Blue Beauty: How to Make Your Routine Ocean-Friendly

Now that you’ve made the switch to clean beauty and started a toxin-free lifestyle, you may be thinking: what else can I do to make my beauty routine as ethical as possible? There are many areas of the beauty industry that could use some improvement in areas like waste, litter and pollution, just to name a few.

One of the areas that suffers greatly at the hands of the beauty industry is the world’s oceans. From coral reef bleaching due to harmful ingredients in summer skincare and sunscreen to pollution caused by the almost 120 million units of cosmetics packaging per year, the oceans and animals that live in them are put at risk. 

So what can you do about it? Though you can’t un-bleach the coral reefs or clean up all the trash in the oceans, everyone is able to make small, sustainable steps to make their beauty routines more ocean-friendly through adopting blue beauty practices.

Blue beauty is a sustainable movement in the beauty community that aims to reduce their overall impact on the world’s oceans. This includes using reusable packaging, limiting the usage of plastic, being mindful of harmful ingredients as well as supporting brands who prioritize limiting their impact on the environment — especially the oceans. 

For the everyday beauty consumer, implementing blue beauty into your routine requires less work than you may think. You don’t need to throw away every item packaged in single-use plastic, but rather find a sustainable way to dispose of or reuse them, and ideally swap for cleaner, reusable or recyclable materials going forward. This could look like washing your hair with shampoo and conditioner bars instead of bottles, and using refillable beauty products rather than single use.

Blue beauty also requires being a bit more thorough in your research of a beauty company before purchasing from it. While we’ve all been tempted by new releases at Ulta or Sephora and purchased without research or thinking much about it, blue beauty wants consumers to support ethical, environmentally-friendly companies who do what they can to reduce their impact on the oceans.

This includes brands like Lush, who encourages reusing or recycling their containers with discounts and free products to those that bring their packaging back in; or COOLA, that partners with a coral reef foundation to prevent coral reef bleaching; or Kevin Murphy Hair, who uses reclaimed ocean plastic in their packaging.

Implementing blue beauty into your routine doesn’t require an overhaul of your existing practices — it just asks you to be a bit more mindful of what you consume in the beauty industry. To learn more about how to implement blue beauty into your routine, check out this visual from FragranceX!