If I see a product out there that says it’s ewg-verified. I don’t even worry what’s in it,” says Baylee Relf, Master Esthetician and founder of DIME, a Utah-based beauty company. Now Relf has the distinction of having her own products verified by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C. non-profit that advocates for transparency, clean ingredients and sustainability in personal care products.
“It requires a lot of testing and new transparency changes,” says Jocelyn Lyle, EWG’s Executive Vice President of Mission and Partnerships on verified status. “It can sometimes take a brand twelve months to go through the program. You have to change your packaging for full disclosure.” The EWG also flags ingredients it deems potentially unsafe or irritants so consumers looking for “clean” beauty products have a place to start.
At a panel at The Lounge at La Caille, Relf and Lyle, along with Muffy Clince of Ulta Beauty, addressed some of the misconceptions about the clean beauty trend. Clean does not necessarily mean natural. DIME, for instance, uses both natural and synthetic ingredients. “The marriage of the two is what provides results,” says Relf. “Clean products should be efficacious. There are a lot of really harsh products out there that will show you results quickly, but it’s at an unhealthy pace for your skin. Where clean products are going to show you a little more gradual results, it’s such a much healthier pace for your skin.”
“A lot of advice we hear is ‘just go fragrance-free,’” says Lyle. “But that is not EWG’s point of view. There are clean and safe fragrances, and there are fragrances out there that are fully transparent.” But it’s more rare. “The dirty little secret of the fragrance industry is it’s really hard to find a fragrance house that will even tell the brand what’s in it.”
In addition to the lack of transparency, Relf started to notice that perfume can cause a lot of issues for people, like skin irritation and headaches. “Our formulators worked really hard to create a low-allergenic profile fragrance.” The result is DIME’s Seven Summers perfume, now EWG-verified.
“I would say, brands going to this level of certification and making this effort to have a clean fragrance formula, it’s still very unique,” says Clince.
Unique, perhaps, because the founders of DIME seem to have a particular obsession with ingredients. Co-founder and Bayley’s husband Ryan says, “Our pillow talk is about ingredients.”
