Is Lush Cosmetics at the Front of Sustainable Cosmetics?
The eco-friendly movement is becoming prevalent in our modern society. People are ditching plastic straws, eating more plant-based foods, but one of the most groundbreaking changes we’ve seen is in the cosmetics industry. For some time, cosmetics have been abandoning animal testing and single use plastics for a more eco-based products and packaging. One company that has exemplified this movement is Lush Cosmetics.
This UK based company is known for many things — colorful bath bombs, soothing lotions, rejuvenating face masks. However, one aspect that Lush strives to work toward is sustainability. Each product, ingredient, and package are carefully considered based on this idea. Lush aims to set itself apart from just a green cosmetics company. Behind the scenes, they put together charities, funds, and campaigns involving sustainability, animal rights, and benefits for the countries that grow their ingredients.
Lush aims to display itself as an environmental and animal friendly company through its advertising and overall theme. After visiting their website, consumers can get a sense of transparency from Lush. There is a plethora of information on their products and even stories of their sustainability, foundations, and much more! Take some time to explore their website to see for yourself.
Having the company’s website as a resource to information is great, but there is also a sense of wariness when information elsewhere is seldom. Wanting to be a transparent company and be the resource for customers to know Lush is unique. However, how is Lush proving their claims? What is it about this company that exemplifies their fight for sustainability?
Through further research and deep discussion with an old friend of mine Olivia Schmids — who happens to be a Sales Manager, Key Holder, and representative for Lush Cosmetics North America — I investigate Lush’s products, fundraisers, and future projects in terms of sustainability. Lush is a company with a defined mission but naïve in terms of defending their credibility. As a company that aims to set itself as a leader in sustainable cosmetics, there needs to be clear evidence of how they are doing it.
A Deeper Look Into Lush Products
Anyone can tell they are near a Lush store by the overwhelming aroma that just begs them to go in. Once you’re there, the vibrancy of the colors and the artistic lettering saying, “100% Vegetarian” or “Make Animal Testing Extinct”, meets your eyes before the actual products themselves. When the chance comes to browse the products, a worker is by your side ready to answer any question you have.
Victoria Estrada, an ex-employee of Lush, says that the training process for new workers is intense. A manager walks the new worker through each ingredient, ethic, campaign, package, and product to prepare their workers for the store. “There is an ethic [Lush] requires their workers to understand and share with customers. It almost felt like a class on all things Lush, and if you failed, you were cut from the team. It sounds intense, but it was such an amazing experience to learn so much about the store.”
Lush has a large variety of products in their stores. Some come in a solid form which requires no excessive plastic or packaging called “Naked”. This line makes up 35% of the stores product range and they are seen in their signature Bath Bombs, soap bars, shampoo, conditioners, and even originally bottled cosmetics that were evolved to be solid, package-free, and self-preserving, like the “Snow Fairy”.
The other 65% of Lush’s products are packaged in plastic or metal containers. This includes lotions, creams, liquid conditioners and shampoos, and perfumes. This seems hypocritical for a company that aims to be the most sustainable and eco-friendly cosmetics company. However, looking deeper into their packaging, you then see how effective their recycling methods are.
Starting with the packaging itself, all Lush plastics are BPA-free and 100% of it is post-consumer recycled. In 2015, Lush packaging designers reduced the thickness of the plastic by 13%, which avoided using roughly 13,600 pounds of plastic that year. Not only was plastic reduced, but customers are urged to return their bottles and pots so Lush can reuse them. To convince customers to follow this, they have a policy that if you buy five black pots, which typically contain face-washes, lotions, etc., you get one of their fresh, made in-store face masks.
According to Estrada, the ex-employee of Lush Cosmetics, shipments that arrived at the store used absolutely no plastic and each box was packed tightly with products. For the online buyer, products are shipped in a biodegradable cellulose bag, which my friend Olivia Schmids showed me in our interview, and a recycled cardboard box with renatured packing peanuts inside that can be composted.
Not only is “Naked”, the recycling program, and packaging keeping with the environmentally friendly and sustainable theme, everything Lush does is also economical for the company itself. They are saving money, building a market, and succeeding this way solely based on user-generated advertising. Lush has a no advertising policy, which saves them a large amount of money.
Charity Pot
Lush aims to keep their products as ethical as they possibly can. This is seen in the sourcing of ingredients, giving back to the communities that provide these ingredients, and through their large campaigning program.
In 2007, Lush launched one of its most successful products called “Charity Pot”. This product is a vegan, philanthropic, skin softener, and with every purchase, 100% of the earnings goes toward a fund that is dispersed to hundreds of charities across the globe. Each “Charity Pot” has a sticker on top of one of the charities it’s supporting to give better insight of what a consumer is putting their money toward.
Schmids, being a sales manager, oversees nominating local charities deserving of this fund. She described “Charity Pot” more in depth in our interview, saying that each charity must fall into at least on of these sections: Environmental, Animal, and Humanitarian. Some charities that Schmids nominated and awarded donations to include: Animal Advocates of South-Central Pennsylvania, a non-profit that advocates the vegan lifestyle as an ethical, sustainable, and healthy way of living, and a group of protestors who needed funding to defeat the impending pipeline that would run through Pennsylvania’s natural habitats. These are just two of the thousands of charities benefiting from this Charity around the globe!
Schmids informed me that as of today, $33,000,000 is dispersed to 2,450 grassroots charities across 42 countries. What an incredible way for a company as large as Lush to support ethics and sustainability.
The Future of Lush
Deforestation has become one of the world’s biggest problems. In the tropics especially, conventional farming of cattle, palm oil, and sugarcane have stripped rainforests down to less then a third of their original state. Not only are habitats being destroyed, but the inhabitants of these rainforests have become endangered or even extinct.
Lush is more than aware of these issues. Especially since a lot of their sourced ingredients come from tropical areas. To support Orangutan populations, Lush has recently stopped sourcing palm oil and even created a soap that donates some of the profit to funds that support the regrowth of Orangutan populations. But Lush hasn’t stopped there. They also have a plan to regrow and revitalize ecosystems in a different way.
In the interview with Schmids, she mentions Lush’s most recent investment in Regenerative Farming. This type of agriculture works with nature instead of against it. It reverses deforestation, restores degraded soil, increases biodiversity, and even urges an environment to resurrect itself to its original state.
Lush has worked with many of their farms in Peru, Arizona, Uganda, and Guatemala in order to adopt regenerative farming. In Guatemala, where cocoa, vanilla, avocado, coconuts are sourced by Lush, the farmers have taken on new organic methods of pest control and even use natural fertilizers like agricultural charcoal, which is made on site.
In Uganda, there is a miracle plant that in incredibly nutritious for the skin, immune system, and even increases natural healing of the body. But the most prevalent benefit of this plant is its power to stabilize degraded soil to be used continuously and avoid expansion to new soil.
Lush is supporting their farmers in bringing back health to their land in order to boost production, but more importantly reverse deforestation and benefit the farmer’s livelihoods.
Looking back at my knowledge of Lush before writing this article, I was only a consumer who loved the product and visible ethic of the company. But now after researching, interviewing, and investing my time into uncovering Lush when it comes to sustainability, I found an entirely new respect for the mission of this company. There is so much more to uncover, and with Lush offering a page called “Stories”, which are articles written by workers of Lush to show the transparency and dedication of Lush, consumers can feel secure purchasing from Lush as a company dedicated to environmental protection, animal rights, and humanitarian ethics.
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