Premium Beauty News - Caudalie has always positioned itself as natural, but as soon as 2006, you went farther, creating a formulation charter to ban several controversial ingredients. What does this approach represent?
Angélique Mahot - All our skincare products are created in France in our Natural Formulation Laboratory of the Cosmetic Valley. Every day, our team of formulators surpasses itself to create a new generation of highly natural skincare. The Caudalie products comply with a very strict naturalness charter called Cosm’éthique, which is updated every year for ever-more reasoned and committed cosmetics.
In 2006, six substances were removed from our formulas – they were considered as potential endocrine disruptors or they were irritant, derived from petrochemistry, or from ingredients of animal origin – for the benefit of natural ingredients. We have now banned 60, including phthalates, mineral oils, parabens, phenoxyethanol, and sodium laureth sulfate, silicones, PEGs and microplastics.
The vast majority of our skincare products are vegan and free from ingredients of animal origin – except for honey and beeswax. Since 2020, we have also undertaken to offer only formulas with at least 95% of ingredients of natural origin (except sun products and Eaux Fraîches) for even more transparency for our consumers.
Premium Beauty News - The Clean Beauty market has changed a lot. How is the brand positioned today?
Angélique Mahot - The health crisis confirmed what we believed from the very beginning: the future belongs to brands that try to produce sustainable products.
Today, being clean is essential. And we were clean much before it became a trend. But today we need to go much farther. Most of our products are based on patented, innovative ingredients developed in partnership with the best research laboratories specialized in anti-ageing, like the Harvard Medical School and Dr David Sinclair, with whom we have worked for 10 years.
Premium Beauty News - Have you also revamped your packaging?
Angélique Mahot - In 2020, we undertook to change all our packaging so it could be refillable, recycled and/or recyclable. Between 2019 and 2020, we reduced our annual plastic waste by 44.33 tonnes. It represents 1,385,312 1.5-L bottles of water.
Our clean commitments go beyond this: we are partners of 1% for the Planet, so over the past ten years, we have given 1% of our turnover to associations that plant trees. At the end of the year, the brand will have planted 10 million!
We are the main donor for 1% for the Planet in the French cosmetics industry, and we hope other companies will draw inspiration from us and join the movement.
Lastly, in 2020, we created the 100% Plastic Collect programme with Tristan Lecomte. In Thailand, we collect the equivalent of our annual plastic production so it is recycled locally and reused by the local population.
