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Transparency is a key concern for beauty buyers, which is why Clarins has created a new system, guaranteed by the blockchain

BY AILEEN LALOR

If you buy fancy food these days it feels like you can get pretty much every piece of information about how it’s produced—who the farmer was, their birth weight and their opinion on Ted Lasso. And that’s broadly a good thing. We want assurances that what we eat hasn’t been grown using GMOs, or that forests haven’t been cut down to make space for our steel-cut oats.

We’d like the same for our beauty regimes, given that it’s a multibillion-dollar industry that uses plant-derived ingredients in virtually every type of product. Enter French brand Clarins, which has a herbarium made of more than 200 plants. “Traceability is a global concern for consumers wanting more transparent data—many fields including food, fashion and skincare are concerned by this need,” says Marie-Hélène Lair, Clarins’ responsible innovation director. “Ninety per cent of clients consider that a brand’s transparency plays an important role in the decision to purchase a product or not.”