“Plastic-free” is the new clean beauty: a treatise

I recently came across a Threads post from @idea.soup that said:

“I don’t have any evidence for it but I have a weird feeling the anti-polyester movement is about to become a right-wing pipeline”

This was a lightbulb moment for me! 

I started doing scicomm in 2011 because I realised the “non-toxic” clean beauty movement could be a pipeline to anti-vax beliefs. The logic of their arguments were the same – they even demonise the same “toxic” substances (aluminium, formaldehyde).

The current anti-plastic trend is giving me a lot of the same vibes. There’s so much shared logic between anti-vax/clean beauty, and the messages I’ve been seeing from beauty brands and influencers demonising plastics (blanket “plastic-free” claims, fearmongering about microplastics…).

Interestingly, a lot of these people are also aware that clean beauty is pseudoscientific. But it seems like they aren’t aware of how a lot of the common debunking arguments actually apply to their plastic messaging too! This was also something I noticed with anti-vax and clean beauty, even with scientists – outlets like The Conversation has many clean beauty articles, and even the legendary Science-Based Medicine has fallen into clean beauty tropes before.

Note: I definitely think we’re using too much plastic, and there are concerns around the health impacts of microplastics. But overblowing the concerns, and switching to “eco” alternatives without looking at evidence, actually goes against the underlying goals of better human and environmental health… much like how removing “dirty” ingredients leads to misaligned outcomes.

Here are just some of the parallels I’ve seen between anti-plastic messaging, and clean beauty…

Related post: Clean Beauty Is Wrong and Won’t Give Us Safer Products

1. Appeal to nature fallacy

This is the blanket idea that “plastic = bad, natural = good” – and this extents to bioplastics as well, which are made from natural starting materials.

The reason this doesn’t work is because where something comes from doesn’t tell you about its effects on your health, or the environment – some of the most toxic substances are all-natural!

Related post: Natural vs. Chemical – Which Is Better?

Clean beauty examples:

• “Clean” lists don’t judge natural ingredients anywhere near as harshly as synthetic ones
• “If you can’t pronounce it, don’t put it on your face”

2. Ignoring basics of the relevant science

Like how clean beauty only makes sense if you ignore the fundamentals of toxicology (e.g. “the dose makes the poison”), blanket “plastic-free = better for the environment” claims ignore the fundamentals of sustainability science.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the scientific standard for quantifiably measuring environmental impact. This looks at ALL stages of a product’s life cycle:

1. Raw materials
2. Processing
3. Manufacture
4. Distribution (transport)
5. Consumer use
6. End-of-life (e.g. recycling, disposal, biodegradability)

Related post: Are plastics and petrochemical products bad for the environment?

For tons of products, end-of-life isn’t the biggest impact – but because most of us don’t have a great understanding of where our products come from, we tend to focus too much on end-of-life, which leads us to incorrectly judge which options are least environmentally impactful. 

Most plastic discussions are almost entirely about end-of-life (microplastics, recycling, landfills, how slowly it breaks down, trash islands…). People are almost entirely ignoring climate change, which is pretty much universally agreed upon by scientists as the biggest environmental threat.

Climate change is often where plastic packaging often wins. For example, one analysis found that switching from plastic to glass/paper/aluminium would require (on average) 3.6 times the material, 2.2 times more energy, and 2.7 times more carbon emissions.

Some reasons for plastic’s benefits:

1. Plastic packaging is usually lighter (less dense), meaning less energy to transport. Commercial transport is one of the areas where there hasn’t been much progress on switching from fossil fuels, so increased energy use here almost directly translates to increased carbon emissions (combustion of fossil fuels is what produces CO2).
2. Plastic packaging isn’t as easily damaged during transport as aluminium, glass and paper. This means:
   1. There’s less wasted product, so there’s more usable product for the same energy input (people don’t buy products with dented or broken packaging). 
   2. It doesn’t tend to need extra protective packaging. For example, Dieux Skin is a brand that tends to make a lot of unsubstantiated sustainability claims – it’s very questionable whether their aluminium sample tubes in paper boxes are less impactful than the standard thin plastic sachets. 
3. Plastic packaging also tends to protect products better from spoilage, which means less product wasted. 

