Natural ingredients in cosmetics: Between environmental promise and dependency risk

Since the late 2010s, cosmetics brands have made natural ingredients a defining feature of their formulations, under pressure from consumers seeking products free of controversial ingredients. This pursuit was built on a logic of health and perception. Not on environmental criteria.

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Yet today, natural ingredients are arguably one of the foremost sustainability challenges facing the cosmetics industry. In 2024, FEBEA, together with Capgemini Invent, carried out a double materiality analysis of the industry. Natural resources emerge from it as a critical issue on both axes of the exercise: impact materiality, what the activity places on the natural environment, and financial materiality, what this dependency places on company value.

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These risks, however, remain rarely measured, even though they increasingly shape the availability, cost and resilience of supply.

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Does a natural ingredient have a low environmental footprint?

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A natural ingredient is not necessarily a low-impact ingredient. The INCI list says nothing about that footprint.

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A natural ingredient is first and foremost an agricultural product. Its footprint is formed above all in the field. It depends on the plant, the yield per hectare, the inputs, the harvest, then the extraction process and transport. Two batches of the same raw material therefore do not share the same footprint, depending on where and how they are produced.

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This variation is not marginal. For an identical ingredient, it can be large. Between two natural sources of bisabolol, chamomile and candeia, the carbon footprint varies by a factor of 14, for equivalent function. Fairglow measured and published this in June 2026. This soothing active exists in several natural sources, with markedly different profiles.

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And this concerns carbon alone. It is the dimension the cosmetics industry measures best, and often the only one it tracks. But it does not sum up a product’s impact. An ingredient with a low carbon footprint can weigh heavily on other fronts.

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An ingredient’s footprint is spread across several dimensions. Some are better tracked than others. The least tracked are not the least significant.

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A natural ingredient’s footprint plays out in water, soils and biodiversity

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Measuring an ingredient’s impact therefore does not mean tracking a single indicator. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the methodology that makes it possible to measure these multiple criteria. It quantifies a product’s effects across its entire journey, from cultivation to end of life. The European Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) framework structures it around sixteen impact categories.

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These sixteen categories go well beyond climate. They measure water consumption and quality, land use and land use change, eutrophication, acidification, pressure on biodiversity and on resources. Greenhouse gas emissions are only one of the sixteen.

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This depth is precisely what tracking carbon alone cannot assess. An ingredient judged on its climate footprint may show a very different profile on water or soils. Yet these two categories are among the least measured, precisely when they are the most exposed for an agricultural product.

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Three dimensions concentrate a natural ingredient’s footprint: water, soils, biodiversity.

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Water: blue footprint and green footprint

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Water is one of the main dimensions of an agricultural ingredient’s environmental footprint. This footprint covers several realities. It comprises, first, blue water, drawn from aquifers, rivers or reservoirs for irrigation and certain industrial processes, and green water, that is, rainwater stored in soils and used by crops. Beyond this resource consumption lies another dimension: the quality of aquatic environments. Agricultural inputs, or certain effluents from extraction processes, can contribute to the eutrophication of water bodies. Finally, the impact depends heavily on local context. The same volume of water withdrawn will not have the same consequences in a region abundantly supplied with water resources as in a territory already under high water stress.

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Soils: land occupation and degradation

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Soils are a second major dimension of natural ingredients’ footprint. Any crop occupies land, changes its use and can durably transform the ecosystems associated with it. The argan tree illustrates this. This tree, endemic to Morocco, yields an oil used in both cosmetics and food. Its ecosystem is now under pressure. In less than half a century, the average density of the argan forest has fallen from around 100 to 30 trees per hectare, while more than a third of its area has disappeared. The causes are multiple: overexploitation, agricultural pressure, urbanization, climate change and difficulties in natural regeneration.

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Biodiversity: a reciprocal dependency

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Biodiversity is a third major dimension of natural ingredients’ footprint. Converting an environment into cropland alters habitats and can reduce species diversity. Intensive practices, such as monoculture, often intensify this pressure. The consequences vary by territory, crop and production method, but they point to one and the same reality: a natural ingredient is inseparable from the ecosystem it comes from.

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Burden shifting: a natural ingredient displaces the footprint, it does not remove it

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These dimensions do not move in the same direction. Improving an ingredient’s footprint on one criterion can worsen it on another. This phenomenon is known in Life Cycle Assessment as burden shifting. A naturally sourced ingredient may show a favorable carbon footprint while weighing heavily on water or soils. Conversely, a synthetic or biotechnology-derived ingredient may show a more balanced profile across those same categories.

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Squalane offers a clear illustration. This emollient exists in three sources: shark squalane, now abandoned, plant-derived squalane from olive, and squalane obtained from sugarcane fermentation, of biotechnological origin. The plant source does not lead across all categories. Depending on whether one looks at land use, water consumption or carbon footprint, the ranking between olive and fermentation changes. The natural version does not systematically come out ahead. The same holds for glycerin. One function, several production routes, plant-based or synthetic, with distinct environmental profiles across categories.

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Deciding on the sole criterion of origin, or on carbon footprint alone, amounts to choosing without a comprehensive knowledge of impacts. Natural is not, in itself, a guarantee of lower impact. It is an assumption that must be verified, not a guarantee. Measurement can settle what conviction cannot establish.

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An ingredient’s environmental impact is also a sourcing risk

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Dependency on natural resources is not only a question of impact. An ingredient whose production rests on fragile soils, water and ecosystems is an ingredient whose future availability is not guaranteed. What weighs on the natural environment ends up weighing on the security and cost of supply.

