What is Clean Makeup?

Clean makeup means that it has healthy, non-irritating ingredients that don’t compromise your skin and health.

One of the worst things about clean makeup is figuring out which brands are telling the truth and which are stretching it.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any guidelines or rules around what makeup brands are allowed to call clean. They can slap it on their packaging even if their products have damaging and irritating ingredients in them.

Our products read “clean. vegan. cruelty-free.” down the side, but what do we consider clean?

If you’re looking for a simple definition, we like the Clean at Sephora list. We ban over 50 harmful ingredients that are used by most brands because they’re easy to use and cheap. Instead, we pushed the bounds of what clean ingredients can do to engineer the longest-wear clean makeup products on the market.

There’s only one way to know if a product is clean or not – read the ingredient list. Figure out which ingredients are known to damage your skin and check your beauty products before using or purchasing those chemicals.

Team Provanity is in the chemistry lab figuring out exactly how much damage different ingredients cause your skin and health. We want to help you figure out what you can use and what to avoid.

Want to know what we look for? Let’s get into it.

Does Clean Makeup Have to be Natural?

When it comes to skincare, we like our ingredients to be as natural as possible to prevent chemical accumulation, but makeup is a different story.

If you want long-lasting, high pigment liquid eyeliner, you’re not going to achieve that using plants.

Makeup that lasts all day needs synthetic ingredients, and that’s okay. Not all man-made chemicals are damaging your skin. When do they, though?

Molecule Size Plays a Big Role

One of the big deciding factors on whether an ingredient makes the banned ingredient list surrounds its size.

In this case, bigger is better. (Do you wanna get out of here?)

When a molecule is really tiny, it can sink into your pores, through the layers of your skin, and into your bloodstream. Larger molecules will sit on the surface of your skin instead of absorbing.

This is why “acrylates” are banned on the Clean at Sephora list but not “acrylate copolymers”. Acrylates are monomers, or one piece of acrylate. Copolymers are multiple pieces bonded together to make much larger chains.

If copolymers are made up of the same stuff as the monomers, wouldn’t they still harm the surface of your skin?

Monomers are much more reactive. They have a double bond waiting to grab onto something. In copolymers, this double bond is busy making long chains. This prevents the copolymer from tearing apart your collagen and elastin.

Free Radicals Work in a Similar Way

You’re going to notice a theme – you don’t want reactive chemicals in your makeup.

Another highly reactive type of molecule? Free radicals.

Think back to chemistry class. You might remember that electrons come in pairs, so they can be stable. What happens if an electron doesn’t have a pair? That’s a free radical, and it’s one of the most reactive chemical species out there.

Free radicals form in your makeup products when their ingredients have unstable bonds. An outside trigger, like UV, oxidation, or heat, will break the bond, and single electron will be left behind.

This electron is going to fight for its life to find another electron, and where does it find it? The fat, collagen, elastin, and DNA in your skin.

That’s one of the biggest causes of premature aging. Your skin will wrinkle and droop when its structure is compromised, and the biggest offender of breaking this structure is free radicals.

Some Chemicals Can Disrupt Your Hormones

Have you heard of endocrine disruptors? This means that the chemical is messing up your hormones.

These ingredients are doing more than aging your skin faster, they’re negatively impacting your physical health by blocking your hormones from binding to receptors that help all your systems work correctly. The effects of this are wildly understudied, but the long-term risks may include infertility, early menopause, endometriosis, and other hormone-related diseases.

Phthalates, parabens, triclosan, and oxybenzone, for example, are beauty ingredients that can seep into your bloodstream and block your hormones by mimicking them. It’s best to avoid them at all costs.

 

Aren’t Some Ingredients Carcinogenic?

You might have heard that some beauty chemicals are carcinogenic, or cause cancer. This might happen for a couple of reasons.

Some ingredients, like ethylene oxide and formaldehyde, are electrophiles, or electron loving. This means that their electrons are poorly spread out, and they’ll look for more to build it up. These chemicals cause cancer because they often attack your DNA.

Redox-active chemicals are even more sinister, because instead of taking electrons once to become whole, they do it over and over again. They gain and lose electrons easily, meaning they constantly pull electrons from the building blocks of your skin. When they pull from your DNA, it can lead to widespread damage that leads to cancer.

How to Avoid Harmful Makeup for Healthy Skin

The only way to make sure your makeup has clean ingredients is to read the ingredient list. Don’t blindly trust labels that claim “clean” without learning what that means to them.

Some ingredients are completely banned; others are restricted to very small amounts. Learn a little bit of our banned ingredient list at a time, and you’ll be a pro at spotting clean makeup in no time.

We’re dedicated to creating the safest high-performing makeup possible. Not only do we follow the Clean at Sephora guidelines, but we push our formulas past the bounds of what other brands think is possible. Check out our products for clean makeup that performs like your favorite brands.