Day 4 of the Fast Company Festival of Innovation featured actress and entrepreneur Michelle Pfeiffer’s talk on how beauty products can be sustainable. Her line of fragrance is called Henry Rose, and she spent a decade creating a line of luxury fragrances with fully transparent ingredients that are safe, sustainable, non toxic, and humanely sourced. She now has seven fragrances in the line.
She started thinking about the line when her children were born, and she noticed that many products did not contain full ingredient lists. She examined the “Skin Deep” database where she found she could check ingredients of products she was using and look for alternatives. She noted that many fragrances contributed to high toxicity rates, given the total lack of transparency in reporting about fragrance ingredients—a brand can say that one of their ingredients is ‘fragrance’ and no additional information about the make up of the fragrance needs to be provided.
No major beauty company would do a partnership with her. She put the product on hold for several years, and then saw that there was more of an interest in ingredient transparency for fragrances. She met with a company called IFF, which introduced her to a group called Cradle to Cradle, which certifies products based on lifecycle assessment.
Most fragrances have over 3000 ingredients they can choose from. For Pfeiffer’s products, she could only choose from about 250 because she was only sourcing fragrances with transparent ingredient lists.Since the brand has launched, it has won an Allure Best of Beauty award along with multiple other awards.
She prefers the term ‘safe beauty’ to ‘clean beauty’ or ‘natural beauty’ as there is no real standard for ‘clean’ or ‘natural’. Safe, to her, makes a specific promise—the brand is not dangerous. It takes away a worry from people’s lives. People shouldn’t have to choose quality over safety.
She’s the founder of the brand, but she’s not the face of the brand. She wanted the brand to be credible on its own, without a ‘celebrity endorsement.’ She promotes the brand on Instagram. She tries to be authentic true to herself and her values, and realizes that any content that she posts could be construed as political content (e.g. ‘wear a mask’). The posts are really pretty:
Learn more about Henry Rose here!
