Why Beauty ROI Is Driven By Social Conscience And Sustainability

When it comes to their beauty brand of choice, Gen Z especially favors a value driven approach but you’d better make sure it’s authentic or they’ll spot it a mile off.

Timed to coincide with World Refill Day on 16 June, L’Oréal Group is launching multi-brand campaign #JoinTheRefillMovement to educate customers on available refill options and encourage their adoption. Participating brands include Lancôme, YSL Beauty, Prada, and Kérastase.

According to the Group, while 78% of consumers express interest in buying more sustainable products, many still remain unaware of such options and their lower environmental imprint. Refilling YSL Beauty’s recently launched Libre L’Eau Nue for example, reduces glass use by 50% says International Sustainability and Scientific Director Caroline Nègre. “That’s a huge impact.”

As her title might suggest, sustainability figures highly in her remit. A decade ago in 2014, she was instrumental in initiating her brand’s flagship botanical project, the Ourika Community Gardens in the foothills of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains.

Beauty empowering local communities

Its genesis, she says, came out of a research trip to the Ourika Valley to source saffron for a skincare range. She learned that the threads were handpicked by women during just two weeks a year so the initial objective was to give them more work to increase their revenue and afford them financial independence. Having consulted with local NGOs, her team began looking for plots of land to create new supply chains. Construction began on the two hectare Ourika Community Gardens themselves in 2019.

Today, Nègre describes it as a laboratory, “an emblematic place for the whole program that happens in the Ourika Valley.” In addition to more immediate employment for the local community, the Gardens provide wider communities with cuttings from which to cultivate crops they can sell back to the brand.

“It’s a place of inspiration, of creation and of experimentation that combines cultivation, botanical research and, of course, human empowerment,” she says. “When you give trees to a village that’s huge. it means money, food and independence.”

The Ourika Community Gardens are now home to some 300 species including iris, jasmine, cacti, pomegranate and figs. All the brand’s axes—fragrance, make-up and skincare from the Loveshine lipsticks to All Hours foundations—contain at least one ingredient from the Gardens. This amounts to over 35 million products.

A beauty laboratory in the Ourika Valley

Speaking to the laboratory aspect, Négre explains how the learnings generated are also pushing the business forward both in terms of sustainable practice and science.

The Gardens’ specific microclimate enables them to foster a variety of different species. “We can grow plants and see how they react to the environment, do a pilot, a small production and once it’s validated and proven efficient we can scale it to the other communities,” she says.

“We apply regenerative techniques, planting one thing for one season to nourish the soil or mixing different species where one benefits the other if its roots retain water for example. We look at the impact and then we can share the results with the other programs.”

The stress to the plants from the extreme environmental conditions afforded by the microclimate also causes them to produce particular molecules to defend themselves, she adds. “These make for a stronger concentration of the components we need for our active ingredients.”

Scent creation and extraction of beauty ingredients

When it comes to scent creation, the brand’s master perfumers like IFF’s Carlos Benaim behind YSL Beauty’s Libre franchise, apply “headspace” extraction technology on site to capture fragrance molecules like those from jasmine which can differ according to the time of day or tuberose which blooms only at night.

Such technology was integral to the creation of Libre L’Eau Nue, YSL Beauty’s first oil-based and alcohol-free perfume. According to Benaim, alcohol enhances diffusion so in its absence, he needed to enhance the heart note of orange blossom “to get that burst of fragrance.” Headspace extraction allows for the analysis and isolation of specific molecules so they can be dialled up or down accordingly.

YSL Beauty global ambassador and Gen Z favorite Dua Lipa who has long been the face of the Libre fragrance franchise also stars in the campaign for L’Eau Nue. The Gen Z beauty marketplace is a competitive one, successfully courted by e.l.f. beauty and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode which it recently acquired so there’s everything to play for.

While Nègre acknowledges that the beauty consumer, and Gen Z in particular is looking for brands whose values resonate with their own, she emphasises that concerns with women’s empowerment (most recently exemplified in their Abuse Is Not Love campaign) and sustainability were already deeply infused in the brand” long before the start of the Ourika Gardens journey.

Monsieur Yves Saint Laurent, founder of sister brand Saint Laurent, created Le Smoking, a female take on the Tuxedo in 1966, affording women the same freedom of movement previously reserved for men. YSL Beauty has evolved this heritage applying such values to the world of beauty.