Transparency in the Beauty Industry

Today’s consumer wants brands to be transparent, especially in the beauty industry. Well and Good even went so far as to call it a trend, noting that 51% of consumers would switch to a product if they could better understand what was in it. According to a new study conducted by the Fashion Institute of Technology, this need for transparency is not going away any time soon. Students from the 2018 Cosmetic and Fragrance Marketing and Management graduate program surveyed 1,800 participants in the hopes of finding out more about today’s consumer. According to their findings:

• 72% of respondents would prefer a brand to explain what their product ingredients do
• 42% do not think they get enough information from brands regarding ingredient safety
• 60% want to know the source of ingredients
• 90% believe natural products are better for them

These statistics were found as part of the 2018 Marketing and Management capstone presentation and based on the culmination of a semester’s worth of work and research. Overall, one thing was clear: “Lack of clear information is impeding the path to purchase,” Lindsay Powell Schwartz, a Capstone leader, said during the students’ presentation.

Because of this lack of information, consumers are turning to all-natural products. However, not all brands can or will make the clean-beauty switch. For those brands, the students proposed a solution: the clearBEAUTY app. A visual app, clearBEAUTY would allow users to take a picture of a product and see reviews, ingredient info, side effects, and Environmental Working Group hazard score, making it easy for brands to be completely transparent.

According to Schwartz, “Beauty industry leaders must work together, whether partners or competitors, to answer the consumer demand for transparency in order to gain the trust of their collective consumers or run the risk of irrelevancy.”

For more info, head over to Fashionista and GCI Mag.

This article first appeared on BeautyMatter.