How clean are “Clean at Sephora” products? A curious, savvy listener submitted this question and I thought it was great! Sephora is vocal about the long list of products they don’t allow in this line. But today, we’re diving into the question of whether or not their are any concerning ingredients that they do allow.
This episode isn’t simply going to take you through each every ingredient on the product list. You’re actually going to walk away with a three step hack that you can use when looking at Sephora’s product labels.
Right out of the gate, I will say that I personally do not buy Clean at Sephora products. I have a list of 25 ingredients on my avoid list and clean at Sephora products allow 7 of them. If you’d like to learn more about how to read labels, what ingredients to avoid, and why - head over to Toxin Free in 3. But today, we’re actually not going to be doing a deep dive into these ingredients.
3 things to look for to determine whether or not something is clean:
How clean are “Clean at Sephora” products? A curious, savvy listener submitted this question and I thought it was great! Sephora is vocal about the long list of products they don’t allow in this line. But today, we’re diving into the question of whether or not their are any concerning ingredients that they do allow.
This episode isn’t simply going to take you through each every ingredient on the product list. You’re actually going to walk away with a three step hack that you can use when looking at Sephora’s product labels.
Right out of the gate, I will say that I personally do not buy Clean at Sephora products. I have a list of 25 ingredients on my avoid list and clean at Sephora products allow 7 of them. If you’d like to learn more about how to read labels, what ingredients to avoid, and why - head over to Toxin Free in 3. But today, we’re actually not going to be doing a deep dive into these ingredients.
3 things to look for to determine whether or not something is clean:
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Speaker 1:
Hello friend, welcome back to another episode of the Detox Dilemma Podcast. As always, I'm your host, wendy in Environmental Toxins lawyer-turned-clean living coach. Today's episode is going to answer a listener's question and that is how clean are clean-ass Sephora products really? Sephora boasts a long list of ingredients that they don't allow when they're clean at Sephora products, but I'm curious is there anything concerning that they do allow? Now, this is such a great question With the popularity of Sephora growing. I mean, it's always been popular, but now it's really popular, especially among teen girls, including my own teen daughter.
Speaker 1:
Navigating clean products in stores like Sephora can get a little complicated, but I want you to walk away from this episode armed with a little three-step hack that you can use when looking at Sephora labels. Ready, let's dive in. Today is so fun, so, if you didn't already know, you can leave me a voice message. If you go down into the show notes, you can leave me a voice message, and recently I've been getting a lot of them, which is fantastic, because when you guys ask me questions, then I can make podcast episodes that answer those questions, and I would much rather make a podcast episode answering questions that you have than try to figure out what it is that you don't know and that maybe you want to know. So I love it. Go down, go ask me a question.
Speaker 1:
Today's question comes from Melissa, who left me a voice message and said Hi, wendy, I have a teenage daughter that loves shopping for makeup at Sephora. They seem to offer a range of brands that are labeled as clean clean at Sephora. Are these really clean? I know you have a daughter the same age as mine. Are there Sephora products that you allow her to wear? Thank you for this question, melissa. I actually recently have been talking a lot about clean at Sephora over on Instagram. I've been trying to go through products and show people how to find things that are clean, and it can be a little complicated, but I'm going to share with you a really simple hack that I mean literally in 30 seconds you can figure out is this product clean or not.
Speaker 1:
Let me start by saying clean at Sephora products do not meet my definition, wendy's definition of clean, and my definition of clean is that a product does not have any of my toxic 25 ingredients to avoid. So, of my top 25 ingredients that I personally avoid, my family avoids. I recommend people avoid clean at Sephora products. Allow seven of them. Now this episode is not going to be an in-depth look at those seven ingredients and what the harm is and how to read them on labels. That is more of an in-depth lesson and I actually teach that. I teach it in toxin free in three. I have an entire module that teaches how to read labels, what ingredients to avoid and why, and I also teach label hacking, which is all my tips and tricks. Whether or not you're reading cleaning products or hair care, you get all the tricks on how to read labels quickly without you know sitting there with a list of 25 ingredients and trying to compare them, because that just takes a really long time. But if you do want to learn how to do that, then jump into my toxin free in three course enrollment is open now.
Speaker 1:
But what I am going to talk about today is just a little quick hack when you're looking at makeup. So if you're looking for anything that is foundation or lipstick or mascara, eye shadow, blush, bronzer, any kind of makeup product at Sephora, here's a really quick way for you to be able to tell pretty instantaneously whether or not a product is clean, the very first thing I look for. Number one first, right off the bat, does it have a synthetic dye? So makeup is full of colors. That's the whole purpose. We put colors on our face, on our lips, on our cheek, on our eyes, and so the first thing to look for to determine whether or not something is clean is what are those colors made out of? And if it is a synthetic dye so you see a color on the label, like red or yellow, followed by a number, or maybe you see the word lake, for example, lake Red Six that would be an example of a synthetic dye anything that calls out the color.
Speaker 1:
The reason why you want to avoid these synthetic petroleum based products is because they are literally made from petroleum and they likely have residue of things like heavy metals and carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting byproducts of petroleum. So you don't want heavy metals like cadmium or lead or anything like that, or anything that's carcinogenic, causes cancer or anything that's going to make your skin break out, something that's going to make you hyper sensitive, and all of these things are contaminants of synthetic colorants and I think most people you know if it's made from petroleum, it probably shouldn't go on your body. That's at least how I feel. There's a lot of studies out there that show why we should avoid it, be avoiding these synthetic Colorants, and we definitely don't want to have them in our makeup and be putting them on our face.
