When most people hear the phrase "environmental justice," they picture factories pumping pollution into low-income neighborhoods, lead pipes running through communities of color, or industrial waste sites placed squarely in the backyards of people who have spent decades organizing, fighting, and demanding better — often without the systemic support they deserved. All of that is real. All of that matters. But there's another layer of the environmental justice conversation that doesn't get nearly as much attention — one that lives in your bathroom cabinet, your gym bag, and on drugstore shelves across the country.

What you put on your skin is an environmental justice issue. And if that sentence surprises you, you're exactly who this article is for.

The Regulation Gap Nobody Talks About

Here's a number worth sitting with: the European Union has banned over 2,400 chemicals from use in personal care and cosmetic products. The United States FDA? Eleven.

Not eleven hundred. Eleven. As in fewer than a dozen. That's how many ingredients have been outright banned from cosmetics at the federal level since the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was signed in 1938 — a law that has gone essentially unchanged for nearly 90 years. While the EU operates under a precautionary principle — restrict it if there's suspected risk — the US requires definitive proof of human harm before acting. And proving definitive harm takes decades of studies, legal battles, and lobbying fights that the average consumer has no say in.

What that means in practical terms: products linked to cancer, hormone disruption, and reproductive harm are perfectly legal to sell in the United States right now. Ingredients that any European pharmacy would turn away are sitting in your local drugstore. The FDA doesn't even require pre-market safety testing for cosmetics before they hit shelves. Companies can use virtually any ingredient as long as it isn't on the very short list of things explicitly prohibited.

Some states are stepping up. California, Colorado, Vermont, Oregon, and Washington have all passed laws banning certain toxic chemicals from personal care products — including PFAS (the "forever chemicals"), formaldehyde-releasing preservatives, and certain phthalates. About 20 states total have passed some form of cosmetic safety legislation. But for the other 30? Federal law remains the floor, and that floor is remarkably low.

That's a problem for everyone. But it's not a problem that affects everyone equally.

Who Bears the Burden

Here's where the environmental justice piece becomes impossible to ignore.

Research published in peer-reviewed journals and conducted by institutions including Columbia University, EWG, and the National Institutes of Health has consistently found that communities of color — particularly Black women, but also Latina women, Asian American communities, and low-income communities broadly — are exposed to significantly higher levels of toxic chemicals through personal care products than their white counterparts. This isn't because of individual choices alone. It's because of what products are being marketed to specific communities, and what those products contain.

Non-Hispanic Black women purchase nine times more ethnic hair and beauty products than other racial groups, according to a peer-reviewed study published in BMC Public Health. And the products marketed to them contain demonstrably higher levels of hazardous ingredients. A comprehensive analysis by EWG of over 4,000 personal care products marketed to Black women found that only 21 percent rated as low hazard in the Skin Deep cosmetics database — compared to a significantly higher percentage of the general market. Black women were nearly twice as likely as white women to use hair products with high hazard scores.

Research scientist Dr. Robin Dodson found that levels of methyl paraben — a common preservative linked to endocrine disruption — were twice as high in the bodies of Non-Hispanic Black women compared to Non-Hispanic White women. The disparity wasn't explained by income or education level. It was explained by product use patterns shaped by racialized beauty norms — the long-standing cultural and workplace pressures that push people of color toward products designed to alter or conform their natural appearance to Eurocentric standards.

And those chemical exposures have documented consequences. A 2022 study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute — one of the largest of its kind — found that women who used chemical hair straightening products frequently were more than twice as likely to develop uterine cancer than women who had never used them. Multiple other studies, including the Women's Circle of Health Study and the Sister Study, have reported associations between use of hair dyes and relaxers and increased risk of breast cancer, particularly among Black women. The Black Women's Health Study — a longitudinal study of nearly 60,000 women — found that long-term heavy use of lye-containing hair relaxers was associated with elevated risk of uterine cancer among postmenopausal women.

The National Cancer Institute has noted that Black women are already twice as likely to develop aggressive subtypes of uterine cancer and are nearly twice as likely to die from it than non-Black women. Adding a disproportionate toxic exposure burden on top of existing systemic health disparities isn't just unfair. It's a public health crisis with a paper trail.