Note that these benefits aren’t blanket statements. Plastic won’t be the best option overall, or even just for carbon emissions during transport every time. Just like blanket anti-plastic statements, any blanket pro-plastic statements are also feelings over evidence. Every case has to be assessed on its own merits, holistically – which requires quantifying impacts with an LCA (note: LCAs can also be used as a tool for greenwashing – this happens a lot with bioplastics!). 

Consuming less is always the more environmentally sustainable option. But if consuming less plastic means consuming more aluminium, glass, paper etc., the overall environmental impact often goes the other way – and a lot of beauty brands intentionally promote this while ignoring consumption. For example, Dieux Skin’s aluminium samples were promoted as a gift with purchases over $150 alongside Forever Eye Masks with a limited edition pattern, and they sell a limited edition not-very-practical tote made of transparent nylon and polyester, which many of their customers seem to believe is plastic-free.

(Sorry to any Dieux and Charlotte Palermino fans! Unfortunately, her and her brand are quite influential in spreading this sort of performative greenwashing and sciencewashing misinformation, and it tends to mislead even more informed consumers, because many people see her as a great advocate for science – see also the later section on identity-based motivated thinking.)

Clean beauty example: “free from nasties”, with no numbers to quantify dose or exposure

3. Citing studies with serious methodology issues

Unfortunately, a lot of microplastic studies have issues in the way they’re conducted that make their results pretty meaningless. It’s difficult to measure small amounts of any substance accurately, but microplastics have extra issues that make it even trickier – often the researchers have good intentions, but lack the expertise to run these experiments well. A lot of the common issues cause false positives or exaggerated numbers, which leads to exciting, headline-grabbing results.

For example, a commonly used quantification method is pyrolysis-GCMS (Py-GCMS). With this method, fats look the same as polyethylene unless you carefully correct for the error with other experiments. This means many researchers report finding more microplastics than there actually are (Py-GCMS was used in the study that claimed there was a spoon’s worth of microplastics in our brains).

Contamination is also a massive issue. Microplastics are everywhere, so lots of studies count microplastics from gloves, lab equipment etc. as coming from the sample.

Because these issues are pretty esoteric, there’s a lot of opportunities for microplastic misinformation to spread:

• if the researchers running experiments and writing papers don’t have specific expertise in analysing microplastics
• if peer reviewers and journal editors who should catch any issues before publication also don’t have specific expertise
• if the people communicating the results to the public (journalists, content creators, brands) take statements from peer-reviewed studies at face value

Clean beauty examples:

Related post: Benzene in your products, Part 2: The story of Valisure

4. Assuming presence means harm

Finding microplastics in a particular diseased tissue (artery plaque, brains from people with dementia) doesn’t mean it’s causing the disease. This goes back to correlation isn’t causation. It could be explained by:

• Inverse causation – for example, people with dementia have leakier blood brain barriers, which means everything gets into the brain more easily
• Unrelated correlation – for example, one lab might have more microplastics because they were using a particular brand of gloves, and they happened to be processing the diseased tissue

Clean beauty example: The infamous “parabens in breast tumours” study didn’t even measure paraben levels in normal tissue.

Related post: Should You Be Avoiding Parabens? The Science

5. Ignoring other reasons for using the material

Outside of just environmental impacts (which are often not considered – see point 2), there are often other benefits to using plastics that aren’t considered when people have decided to demonise plastic.

• Accessibility: Aluminium tubes and glass containers have a risk of injury, especially with limited mobility (see also injuries from glass/metal straws)
• Technological benefits: Plastic packaging is needed to protect some unstable products, it doesn’t dent or break like aluminium and glass, and some parts can’t be made with other materials

Clean beauty example: Parabens are powerful preservatives, which means a lower amount is needed to preserve products compared to other preservatives. This means parabens are often safer for people with sensitive skin and cause less allergic reactions. 

Related post: Clean Beauty Is Wrong and Won’t Give Us Safer Products

6. Science-washing using convenient myths and convenient experts

A lot of brands and influencers who claim to love science are posting content and selling products based on anti-plastic myths, and supporting it with cherrypicked evidence and experts.

It’s important to remember that claiming to follow science isn’t the same as actually following science. Like any other industry (fitness, wellness), many beauty brands science-wash to sell products, and a lot of supposed experts are happy to help.