Speaker 1:
Now what I look for are companies that color their makeup with things like fruit pigment pigments. So you have a lot of companies are doing that. Juice beauty does it 100% pure, does it although not everything 100% pure is clean, because they, you know, do use some ingredients on my avoid list, but they do use fruit pigments. Mineral pigments are the most popular. Those are the ones you're probably going to find at places like Sephora, and so things like iron oxides when you see mineral iron oxides, that's really what I'm looking for or something like titanium dioxide now, I don't use titanium dioxide on a lip color or a loose Product, so like loose powder, because you can inhale it and that's not a good thing. But if it's not like a pressed cheek or something that is a pressed colored product, I don't avoid it. It sits right on top of your skin, actually protects you against the sun, and so you want to look for those mineral pigments. So if the product you're looking at does not have synthetic dyes and it's using mineral pigments, that's great.
Speaker 1:
So now you're gonna go on to hack step number two and you're gonna look for Undisclosed fragrance. So any product that says fragrance on it that doesn't specify Say that it's an essential oil or it's a specific botanical extract, if it has the word fragrance or perfume, then you want to avoid it. Now I will say that clean it Sephora doesn't allow synthetic dyes that are more than 1% of the product, which is fine and Probably better than lots of other places. In fact, I know it's better than so many other places. However, inside of that fragrance can be thousands. It gets a possibility of thousands of different kinds of Ingredients that the majority of them are petroleum based synthetic ingredients.
Speaker 1:
The other thing that really bothers me is, although clean it Sephora doesn't allow phthalates in their synthetic fragrance, which is a good thing. Those are undercut disruptors. That are we, you know. I think it's widely known how bad they are. They lead to breast cancer, they lead to infertility, all kinds of other hormonal issues. But they do allow Lilial, and Lilial goes by. You know a couple, a couple of names, but it is banned in the UK and in Europe because it is a known Reproductive toxin. So if you go by products in Europe. In the UK, this, this is a band. It's been banned since March of 2022, but it is found in products in clean it Sephora. So they're allowing brands to sell products to mostly women, young girls, teenagers that have known reproductive toxicity, and I have a serious problem with that.
Speaker 1:
And the only way you're really gonna avoid it completely and know for sure that it's not in there is if you avoid undisclosed fragrance. So that's number two look for an undisclosed fragrance. Don't buy products that say fragrance or perfume on them. They aren't very, very specific as to what they are. And then a hack. Step number three If it doesn't have a synthetic dye and it doesn't have an undisclosed synthetic fragrance on it, the next thing you want to look for is an ingredient called phenoxyl ethanol.
Speaker 1:
Phenoxyl ethanol is a preservative and it's it's found in a lot of products and I will say this it's one of those middle of the road not terrible, but not super great preservatives. Products need preservatives. If there's any kind of water in a product, you can't have it molding or going rancid or going bad. You need a preservative of some kind. But here's the thing If a product has a phenoxyloethanol in it, which I avoid, it's on my avoid list.
Speaker 1:
It's highly likely they're also using ingredients that are a little bit harder to spot and more complicated, but are made in the same way, and those are called athoxylated ingredients. So looking for phenoxyloethanol is a way to kind of target and figure out is this a company who's using athoxylated ingredients? It's a tell-tale sign and here's the issue with that. So phenoxyloethanol is created between they use phenol, which is highly corrosive, and they use a carcinogen called ethylene oxide. So when you create this ingredient in the manufacturing process it contains residues of that corrosive phenol and that ethylene oxide, which is a carcinogen. And anything that's made with ethylene oxide is called an athoxylated ingredient, and you're gonna see these ingredients. They're popular as PEGs. You'll see the letters PEG, ppg, anything that ends in F, like lower F or stair F. Polysorbates are another one. So you can see it gets complicated. You know what is an athoxylated ingredient.
Speaker 1:
If you wanna learn again, jump into toxin-free in three. But for purposes of this section, usually if you just look for that one ingredient phenoxyl ethanol and it has that, it's likely there's other athoxylated ingredients as well. Okay, so to wrap that up, if you are looking at a clean etsyphora product, look for three things First look for a synthetic dye, then look for an undisclosed fragrance and then look for phenoxyl ethanol. I do wanna say that you know you're not gonna catch 100% of all the ingredients out there, but this is like a 90% tile, like 90% of the time. These are the ingredients that I see when I'm looking at products and I've determined that they don't meet my standards of clean.
Speaker 1:
Now there are a lot of brands at Clean Etsyphora that use ingredients that I feel like are worse than others. Merit is one of those brands. You know. Merit really markets themselves as clean. They use BHT, which is a well-known cancer-causing ingredient, and it just really it bothers me, the greenwashing bothers me. Selling something as clean to people who are really trying hard to do better, they care about their health, they care about their infertility, and to make them believe that they're buying something that is clean and safe when it's not is just something that I feel like.
Speaker 1:
Informed, constant and getting the word out is so important. I really believe that knowing how to read labels is kinda like knowing how to do your taxes or balance your budget or you know. It's one of those life skills that everyone should have. I believe that everyone should be able to look at a label, understand the ingredients that are in it, the possible harm that it could do to your health and your body, and to know how to look for cleaner options. I think that is how we turn the tide and that is why I'm here and that's what I do. What I do it's why this podcast exists. Okay, that's a wrap, and if you want me to do an episode about any topic whatsoever, leave me a voice message and I will make sure that I record an episode and I answer your question. Thank you for being here and I'll see you next week Another great day.