Dr. Bhavna Shamasunder, assistant professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College, put it directly: for people who already live in neighborhoods with higher environmental pollution loads, the chemicals in beauty products add to an already compounded burden. You're not just dealing with one source of exposure. You're dealing with a cumulative pile-up that regulators are not designed to measure or address.

The "Clean Beauty" Problem

So the clean beauty movement is the answer, right? Just switch to "natural" products and you're protected.

Not quite.

Here's the part that matters for conscious consumers: in the United States, terms like "clean," "natural," "non-toxic," and even "organic" are not legally defined for personal care products. Any brand can print those words on its packaging without meeting a single regulated standard. The FDA has no requirement that these claims be verified. That means the "clean" moisturizer at a boutique wellness shop could contain the same concerning ingredients as the one at the dollar store — and neither label is required to tell you the whole truth.

This creates a market problem that compounds the justice problem. Safer products, when they genuinely exist, tend to be more expensive and harder to find in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color — a geographic disparity that mirrors other patterns of systemic inequality, from redlining to the placement of waste facilities. A Harvard study looking at stores in Boston found that shops in neighborhoods with higher percentages of residents of color were more likely to sell personal care products with higher hazard scores. Geographic access to safer options isn't evenly distributed. And the time required to decode an ingredient list — cross-referencing chemicals against databases like the EWG's Skin Deep — is a luxury that not everyone has.

The burden, in other words, keeps landing on the people with the least systemic protection.

Why This Is a Values Issue — and a Consumer Power Issue

We built Bearded Coast because we believe what goes on your body should be something you can feel good about — and something that doesn't require a chemistry degree to navigate. We use organic, plant-based ingredients. We publish what's in our products. That's not marketing language. That's a deliberate choice rooted in the belief that transparency isn't optional.

But we also believe that individual consumer choices, while meaningful, are not a substitute for systemic change. Choosing better products is something you have the power to do — and we think you should. But the responsibility for what ends up in products should not fall entirely on individuals who have to read ingredient lists like they're preparing for a chemistry exam. The industry needs to be held to a higher standard. Full stop.

What you can do right now:

Read your labels — and look past the marketing. "Natural" means nothing without certification. Look for USDA Organic (for products that meet food-grade standards), EWG Verified, COSMOS Organic, or NSF/ANSI 305 certification. These are actual standards with teeth — not slogans someone printed because it looked good on a label.

Use the EWG Skin Deep database. It rates personal care products based on ingredient hazard scores and is one of the most useful tools out there for cutting through the noise. The app lets you scan products in-store, which means you can do your research at the shelf instead of at home, three days later, after you've already bought something.

Support brands that are transparent about formulation. If a company won't tell you what's in their products — that's a signal. We list every ingredient in ours because we think you have a right to know what you're putting on your skin. That should be the baseline, not the exception.

Support policy change. Several states have passed cosmetic safety laws in recent years. Bills like the Beauty Justice Act in New York and expanded chemical bans in California signal that the legislative landscape is starting to shift — and much of that progress has been driven by community-led organizations like WE ACT for Environmental Justice and the Black Beauty Justice Project, who have been doing this work long before it became a mainstream conversation. Paying attention to these efforts — and to the brands that advocate for stronger regulation rather than fighting it — matters more than most people realize.

The Connection Is Right There

Environmental justice isn't just about what's in the air or the water — though it's absolutely about those things too. It's about the cumulative, compounding ways that pollution and toxicity are distributed unequally across communities based on race, income, and power. The beauty industry is one more arena where that distribution is playing out, with real health consequences, driven by systemic forces and inadequate regulation.

When you pull plastic out of the ocean — like we do, in partnership with 4ocean — you're addressing one piece of the environmental harm puzzle. When you choose products made with organic ingredients, formulated with transparency, and sold by a company that isn't hiding anything behind a label, you're addressing another. These choices are connected. The health of your body and the health of the planet live in the same ecosystem.

What you put on your skin matters. And who gets protected — or not — by the laws governing those products matters just as much.

Bold beards. Clean ingredients. Eyes open.

Curious about what's actually in your Bearded Coast products? Head to our ingredients page — every single one is listed, defined, and there for you to evaluate. That's the way it should be.