Green beauty claims secure and transparent with blockchain technology says provenance
Last month, Dr Emma Meredith, director general of the UK’s Cosmetic, Toiletry and Perfumery Association (CTPA), said sustainable action and communication had become a “moral imperative” for the beauty and personal care industry by 2023. And with the EU Cosmetics Regulation (EC) no .1223/2009 and the EU REACH Regulation (EC) No. 1907/2006, both under revision, a lot of green change was in store for the industry.
Already, UK, EU and US governments have started to crack down on green claims, with the UK government’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Green Claims Code published in 2021 and the European Commission (EC) detailing plans under its European Green Deal for to protect consumers against greenwashing. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also updated its green framework for “guides”.
For beauty, this meant a year of transparency and real sustainable action started or continued and, most importantly, communicated.
“These different initiatives are going to vary in scope and pace, but what all three have in common is that brands need to prove all their claims with clear, relevant evidence that buyers can access,” said Phil Verey, MD of Sustainability Marketing. technical specialist Origin.
“You need to use user-friendly language that is specific and clear and use recognized industry certifications to avoid self-accreditation,” Verey told attendees at last year’s Sustainable Cosmetics Summit in Paris.
A “secure, immutable and transparent way to log claims”?
Founded in 2017, Provenance already worked with around 200 beauty brands across D2C sites and via retail partners in the EU, UK and US, offering digital verification on a range of green claims such as ‘recyclable packaging’ and ‘net zero’ and proof of third party certifications such as Cradle-to-Cradle, COSMOS and FSC certified, among others. The open source framework, developed in collaboration with third-party experts, now contained more than 80 different claims that brands could make across five pillars – climate, society, nature, waste and workers – which were then displayed via clickable “proof points” deeper information to consumers.
Verey said all of this was powered by blockchain, which was key. “The simplest way to think of blockchain is as a digital ledger that records transactions over time. And so, the way we use blockchain at Provenance is really just to provide a secure, immutable and transparent way to log claims, make sure that they is fact-checked, that they have the right evidence and make sure that those claims are then available to anyone who wants to see them, he said.
“…What we’re trying to do is build a future where buyers don’t just have to blindly trust what they’ve been told, but can verify the information themselves.”
Provenance research indicated that 80% of customers were unsure whether to trust sustainability claims, with less than 25% strongly agreeing that brands were transparent about the environmental and social impact of products. “There is a serious lack of trust from a shopper’s perspective [beauty] industry],” he said, and so using blockchain as a “transparency technology” to overcome this lack of trust would be key going forward.
Speaking at the same conference, Philippe Guguen, founder and CEO of French digital marketing agency Map Emulsion, agreed that blockchain was the way forward for industry trust because of the security it provided and the diversity of ownership that was important when dealing with valuable data.
Tracking and communicating the sustainability “journey”?
Importantly, he said the Provenance software enabled brands to tell a “dynamic story over time” – logging a sustainable claim and then adding a new claim a year on, for example at either the product or brand level. “Sustainability is a journey. Sometimes you have to start small and tell that journey over time.”
Verey said what the company was now exploring was the potential to offer ingredient-level transparency to the beauty industry. “We have the ability to do that from a technical perspective, and we’re just trying to figure out if the industry at large is ready to provide that level of transparency.”
Provenance was already used by more than one million shoppers per month, but the company’s goal was to reach one billion people, he said, with the goal of empowering people to choose products that matched their values.
