Beauty products sustainable packaging

There’s more than just highlighting people’s natural beauty; it’s important to preserve the world too. That means you need to think about sustainability across your business and find areas to become a leader within your industry.

Customers want to see responsibility from companies. They’ll seek out ones with values that are important to them. Your brand is how the public sees you, and a positive impact can improve your relationship with people.

This guide discusses beauty products’ sustainable packaging ideas, which include:

• Seaweed
• Bamboo
• Beeswax
• Cornstarch
• Ceramic
• Compostable cardboard
• Reusable glass

A significant problem with unsustainable packaging is that much of it ends up in the sea, harming wildlife and washing up on shores. 

The material most associated with the dangers to sea life is plastic. It’s artificial and does not break down in the water.

But what if you could use something natural to the sea to put around your beauty products? Well, seaweed could be the answer. It’s perfect for single-use products like face masks, gels or liquid cosmetics.

But most importantly, its:

• Edible
• Biodegradable

If it ends up in a landfill or the sea, it wouldn’t be a problem. In addition, growing seaweed absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so it helps fight global warming.

Another natural beauty product’s sustainable packaging idea is bamboo. It’s a fantastic material that you can use in different forms. That could be for paper or wood packaging products.

Your boxes can be made with bamboo rather than traditional paper, as it’s more renewable than chopping down forests. Bamboo is grass, and it grows rapidly. It doesn’t take years like average trees.

Additionally, you can make reusable wooden tubs from the natural material that you can wash out and repurpose. That could be great for skin care products, for example, a bamboo tub inside a bamboo paper box.

Natural materials are a great way to add exciting elements to your packaging. One of these could be beeswax wrap. It’s a blend of beeswax, jojoba oil, tree resin and organic cotton.

You can use this material as more of a lightweight paper that you can reuse or recycle. It could be great to wrap soap and bath bombs, and it will likely smell good itself.

The only downside of the material is it requires you to farm bees, which means it’s not vegan. Vegan brands are likely to gain more popularity as more people seek businesses that cater to their values.

There’s a great material to use in your beauty products’ sustainable packaging to replace plastic. It’s the fermented sugars of cornstarch. Polylactic acid (PLA) shares properties with plastic but it is biodegradable.

The properties of the cornstarch materials include:

• UV resistant
• Oil resistant
• Food safe

That means you can use it for packaging things like sun cream or body butter. But it’s important to note it can also come in different forms like plastic.

You can put it through an injection mould to create the shapes you need, and you can use it for a film to create a protective layer for your beauty products. 

In addition, it also works to make bottles, so you could use it to hold vail varnish remover.

A great option could be refillable containers, and a perfect material for that is ceramic. You can mould it into the shape you want, and it can hold capsules of exfoliators or cleansers.

If you make something refillable, the customer has an incentive to return it to you. That could be a broader thing that you can encourage people to bring their containers back to you, and you’ll fill them for a discounted price.

An opportunity like that wouldn’t just be great for the environment, it would benefit your business. For example, a visit to your store can become a monthly routine for your audience, and you introduce a loyalty scheme.

One solution for beauty products’ sustainable packaging is compostable cardboard, alongside glue with a water base and ink that contains vegetables. 

That may sound like a strange combination, but it means you can use a sturdy material, and it will biodegrade over time.

Cardboard is a material that you can use across the beauty product spectrum for tubes, cartons, and boxes to hold cosmetics, body care, or toiletries.

You can label the packaging with veg-based ink with water-based glue and put your designs on the front. 100% biodegradable packaging is something you can brag about, so it’s likely to be perfect for helping you build your brand.

Packaging made from glass looks great, and you can recycle it, but there could be a better solution. Create packaging with more than one purpose, so once it does one thing, customers can use it for another.

Glass is the perfect material for that design philosophy because of its ability to look good. You can use it in various ways and decide on a new purpose to encourage people to try.

For example, perfume bottles often come in exciting shapes and sizes. What if you also create the ability to turn those bottles into solar-powered lights after their use, add a light in the box and make it easy to clean it out.

Once you find the material you’d like to use, you must find a supplier that can provide you with what you need. But it’s not an easy process to search for a new one. If they let you down, it could harm your operation.

To avoid issues when you take on a new supplier, vet potential ones. Your vetting process can include a check of their:

• Finances — are they likely to go bankrupt?
• Ethics — do they treat their workers well?
• Customers — are their current clients happy with their service.

What’s the use in creating sustainable packaging for your product if you don’t take that idea into the rest of your business. Plus, the hassle of mountains of paper should be enough to prompt a digital solution.

Countingup is a business account with built-in accounting software. It’s all ready for you through your phone. It can take care of things like automatically sorting your costs with its expense categorisation feature.

Get started for free.

For more tips, see:

• Beauty industry regulations to know about
• The best beauty industry networking events
• How to promote your beauty business