As we celebrate one year of Doré, one of the things we are most proud of is our commitment to transparency when it comes to our formulations and our packaging.
When we set out to create this brand, we knew it was essential that the trust we built with our community over the 15+ years of the blog extended into how we developed our products. We’re not chemists or sustainability experts, but luckily after more than 15 years, we knew a few people that were.
We’ve shared before the challenges of defining clean beauty and how it can mean so many different things, so the first thing we did when creating our formulation charter - the guidelines our lab partner must follow in creating our products - we worked with an expert cosmetic chemist who is a pioneer in clean beauty to analyze the different third party certifications that could help us shape our charter and hold us accountable to rigorous standards. This was how we came to choose EWG Verified as our clean standard for formulating our products.
It was a challenge for our lab as they had never formulated to such a strict standard before - EWG goes beyond EU Cosmetic standards, and differs from a focus on natural ingredients that’s more commonly found in the French clean beauty world. After a lot of trial and error, we landed on formulations that met EWG Verified and we applied for the certification. All of our products can now be found in EWG’s Skin Deep Database where you can learn more about all of their ingredients.
When it came to packaging, there are so many decisions that go into each component. We knew that while glass is often a better material to use than plastic, it is often more carbon intensive to produce, heavier to ship again impacting carbon emissions and often requires secondary packaging for protection especially when stocked on store shelves. We wanted to reduce our waste and carbon footprint as much as possible by eliminating secondary packaging and carbon emissions in the packaging manufacturing process. Although we use post consumer recycled plastic in our packaging, just using recycled plastic is often not enough. That is why we chose to certify Plastic Neutral through rePurpose Global, offsetting all plastic being used in our packaging regardless of whether it’s recycled content or not. Additionally, we’ve begun collaborating with Bluebird Climate so that we can use data to help us make decisions around improving our footprint of our current packaging, and developing the best packaging possible for the environment as we work on new products.
We’re far from perfect, but by providing honest insight into how we’re building Doré, and encouraging you to ultimately use less, but better products in your routine, we’re hoping to continue to make progress towards building a better brand for ourselves and our planet.
