This year and last year truly seem to have been the era of waterless beauty products. Consumers adopted powders, pastes and pucks instead of liquids, with the goal of both minimizing water usage in production (water being an increasingly scarce resource) and making products smaller and lighter so their transportation consumes less fossil fuel. As an added benefit, they take up less space to store and require no preservatives (because bacteria can’t proliferate in the absence of water), plus there’s minimal packaging (no pumps or bottles) and less risk of spillage.
There’s nothing particularly newfangled about waterless beauty products—soap has been around for millennia. “I suppose it was the advent of shower gels that really moved people away from soap,” says Helen Ambrosen, co-founder and product inventor at Lush Cosmetics. “We make beautiful soap though we do also make lovely shower gels. We like soap because it’s antibacterial and deodorizing. If you use soap on your bits and pieces you will get a much better effect than if you use shower gel or liquid soap.” Ambrosen says that soaps are often better for the skin and its microflora because they can be made without preservatives.
Thirty-five ago the brand also created shampoo bars, which are now all the rage. “One of the challenges we have is that we’re quite often ahead of the customers,” says Ambrosen. “It’s taken all those decades for people to get it, but they have now. In 2019, for example, which was really the last normal year, we sold 6.6 million shampoo bars and saved 19 million shampoo bottles from ending up in recycling or landfill.” The brand also has conditioners and body moisturizers in solid formats, plus solid shower gels, which, contrary to popular belief, aren’t just soap (they contain the brand’s shower gel ingredients with an additive to make them solid).
One challenge many people have with solid products like bars is that they go gloopy in the shower—and that’s where powder and paste products come in. In 2019, Toronto’s An-Hydra introduced its Waterless Clay-to-Foam Daily Cleanser, a powder that becomes creamy when mixed with water. Newfoundland-based Duckish does waterless bars, but also moisturizers and diaper cream in sticks.
Right when the pandemic hit, along came Everist, with shampoo and conditioner pastes in recyclable aluminum tubes that offer a similar experience to using a regular liquid hair product, but in a three-times concentrate—so a 100ml tube lasts about as long as a 300ml bottle. “We really wanted to find a formulation that was close to what people were used to and that would offer similar performance” explains Jessica Stevenson, co-founder. “People might come for the eco benefits but they might not stay just for that. So these products are for the people who want to use shampoo bars but can’t get there.”
Her business partner, Jayme Jenkins, says Everist is for imperfect environmentalists. “It needs to be easier to be eco—brands that don’t judge and meet people where they are,” she says. “It’s not about 100 people doing zero waste perfectly, but more like millions and billions doing it imperfectly, without being made to feel like hypocrites.”
Lush is a well-known name in beauty, and Everist, An-Hydra and Duckish are growing rapidly, though they aren’t massive players (yet). But, perhaps due to the little guys’ success in proving that there is an audience for waterless products, the big brands are starting to make them. And that means they’re becoming more accessible.
Estee Lauder’s Aveda has launched a solid version of its Shampure shampoo for Earth Month and has an ongoing partnership with a non-profit that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing countries. KMS, which is owned by the huge Japanese manufacturer Kao, has three different varieties of solid shampoo in its permanent offering, and includes mindful water usage as one of its sustainability principles. L’Oreal Group-owned Kiehl’s has just launched Future Made Better Concentrated Facial Bars. These come in three varieties (for dry, distressed, or oily skin), use five times less water than the brand’s liquid cleansers, are more than 95 per cent biodegradable, and have minimal plastic waste packaging.
At the mass-market level, L’Oreal Group’s Garnier has a goal of making affordable and accessible beauty products through endeavours like switching to 100 per cent recyclable packaging by 2025—and, now, Whole Blends Shampoo Bars. “Each is made of 95 per cent plant-based ingredients, is 97 per cent biodegradable and provides up to two months of usage, four times longer than the average bottled shampoo,” says Valérie Gagnon, communications manager.
Garnier is also looking to its production processes to see if it can reduce water consumption in manufacturing, an area that isn’t much discussed. “We already have three ‘water-loop’ factories, where 100 per cent of industrial water use [for cleaning and cooling, for example] is re-treated, recycled or reused; we no longer need fresh water for these processes,” says Gagnon. That saves millions of litres of water every year.
Where can the waterless beauty trend end? Will all our moisturizers and serums eventually all comes as solids for us to mix at home? Probably not, says Jenkins, explaining that, in some circumstances, water is a key part of a formulation that has to be added in precise quantities. “We started with shower products where you can easily add water and there is definitely more space with wash-off formulas where you don’t have to consider mixing ingredients yourself, boiling things and measuring them.”
Ambrosen agrees. Still, she believes the waterless category will expand. “We almost have to give people two things, one with water and one without, and show them that the one without works better for them. Everything depends on quality, value for money and the whole experience. If we can continue to evolve that and expand on it then this part of the industry will absolutely continue to grow.” —Aileen Lalor
share:
Be the first to comment