Going green doesn’t have to be grey for personal care brands
The personal care sector has always seemed pretty much proof against sustainable packaging. Sophisticated colours, metallics, textures, shapes and extravagant multi-layering have always seemed too integral to the magic to let go. Yet now Unilever has announced that it is to make refills available on its brands. It’s a bold move, but will consumers feel the greening of personal care makes their lives a little greyer?
Packaging in personal care sector has always had a very special role. The bottle, the tub or the jar makes the product precious, luxurious, an item of desire and an object of display. We may feel guilty about the excess, but it still gives us a sense of luxury and indulgence. And this, after all, is a big part of what personal care is all about. Then there are all the practicalities of preserving the product. Up until now, even many brands who have made their name for natural, organic, fair trade have found the packaging issue just too difficult to tackle.
But while the personal care sector has lagged behind, little by little, change is afoot. Ethical brands, like Body Shop and Toms of Maine, that were snapped up by major multinationals in the noughties act as testing grounds for global strategies.
Pioneers are setting the pace. Aveda’s holistic ‘cradle-to-cradle’ approach shows you can be both sustainable and desirable – at least at the more premium end of the spectrum. In the independent mainstream, Lush has long offered ‘naked’ products with no packaging at all, relying on the appeal of the ingredients to give the products their sense of indulgence.
Packaging manufacturers are creating new solutions with retainable dispensers and recyclable refills. What once seemed impossible is becoming not only achievable, but a commercially sound decision.
But will consumers go for greener beauty and personal care? The indications are that general irritation with packaging waste is spilling over from food where the spotlight has been up until now. They won’t compromise on convenience (only two per cent of customers took advantage of Body Shop’s refilling service in the 90s) and they won’t all buy into utilitarian (gifting is, after all, a huge part of the sector). But, as the imaginative green leaders show, sustainable can be seductive, too.
Times are changing and the pace can only accelerate. The recent purchase of NUDE by LVMH would indicate that the big luxury groups are taking greener beauty ever more seriously at the premium end. And with the big guns of Unilever driving it into the mainstream, it may only be a matter of time before the ‘tub for life’ becomes as everyday as the supermarket reusable carrier.
Image credit: Aveda (Dragonfly)
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