a report by the NPD Group, while Google searches for ‘refillable beauty’ rose by 59% in the past year. And beauty retailers have responded in kind. Take Selfridges, whose Project Earth sustainability strategy, launched in 2020, leans heavily on refillable beauty; Selfridges stocks more than 900 refillable beauty products from 48 brands and sold over 8,500 refills in 2021 alone. Such progress towards a packaging-free future is promising for an industry in which packaging represents a staggering 70% of its waste. But is this seemingly circular model of consumption really a solution for beauty’s big dirty secret?
Package of measures
On the surface, refills seem
