EP230. Human rights abuses in cosmetics

A news story hit the headlines earlier in 2024, which made me sit up and pay attention. So the BBC undertook an investigation into perfume supply chains and they discovered that jasmine used by at least two of the big fragrance houses, Givaudin and Fermonic, who supply Lancome and Air in Beauty, owned in turn by l' Oreal and Estee Lauder, and discovered that the flowers for their Egyptian jasmine oil in some cases were being picked by children. This story got picked up all over the world and it shone a very stark light on the lack of transparency in where personal care ingredients come from. Now, I don't think any of us want to buy cosmetics or perfumes if they were made through the labour of young children or in fact any illegal or exploitative labor practices. But these human rights abuses do inevitably happen in most industries, including the beauty industry, and many of them may never come to light, particularly if the industry remains so very secretive. And you heard about this on last week's podcast when I interviewed Ashley Posner of Lucent Labs, who talked about the way that she's taking on the big fragrance houses by trying to bring transparency and traceability to fragrance. So in today's short podcast opinion, I want to report on a couple of these news stories that have come out this year and I believe that this will further cement the importance of the work that Ashley and other champions of transparency like her are undertaking. So buckle up for some shocking news reports. Hi, it's Lorraine Dallmeyer, chartered environmentalist, biologist and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversations podcast and these are my green Beauty opinions in which I challenge the beauty industry's terrible track record on sustainability and share my thoughts on how we can make the beauty sector a better and more sustainable place. If you want to be the first to hear all of my latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to this podcast. So if you haven't watched it yet, I do Recommend Catching the BBC's investigation on child labor in Egyptian jasmine harvesting. It's called Perfumes Dark Secret and you can catch it on YouTube as well. I watched the whole thing and it was actually really quite shocking. So the researchers and film crew went to Egypt in the summer of 2023 and when they were there, they filmed families picking jasmine flowers for the perfume. Now, as you might know, jasmine blooms at night, so pickers get up in the middle of the night to head out into the fields, which seem to be full of mosquitoes in the documentary. And when they're There they turn on a torch, if they have one, and they pick jasmine flowers for hours on end. So one woman who they followed for the investigation took her children with her, who ranged in age between 5 and 15 years old. And I found that quite hard to watch. I have two children myself and I can't imagine having to wake them up at 3 o' clock in the morning to spend four or five hours picking, picking jasmine flowers. And between them, they managed to fill a bucket of jasmine flowers which amounted to about one kilogram in weight. So in the documentary, they got paid $1.50 for that whole kilogram of jasmine flowers. That's a lot of flowers. And as the narrator pointed out, Egypt has been hit by inflation and that really isn't enough to easily feed a family. So the main point really is that those jasmine flowers are then used to make really expensive perfumes, you know the ones I mean, and that money doesn't trickle down to the people who pick the ingredients and who struggle to make ends meet. But perfume is an enormous billion dollar industry, and According to the BBC's documentary, 3,000 new fragrances were launched in 2022 alone. That is an eye watering amount of perfume. So there's clearly something broken here. Now, do I think that these big companies are deliberately sending children into fields at night to pick jasmine flowers for perfume? No, of course I don't. And of course all the companies involved rightly said that they would immediately address these issues and investigate them, because let's face it, any sane human being working in any company of any size should be horrified to know that their products and services contribute to child labor. But because this industry is so opaque and so very secretive and so incredibly profit driven, you end up in a situation where pickers are simply not seeing any of the profits from the expensive perfumes that we buy or gift, and where rock bottom prices to the people harvesting raw ingredients for cosmetics can then lead to human rights abuses. So hot on the heels of that media splash came the announcement that carnauba wax was also leading to exploitation of workers in Brazil. So again, another BBC report published in Portuguese in June of this year followed the investigation by the Brazilian Ministry of Labour, who looked into working conditions in the carnauba wax industry. So if you didn't know, this is a wax used in food as well as cosmetics, and it comes from palm plantations where workers basically cut the fronds manually from the tops of palm trees with a scythe and they have to wear gloves to do this because the leaves are so sharp and the leaves then release the scales that contain the wax. So the investigation by the Brazilian Ministry of Labor discovered what they termed slave like working conditions, which included a failure to register workers, failure to provide adequate work clothing, lack of drinking water, unsafe electricity supply, illegal hiring of workers, precarious accommodation and unsanitary conditions. And of course, rather unfortunately, the article pointed right back to l' Oreal again who state that they are committed to ethical sourcing and have an audit program with their suppliers to ensure due diligence. And you know, I think the problem is that once your company is so big that it caters for most of planet Earth, you have to rely on everyone to adhere to your policies. And ultimately, when there is so much money to be made, many companies will just claim whatever it takes to get the contracts to win the work. As the BBC article concluded, and this is quite hard hitting, it said, this is what we call willful blindness. It's comfortable for the industry not to see the problems because it doesn't need to act to invest and to pay. So an opaque industry is inherently riddled with difficulties. I've just shared just two news stories that came out in 2024, but my hunch, which I'm guessing may also be your hunch, is that these are just two of the many stories that could have got covered. The daily reality is undoubtedly bigger and the only way that the cosmetics industry will change this is through transparency, traceability and a genuine desire to do the right thing. This industry has created a monster and now they need to figure out how to put that monster back in its cage. So my challenge to you for this week is to buy from brands that can genuinely demonstrate the traceability and transparency of their ingredients. This is a really tough one. I keep thinking about some of the beauty brand founders I've interviewed on my podcast who have dedicated their entire careers to getting to know their ingredients and their suppliers. There are some great companies out there doing great work and I recommend you support them over everyone else. Thank you for listening to my Green Beauty opinions. Remember to visit the Formula botanica website@formulabotanica.com to try it off. Free online formulation course and if you haven't subscribed yet to the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, please make sure you do so now in your favorite podcast app. Leave me a five star review if you enjoy the conversations I host and I'll be back soon with my next episode.