It’s Plastic Free Beauty Day – here’s why it’s never been more important

We were doing so well. We’d banned microbeads and plastic straws, replaced single use carrier bags with totes and invested in our reusable cups to collect our morning coffee. But due to the unprecedented circumstances of the Coronavirus pandemic, our use of single use plastics shot right back up.

Although much of this was a necessary step in fighting the spread of the virus, the throw-away attitude we took to face masks and lateral flow test is not something we should carry over into the rest of our everyday lives. It remains as important as ever: single use plastics should still be avoided for the sake of our planet and our future.

One area where we can considerably cut back on plastic consumption is with our beauty products. The beauty industry first came under fire for its use of microbeads – some products contained over 300,000 microbeads – per tube. Luckily, as of January 2019, a manufacturing ban by British law meant that microbeads are no longer found in beauty and personal care products. There’s also the problem of face wipes and wet wipes. According to Mintel, 47% of us regularly use them and many varieties are virtually indestructible. All in all, a shocking 13 million tonnes of plastic are dumped in the world’s oceans every year, and in 2017, the UN declared the global ocean plastic pollution a ‘planetary crisis’.

It’s for this precise reason that in 2019, Yolanda Cooper, founder of We Are Paradoxx, founded Plastic Free Beauty Day, which takes place every year on June 17th, as a way to unite the industry in the fight against pollution and challenge the over-dependence of plastic by beauty brands. To support Plastic Free Beauty Day  we’ve listed some of our favourite plastic-free beauty brands including We Are Paradoxx, KanKan, Circla and Vanderohe  below.