Performance & Sustainability are the Future of Beauty

In the 2024 beauty market, consumers demand formulation efficacy and sustainability—without compromising either.

According to a May 2024 Exploding Topics Report, “Search volume for ‘sustainable beauty’ is up more than 200% since 2019.”

At the same time, clinical beauty has begun to eclipse pure play “clean” beauty. Shoppers, demanding transparency from beauty brands, are pushing brands to prove marketing claims.

How do manufacturers reconcile these trends? With safe, sustainable and high-functioning ingredients that offer the best of both worlds: performance and sustainability credentials. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Prestige Skin Care & the Skin Health Boom

The global skin care market is forecast to generate $186.60 billion in revenue this year worldwide, per Statista, and is projected to grow at a rate of 3.08% for the next four years.

There are more skin care buyers now than in previous reporting periods, and these shoppers are “both spending more money and purchasing more frequently,” per Circana.

In the U.S. market, prestige skin care increasingly drives most of the category’s growth, per Circana, expanding at 7% in the first half of 2024. Focus on the value that higher-quality formulations bring to consumers’ lives leads growth in the luxury space.

Mintel data supports this. A 2023 report from the firm noted, “Consumers in this space are calling on brands to provide education on ingredient potency and application techniques, to communicate the added benefits of products and help users to reduce their environmental impact, heal their skin barriers, and save time and money.”

It’s no surprise, then that 67% of female skin care consumers prefer general skin-health-promoting products with higher-quality ingredients.

Emerging trends are expected to drive additional skin care market growth, including a 6.4% growth rate for global men’s skin care, which totaled $16 billion in 2023.

More growth can be attributed to the increasing diversity of retail channels. This diversity provides brands with opportunities to expand from health and beauty store specialists to e-commerce platforms to drugstores.

Performance x Sustainability: Consumer-preferred Innovation

Trust is critical in 2024’s beauty market.

“Shoppers are demanding proven value, convenience and efficacy from their skin care routines and are willing to defy brand loyalty to acquire it,” notes a 2024 Mintel report.

Shoppers are serious about the “proven” element of brand claims. A 2023 survey from CleanHub found, “Shoppers are zooming out to evaluate a brand’s broader environmental and social footprint before making a purchase.”

Kantar research backs this up, noting that sustainability is the “driver of corporate reputation, contributing 45% to people’s positive perceptions of a company.”

Yet more than 50% of consumers surveyed by CleanHub expressed doubt over “the authenticity of brands’ clean beauty claims.”

By centering verifiable effectiveness alongside safe and sustainable credentials, beauty brands have a unique opportunity to engage consumers and build long-term relationships.

Natural & Sustainable Aren’t Always Synonymous

A 2023 survey conducted by Foresight Factory found that consumers rate palm oil high on the list of ingredients of concern, proving that “natural” and “sustainable” are far from synonymous. Yet their worries could be ameliorated with proper certification of feedstocks.

Palm oil has long been dogged by controversies related to deforestation, soil degradation and human rights abuses associated with its production for a wide variety of consumer products, including beauty. Yet its versatility has made it difficult to replace.

Fortunately, there are viable alternatives that deliver on shoppers’ desire for ethically sourced ingredients with sustainable credentials and proven performance.

For instance, Shell’s readily biodegradable high-purity Shell NEODOL® alcohols are versatile for a range of personal care/beauty applications. The range includes odd and even numbered primary alcohols from C9 to C15 and comprise a composition of about 80% linear and 20% branched.

Shell NEODOL alcohols unique lightly branched structure offers foaming power, ease of formulating, product stability, and emollient properties. These properties are well suited for body wash, shampoo, and many other personal care products.

Shell NEODENE® high-purity, linear alpha olefins offer versatility in product manufacturing and can be used as intermediates to increase foaming performance in cleansing agents and moisturizers, as well as other applications.

A number of Shell NEODOL and Shell NEODENE grades, including bio-based options, are certified as EPA Safer Choice and CleanGredients, recognizing them as “safer for humans and the environment, meeting the EPA’s stringent health and environmental criteria,” per the EPA.

Furthermore, the biobased mass balance grades of Shell NEODOL and Shell NEODENE are kosher certified.

Mass Balance for Trust & Sustainability