Because the notion of “clean” has solidified its place in mainstream beauty marketing — July 15 is officially “National Clean Beauty Day” — the backlash against it’s becoming louder, too.

For one, content creators — influencers, young brand owners and skincare experts with a loyal following online — have been questioning the meaning of the term.

“‘Clean’ means absolutely nothing,” said Dr. Shereene Idriss in a press release to WWD. (The Latest York City-based dermatologist — who is commonly dismantling misinformation in beauty on social media through her conversational #Pillowtalkderm sessions — had lost her voice, mockingly, and was unable to speak on the phone.)

“In case you ever tried to take a step back to seek out a regulated, uniform, data-backed and cohesive definition of what ‘clean beauty’ means, you’d quickly realize that it doesn’t exist,” she went on. “The definition varies from brand to brand, retailer to retailer, ‘expert’ to ‘expert,’ and subsequently it’s merely a subjective opinion imposed on consumers as ‘facts.’ ‘Facts’ that not get questioned because they’re perpetually repeated, eventually turning into an indoctrination of sort. ‘Facts’ delivered to the patron through a veil of fear, with the intention to coerce the patron to purchase into ‘their’ narrative.”

The critique began emerging pre-pandemic but has gained traction.

“Clean beauty is merely a marketing tactic to sell you products,” proclaimed dermatologist Dr. Andrea Suarez, often known as Dr. Dray to her 1.26 million YouTube subscribers, in a video posted in January of last 12 months. The eye-grabbing clip is titled “CLEAN BEAUTY NEEDS TO DIE IN 2020.”

“The underpinnings behind it usually are not rooted in science or anything of true value or merit to your skin,” she said.

4 months later, Gen Z skincare influencer Hyram Yarbro uploaded a video of his own addressing the subject: “The Problem With ‘Clean Beauty.’”

“In case you’ve been within the skincare community during the last 12 months, you should have known that a certain term has come up and been really popular. It’s the term clean beauty,” he told his followers. He currently has greater than 4.5 million subscribers on the platform (and 6.7 million on TikTok).

“I’ve had so many comments and clients approach me prior to now saying, ‘I only shop for clean beauty,’” he continued. “And I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’”

These videos get 1000’s, sometimes thousands and thousands, of views.

“Every time we do debunking myth series, they get received really, rather well by people,” said Krave Beauty founder Liah Yoo, who has also been discussing the topic online, particularly on her YouTube channel where she has greater than one million followers.

The audience is engaged, often commenting on the posts, videos and direct messaging the influencers.

“What I get a number of is people being, like, ‘I felt like I used to be down this clean beauty rabbit hole,’” said Charlotte Palermino, aesthetician and cofounder of Dieux. She ceaselessly expresses her views on Instagram Stories, sharing what she believes are false or misleading statements fueled by certain brands and retailers within the “clean” movement — a billion-dollar business today.

“They are saying, ‘I feel very silly, but I’m very glad that you simply’re here since you’re not making me feel bad about it,’” Palermino continued. “And I believe that’s the final word thing, that no person should feel bad about being taken in by some sensible marketing.”

All brand creators are marketers, she said: “We’re all selling a product. Let’s be really honest about what your product does, what safety testing actually goes into it and never give attention to these lists that really don’t make us safer. They’re just really great p.r. They’re really great p.r. moments. That’s truly what they’re.”

“Free from” lists — records of probably harmful ingredients not utilized in formulations — usually are not constructive, she added. “It’s not creating higher products. We’re not creating an industry where persons are interested in what’s of their products. We’re making a negative industry, literally where we’re calling things dirty.”

Gregg Renfrew, founder and chief executive officer of Beautycounter, said “clean” goes far beyond the lists.

“We aim to coach,” Renfrew said. “We don’t imagine in fear-mongering in any respect. And we all know that corporations do this….We use commerce as an engine for change. We imagine that as consumers, we are able to vote with our bucks.”

Renfrew is lively on Capitol Hill, working to pass laws that help protect the health of shoppers. (The most recent is The Personal Care Products Safety Act, a laws for the FDA to review ingredients, provide corporations with guidance and issue recalls on products prone to cause “significant” harm.)

“There’s been a number of chatter on, ‘Oh, clean isn’t defined,’ which is definitely something we’ve been saying since we launched,” added Lindsay Dahl, senior vice chairman of social mission at Beautycounter. “We go to great lengths to define what clean means to Beautycounter for consumers, because right away it’s an advanced marketplace for consumers to navigate.”

“I do imagine that every one clean isn’t created equal,” Renfrew said.

