Celebrating Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! In honor of this beautiful blue marble we all share, we’re re-committing to our pledge to conserve water for life-giving drinking and life-saving sanitation. After all, what’s more beautiful than caring for Mother Earth?

Pinch of Colour launched four years ago as the first waterless beauty brand to put water conservation at the forefront of our thoughts, personal actions and business practices—and we’re not done yet. Discover how we’ve changed the beauty industry for the better, and learn about our decisions to honor Earth Day, every day.

The Making of Waterless Beauty

Water waste in the beauty industry is a fact: Water is the most used ingredient in beauty and personal care products, and these products have a mind-boggling water footprint. The water footprint of a cosmetic product is the amount of water that is consumed and polluted in all-processing stages of its production. A product’s water footprint tells us how much pressure that product has put on freshwater resources. Each step in production has a direct water footprint and an indirect water footprint. In the cosmetics industry, the impact of water footprint is primarily linked to our bathrooms, while using shampoos, body washes, soaps, all of which use high amount of water content in the formulas (sometimes up to 90%).

When we launched Pinch of Colour, we wanted to turn the beauty industry’s water use standards into a thing of the past. Our approach to the water footprint is something called “Gate to Gate” water consumption. This means that our lab receives the ingredients at their gate; re-processes some of the ingredients without the use of water; and finally, manufactures our formulas without the use of water.

Because we are still a developing brand, we are working diligently to improve our ecological footprint and ensure that with time our water flow is controlled. That means looking at the process as early as in the planting of the seed stage, way before the plant becomes an extract, and way before the extract becomes a formula. This process of analysis will help us understand the life cycle assessment of a product; the water footprint in our formulas and ultimately it allow us to understand the ecological footprint of our company.

The Waterless Way Ahead

For each of us at Pinch of Colour, Earth Day marks a day where we stop and look ahead to what we can do better. Working to improve our ecological footprint is just one of the ways we hope to define Beauty With a Cause. We’re also looking for new ways to partner with charities and NGOs to help bring water to global communities in need—partners we’ve worked with since our inception, like Clean Water for Children, Healing Waters Organization and Ekenywa.

We are re-examining our production, our packaging, our sourcing and our final products to ensure our practices live up to our own high standards. We’re educating our customers and our beauty industry peers on why waterless beauty is the way ahead—and how we can all conserve more water for those who so desperately need it. We are dreaming big and implementing small, everyday changes to our beauty routines. And we’re living our credo, Beauty With a Cause.

Amy Flyntz, Contributing Writer