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The often-overlooked point lies in the cause-and-effect link. Environmental impact is not only a consequence of production. It becomes a threat to it. A crop that depletes its soils, over-draws a region’s water or erodes the biodiversity it depends on undermines its own production base. The degradation an ingredient causes turns back against its availability. Environmental footprint and sourcing risk are two readings of the same reality.

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This is precisely what measurement makes it possible to cross-reference. Life Cycle Assessment does not only quantify an ingredient’s impact. It reveals, in the same movement, its points of exposure. A high water footprint in a water-stressed territory, strong pressure on degrading soils, dependence on a declining ecosystem are all signals of impact and signals of risk. An ingredient that weighs on these categories, in an already strained region, is an exposed ingredient.

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To this ecological fragility are added the geographic concentration of certain materials, the length of supply chains and the growing volatility of agricultural yields under climate change. The use of natural ingredients, pursued without measurement, can thus increase the very exposure it was meant to control. Measuring an ingredient’s impact also means mapping the risk it places on the company, and equipping oneself to anticipate it.

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Only measurement can assess impact, beyond natural status

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An ingredient’s natural status says nothing about its environmental impact. It indicates an origin. It says nothing about the actual footprint, nor about how it is distributed across the various PEF criteria. To know it, one must measure it.

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Measurement shifts the question. Between a natural active grown in a water-stressed region and an alternative with equivalent function, Life Cycle Assessment establishes the respective footprints, category by category. It positions each option without prejudging its origin.

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Biotechnologies are one illustration. Precision fermentation produces actives with equivalent function without cultivating the plant from which they are usually extracted. It reduces pressure on rare or fragile resources. But it does not step outside agriculture for all that. These processes feed on cane or beet sugar, and therefore on a field, with its land, its water and its inputs. Added to this is the energy of fermentation. The dependency does not disappear. Depending on the feedstock and the energy used, a biotech ingredient’s footprint may be lower than that of the natural one, or comparable. Here again, only measurement can tell.

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This assessment requires measurement at the right scale. The finished product is not enough. It is at the ingredient level that the differences arise. A Life Cycle Assessment conducted ingredient by ingredient provides the granularity needed to compare a source, arbitrate a formulation, and situate a supply.

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This granularity was long missing. Environmental data for cosmetic ingredients were lacking, and LCA remained confined to finished products. That barrier is now lifting. Specialized databases now reconstruct ingredients’ footprints at life-cycle scale, making this assessment possible where it was not.

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The promise of natural ingredients took hold. It remains an assumption until it is measured. A natural ingredient may prove light or heavy, resilient or exposed, depending on the plant, the origin, the process and the territory. Only Life Cycle Assessment, conducted at ingredient level and across all impact categories, can reveal this.

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This is the barrier Fairglow has lifted. By reconstructing, through retrosynthesis, the missing environmental data of COSING ingredients, the platform makes measurable what was not, at portfolio scale. The question is no longer whether an ingredient is natural. It is what it costs, and what it exposes.

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Frequently asked questions

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Is a natural ingredient better for the environment? Not necessarily. Natural status indicates an origin, not a footprint. A natural ingredient can show high impact on water, soils or biodiversity. Only a Life Cycle Assessment across all categories can determine this.

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What is burden shifting? It is reducing an ingredient’s impact in one category while increasing it in another. Improving the carbon footprint may, for instance, worsen the water footprint or land use. Life Cycle Assessment serves precisely to detect these shifts.

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Are biotechnology-derived ingredients more sustainable than natural ones? Sometimes, not systematically. Precision fermentation reduces pressure on rare resources, but it depends on agricultural sugar and fermentation energy. Depending on the feedstock and the electricity used, its footprint may be lower than that of the natural ingredient, or comparable.

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Why measure impact at the ingredient level rather than the finished product? Because the differences arise at the ingredient level. Two sources of the same active can have very different footprints, as with the factor of 14 measured on bisabolol. Measurement limited to the finished product masks these differences.

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How can natural ingredients become a sourcing risk? An ingredient whose production rests on fragile soils, water and ecosystems has uncertain future availability. The degradation a crop causes turns back against the resource. Environmental footprint and sourcing risk are two readings of the same reality.

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Sources

European Commission, Recommendation (EU) 2021/2279 on the use of the Environmental Footprint methods (Product Environmental Footprint, PEF). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reco/2021/2279/oj

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ISO 14040:2006 and ISO 14044:2006, Environmental management — Life cycle assessment, principles, framework and requirements (including the prevention of burden shifting). https://www.iso.org/

ISO 14046:2014, Environmental management — Water footprint, principles, requirements and guidelines (blue water and green water distinction). www.iso.org

ISO 16128-1 and 16128-2, Definitions and technical criteria for natural and organic cosmetic ingredients and products. www.iso.org

FEBEA and Capgemini Invent, Double materiality analysis of the French cosmetics industry, 2024. https://www.febea.fr/etudes-et-rapports/analyse-double-materialite-la-filiere-cosmetique-travail-inedit-collaboratif-la

FEBEA, Biodiversity and cosmetics, a practical guide for SMEs, 2025. https://www.febea.fr/etudes-et-rapports/biodiversite-cosmetique-guide-pratique-pme-acteurs-engages-du-secteur

Regression of the argan forest (density and area), scientific literature, journal Sécheresse.

UNESCO, Arganeraie Biosphere Reserve (Morocco), designated 1998. www.unesco.org

Silva et al., Precision Fermentation as a Tool for Sustainable Cosmetic Ingredient Production, Applied Sciences, 2025. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/15/17/9246

Fairglow, Insight on the carbon footprint of bisabolol by source, June 2026.

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