Related post: Scientism or “Science-Washing” in Beauty

Sustainability claims without appropriate evidence have been deemed misleading and deceptive according to regulators in many major regions (see e.g. guides from the US FTC, UK CMA, and Australian ACCC). Brands who don’t want to mislead and deceive their customers should hire sustainability experts to vet proposed claims, and actually take their advice.

There’s also a pattern of brands and influencers not understanding relevant expertise, much like other types of science-washing:

• Assuming they or their chosen “expert” know how to interpret science papers, despite not having any science background 
• Assuming scientists from a different area can interpret sustainability data – sustainability is particularly complex and requires familiarity with multiple scientific disciplines

Clean beauty examples:

Other parallels

These are some of the big parallels, but there are lots of others as well! 

• overfocus on endocrine disruption (linked to regressive traditional gender role BS)
• assuming really diverse ingredients are all the same
• brands trying to justify pseudoscience with “but it speaks to our customers”
• dodgy animal studies (one sicko kept putting dogs and rats in polyester panties??!)

It’s also worth noting that a lot of the same experts fearmongering incorrectly about parabens and phthalates have now also jumped onto the microplastics bandwagon.

Again, we should probably aim to reduce plastic waste, like how we should reduce long term health impacts from beauty products. But blanket demonising of plastic without assessing the evidence properly leads to misplaced conservation – ultimately making things worse, just like removing “dirty” ingredients.

Watch out for motivated reasoning

Something I’ve noticed a lot more lately is identity-based motivated reasoning and confirmation bias – people only accepting evidence when it aligns with their political or other alignments. This has always been the case with a lot of anti-science movements like clean beauty, and I’m seeing this happen a lot with plastic. 

For example, mainstream media outlets like The Guardian are finally talking about microplastic measurement issues, and correcting their previous articles on the “brain microplastic” study. Choosing to delve into complex science and correcting their own misinformation is something rare and commendable!

But because The Guardian quoted a former Dow chemist, a lot of people are accusing them of being “bought by Big Plastic”. This is despite them also quoting two independent scientists working at public institutions who are saying the same thing, plus they referenced a response letter written by nine European scientists working at public institutions.

As my friend and cosmetic scientist Jen Novakovich‬ has said: “Discounting something solely based on funding source or affiliation is actually the opposite of critical thinking.” 

Looking at financial conflicts of interest is just one factor to take into account – you also have to do the much harder work of actually thinking about the arguments presented. The Guardian article is communicated in a way that non-experts can definitely grasp. 

All my posts on environmental misinformation draw heavily from the work of Jen Novakovich (The Eco Well) – she’s currently doing a PhD on the impacts of environmental misinformation! Her posts listed below are excellent starting points for learning about microplastics, packaging, and greenwashing and cosmetic misinformation in general.

References

Novakovich J. The Truth About Microplastic. Podcast Recap. The Eco Well. May 16, 2025. 

Novakovich J. “Sustainable” Packaging with Dan Coppins Podcast. The Eco Well. January 26, 2022.

Novakovich J, Coppins D. Sustainability in Packaging Fireside Chat. Presentation at: Sustainable Beauty E-Summit; March, 2022. 

Wong M. Are plastics and petrochemical products bad for the environment? Lab Muffin Beauty Science. June 3, 2023. 

Herbes C, Beuthner C, Ramme I. Consumer attitudes towards biobased packaging – A cross-cultural comparative study. J Clean Prod. 2018;194:203-218. DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.05.106.

Biodegradable Plastics Association. Denkstatt Report. 2011.

Novakovich J. Out for 2026: Beauty businesses claiming to be “eco-friendly” because of some buzz word, without any kind of valid proof. Instagram @theecowell. January 7, 2026.

Wong M. Plastic Spoon in Your Brain? YouTube @labmuffinbeautyscience. April 14, 2025.

Novakovich J. So… we don’t have a spoonful of microplastic in the brain? Instagram @theecowell. January 20, 2026.

Elias M. Should you be freaking out about microplastics? SBS News. November 6, 2025.

Carrington D. ‘A bombshell’: doubt cast on discovery of microplastics throughout human body. The Guardian. January 13, 2026.