“We’ve said from the start, ‘Natural doesn’t mean protected. Not all preservatives are toxic,’” Dahl said. “We welcome the conversation, since the science around this could be very complex. We live in a world where people want things to be black and white, and the science isn’t black and white.”

Palermino echoed similar sentiments.

“There’s a lot nuance,” she said. “All this criticism I actually have right away is reserved for the brands that actively scare people about ingredients, or that tell them to swap out their beauty products, or are talking about ‘nontoxic,’ since it doesn’t mean anything. Anything will be toxic.”

When the “clean” movement began, it was well intentioned, critics emphasized. But in some cases, the campaigns took a turn for the more severe.

“[It] was rooted in attempting to do higher for the patron,” Idriss said. “But the present state of ‘clean beauty’ is a mockery of human intelligence: leading through marketing, fear and prying off of insecurities.”

Yoo agreed: “It was to supply safer products. But I believe the evidence that they collected was to suit the narrative. To abide to the clean beauty standard was to actually sell more. It was flawed, because they were collecting a number of misinformation as a substitute of factual evidence.”

There’s been a “demonizing” of certain ingredients, noted Suarez in her video, even “something as benign as petrolatum,” she said. “They claim that it’s toxic and carcinogenic….This is completely not true. For a dermatologist, that is top-of-the-line ingredients. It’s a superior humectant, and it really works thoroughly when it comes to addressing problems with the skin barrier, dry skin conditions. And likewise, it’s non-allergenic, meaning of all of the stuff you may be putting in your skin, petrolatum might be certainly one of the safest things you may placed on your skin.”

Used as an ointment and located in products like Vaseline, petrolatum is a jelly-like substance made with a mixture of hydrocarbons.

The issue, in line with the Campaign for Protected Cosmetics (launched by the nonprofit Breast Cancer Prevention Partners), is that when petrolatum isn’t refined, it may possibly be contaminated with toxic chemicals called polycyclic fragrant hydrocarbons. “When properly refined, petrolatum has no known health concerns,” states the organization.

“I hate it when people make me defend the FDA,” Palermino said. “There’s a number of things that I’m not a fan about with the FDA. But the concept this can be a self-regulated industry — the incontrovertible fact that media publications have published that without fact-checking it. This isn’t a self-regulated industry. What are you talking about? There are such a lot of regulations while you make skincare by the law. The issue is that the enforcement isn’t great. So, do you will have some people making skincare of their bathtubs? Yes. Should they be? Probably not. But it surely doesn’t mean that these large multinational corporations are throwing toxins in your skincare. It’s just not the fact.”

“I don’t think you’ll ever get anyone to disagree, whether you’re talking to me or Sephora, or Ulta [Beauty] or anyone else for that matter, that clean is basically about safety and sourcing, sustainability and ethics and being really transparent about all that,” said Credo Clean Beauty cofounder and chief operating officer Annie Jackson.

“It was hugely disappointing to see some brands in our store, in our ecosystem type of the ringleaders of the backlash against clean,” she added, attributing it to criticism that “clean” brands have been receiving, particularly on social media.

Alongside her team, she’s created “The Dirty List” as a part of the retailer’s “Credo Clean Standard” — an in depth explanation of “what clean beauty means to Credo.” It’s the gold standard in “clean.”

“It’s an industry where there’s 12,500 chemicals which are approved to be used in beauty, but then the overwhelming majority of those haven’t been assessed for safety by any regulatory body,” Jackson said. “We don’t fear chemicals, and we don’t encourage our customers to fear chemicals.”

She noted the discharge of a recent study published on June 15 by the Environmental Science and Technology Letters (via nonprofit scientific organization American Chemical Society). Researchers found that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — man-made chemicals that, in line with the USA Environmental Protection Agency, are linked to “hostile health outcomes in humans” — were in cosmetics products like foundations, mascaras and lipsticks purchased within the U.S. and Canada (to extend their durability and water resistance).

The paper states: “The manufacture, use and disposal of cosmetics containing PFAS are all potential opportunities for health and ecosystem harm.”

“Nobody has all of the answers,” Renfrew said. “But it surely is protected to say that there’s scientific evidence that points to certain chemicals of concern. And I believe we are able to all agree that there are particular chemicals which are linked to cancer reproductive toxicity or endocrine disrupting chemicals that we don’t want on our bodies.”

“Clean, , possibly this term will evolve into something different, however it is a strategy to distinguish these brands going to painstaking work to not buy chemicals that might potentially be harmful,” Jackson said. “To not acknowledge them amongst the ocean of other brands that aren’t doing any of that’s just unfair.”