The Hidden Costs of Beauty: How People and the Planet Pay The Price

Photography by Jeffrey Mullins/Salonviornment

By Hannah Craik,

Founder of Salonviroment

Labor rights, social justice, and environmentalism are described as the 3 Pillars of Sustainability. These 3 Pillars are important for all industries because they create a framework that balances profit with responsibility. Together, they act as a tripod. If one leg is weak, the whole system collapses. Which is why the conversation of environmentalism, social justice, and labor rights are important to discuss in the beauty and salon industry now - because these pillars aren’t always strong, but need to be to create a stable industry, otherwise there will always be a hidden cost to beauty.

We started Salonvironment because we noticed a lack of sustainable initiatives for beauty professionals and wanted to grow education surrounding it, but we quickly realized that it was a deeper problem than we realized. The low accessibility to easy solutions, the unspoken systematic racism, and the lack of accountability from the big players in the field.

The Hidden Costs of Beauty

Most regulation change is usually quite slow and takes armies of people that believe in the mission - but the fight can also be quiet, which makes it harder for the average person to get involved. Regulation for beauty products are a part of this, there's only been a handful of federal policies that target the beauty and salon industry. MoCRA, for example, is one of the largest federal changes we've seen for cosmetics for quite sometime in the 80 years since the FDA was established.

We have come a long way since 1938 with federal labeling regulations and Microbead-Free rulings. States have even taken their own initiatives such as Washington being the first state to ban formaldehyde-releasing chemicals in cosmetics and California’s Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act, with states such as New York and Michigan looking to pass similar legislation.

Beauty services can be very “fume-y,” which is where a lot of health issues can come into play. Combining multiple services that have higher health risks due to the products, possibly not well-ventilated spaces or utilizing an efficient air purifier, and having salon professionals be working in the public so they have a higher risk of getting sick otherwise (and having lower immunity because of that), hairstylists are more prone to long term illnesses. 

Unfortunately, hairstylists do not get paid if they do not work. Beauty professionals do not usually have protections against getting fired if they’ve missed too much work nor do they have the proper insurance that covers these illnesses, finding themselves having to quit their career. Without further protections for beauty professionals, this will continue to be a normal part of the industry. 

Additionally, systematic racism can play a part in this too as seen with multiple lawsuits over hair straightening products, smoothing treatments, and other products that are aimed primarily for the black community. While there are demands for changing these products, there needs to be more voices from every community (who can also be affected by these ingredients in smaller amounts). Another layer to this is society’s hair standards for the BIPOC community - where “professional” often means straightened hair, while braids, locs, and natural textures are discouraged despite the long-term damage straightening can cause. 

See where this is a vicious cycle? Thankfully there are federal policies in place such as The CROWN ACT to help protect individuals in the workplace or schools as well as policy introductions such as the Safer Beauty Bill Package, where one of the bills specifically targets protections for hairdressers and vulnerable communities. However, it doesn’t just stop at affecting people; it continues on to affect the earth in various ways. 

How People and the Planet Pay The Price

One way the industry is harmful environmentally is: disposing of excess/expired shampoo, hair color, body wash, or other beauty products by flushing it down the drain or throwing it in the trash. Those items should be disposed of as hazardous waste, but that’s not a widespread discussion and accessibility to these programs aren’t equal across the country. Corporations have regulations they have to follow to dispose of these products and third-party companies that are created specifically for that purpose, but beauty pros and individuals only have access to city-funded programs or a few small companies to choose from. The problem with those is they usually don’t accept these items from “small businesses” or they can be out of their price range, so these chemicals just end up in water ways or potentially leaching from landfills (if not well maintained).

Another way the environment is affected by the beauty industry is all over the waste that comes with it. The global cosmetics industry creates around 120 billion units of packaging alone and salons create around 877lbs of waste per minute, most of this waste being single-use and considered “unrecyclable” (which just means it needs someone to create an end market for it to be able to be recycled).

Waste has incredible opportunities that have yet to be explored. A huge part of our work at Salonvironment is bringing accessible, sustainable solutions to the beauty industry and finding creative, innovative waste diversion for salon waste. Yes, the overwhelming amount of waste created should be slowed at the source from corporations, but there still needs to be solutions for waste diversion.

Last summer, we successfully kept ~80 beauty products out of landfills and 52 beauty tools from going to landfill through our Product Swaps and Donation Collection.

Another example of creative waste solutions was our experimentation in the summer of 2022, when we tried using salon waste in our garden to see if anything had the ability to make it stronger. For this I used bleach tubs, color tube packaging, and hair clippings.

There are other incredible examples that we see beauty waste play a role in innovative solutions such as recyclable beauty pumps, building materials, soap dishes, and more. By creating these solutions, we can create a stronger industry by keeping items out of landfills, cut the use of natural resources, and grow local economies and strengthen communities.

With that said, we can build a stronger beauty industry by addressing labor rights, social justice, and environmental concerns. But we can’t do it alone - we need individual and industry involvement through policy reform, community engagement, protections for professionals, creatives, innovators, and you to make a difference.