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On the front lines of improving the safety of beauty and personal care products, Alissa Sasso is in a unique position, as part of a global non-profit working with many oh-so-profitable skincare, cosmetics and personal brands. No one could do it better, as she navigates the challenges in a totally non-adversarial way. It’s a tough job and Alissa does it with sensitivity for all the stakeholders, which is the only way to make progress in such a vast undertaking. Don’t miss this important discussion on a topic that affects us all.
Hey everybody. I'm so excited to be here with Alissa Sasso. She's a manager at the Environmental Defense Fund. Welcome to Where Brains Meet Beauty®.
I think it can be a ton of information out there. It can be really overwhelming, but I really look for, this company sort of sharing their journey as well. Are they talking about some of the changes they've made over the years? Are they talking about things like, "Here's why we still use this ingredient that you might be wondering about?" I don't look at every single... It'll take me forever to look at every single bit of detail that they put out there on all these ingredients. But I do try to see how much are they sharing? Does it feel like it's authentic to the journey that they're on?
In other cases, natural ingredients would be safer and more sustainable. That's when I say those really long ingredient lists, what I do is I go to the website because usually, they have more real estate to describe what's in the product than on the packaging in a store. I like to look at, are they sharing what they're using these ingredients for? You'll see a lot of companies now share function information for ingredients. I don't think that that should be necessarily a turnoff for a shopper in a store. I think it comes back to how much information is the company sharing about those ingredients. I think it can also sometimes some of these ingredients are just in there because we recognize the name and maybe not because they're actually serving a function. So that's another... Yeah, there're quite a few trade-offs when you're looking at these types of products.
And so, I think that that perception is changing a bit, especially in the last few years. I think there's a lot more information being shared online, a lot more people looking for this information, but that when I started in my career, that was a perception that we were sort of tackling and trying to educate people about. And then I think the next steps are being able to look at things like, "Okay, here are the ingredients that are in products and here's what you can look for." Yeah. So, there're definitely challenges around it. I think greenwashing can be a big challenge in terms of trying to sort of share information with consumers, but people's understanding and perceptions are shifting and it's making it a lot easier to share this information.
And I think sort of owning that and I try to share my personal experiences around that as well because I think it can help. The more we talk about why we make certain decisions, the more it can sort of alleviate some of the shame about it. But I think just for us, we share as much information as possible so that people can make decisions and maybe they continue to make a decision to use a product that has potentially some hazardous ingredients in it. There's a reason probably that they're making that decision, but I want people to be able to make those decisions with as much information as they need.
Then I think one of the other pieces of this is I also want to be careful about, I think when it comes to a lot of thinking about what we can do as individuals, in terms of environmental issues, there are things we can do as individuals, but really a lot of these problems are institutional. And so I don't ever want to make any particular person feel like it's their responsibility or it's their fault, maybe that they are using some of these products or maybe aren't being as sustainable as possible. I think that making people feel empowered to make changes in their life is great, and I sort of always want to bring in the idea that we have an outdated regulatory system that oversees cosmetics in the US and that is not an individual problem, that is an institutional problem.
And when it comes to brands as well, I think they're also operating within the system where regulations aren't really set up to support them to make safer products. And there are things that they can be doing. There are places they can be looking for help, but in the same way, I think just committing to learning as much as they can and making changes as they learn this journey of continuous improvement, which is also in my life, that's sort of how I've approached it, thinking through, I didn't make... I didn't change everything I was using all at once. As I learned, I really set priorities for what changes I wanted to make, but also made some decisions of I'm going to keep using these products for a particular reason. So yeah, I fully understand the shame spiral that can come out of it, and that's why I do try to share as much as I can about what I do in my own life.
And so what came out of that work, I think was we really saw that there could be a bit of a lever in working with retailers in terms of then there being a ripple effect across the industry to address ingredients in products. And I do want to say one thing that's really important to EDF is that we don't take money from our corporate partners, they are our partners and our work is funded by individuals and foundations, and that enables us to really be in a partnership with these companies and not necessarily like a advisory or consulting relationship per se. Yeah, it ensures credibility to what we're doing, but also what they're working on. And so, that was sort of the start of our work on chemicals and not necessarily start, but the start of our work, really with retailers on chemicals and products.
And since then, this work has really evolved. After all these retailers put out their own policies, we started seeing things like clean logos and clean labels or clean shops pop up. And I think that those types of shops go hand in hand with the retailer chemical policies in terms of the policies are addressing all the products in their stores. And then when we think about these clean logos, they're really highlighting the best of the best. And so I think you start to see... It helps to sort of raise the floor for products across the store and gives an aspirational goal of here's what we want our products to look like. So, a lot of our work with retailers over the years has been supporting them in developing, implementing these policies, which includes things like looking at data, helping set goals, helping to set priorities.
And then when it comes to working with brands, that work also varies quite a bit. We've been involved in a lot of work where you're bringing together retailers, brands, ingredient manufacturers to try to tackle a joint problem that they're all dealing with. These are like pre-competitive collaborations. So, the work with brands really is about trying to help them understand what these retailer policies are about and try to improve what they're doing as well because the retailer sets the policy, but ultimately it's the brands who are taking action from that policy and they're the ones making the change. So, we work all along the supply chain to make improvements and to make change happen.
So, I think you sort of see, every company goes through this journey where maybe there's some stuff that they can do upfront, and then it's an iterative process. You make those changes, you come back and you say, "What's next?" And I think the more you dig in, the more progress you make. You start getting into places where it is a bit more challenging. I think in my work, what's exciting is that we've been working with Walmart for a long time, but we started working with Sephora a few years ago on their chemicals policy. And so, we're sort of able to start back at that place of like, "Let's set our priorities." Maybe some of the first things they're going to do are easy changes to make. And then we'll start thinking about what's next? Where are you really going to need to dig in and figure out what you want to do here?
And that's also why some of the pre-collaborative work that we do is exciting because all of these companies at some point are going to end up with some of the same challenges and that's going to be hard to make progress there unless you have retailers, brands, ingredient manufacturers, all talking about what's happening there. So, definitely it does... It can get harder the more progress you make. I like working with a lot of different companies because I come in at different places in their journey. And so sometimes we're making those early stages of setting priorities and making changes that are a bit easier to do. And then with other brands, we're really thinking about, "Now you're dealing with the hard stuff. What do you do next?"
Yeah. And that's a really hard area to tackle. I think that's why we've seen the conversation shift there more recently because that is sort of one of those areas where, or maybe you've made some of the early changes in your journey, packaging is going to be a bit harder because it's just not as easy for brands or retailers to know what's in the packaging that they're using. Yeah. So I think the more conversation we have in that space, we'll start on the journey to getting more transparency into what's in our packaging.