Why Kenvue Is Participating in the EcoBeautyScore Initiative

the EcoBeautyScore, developed over a span of three years alongside more than 70 leading cosmetics companies and industry bodies, brings transparency to the environmental impact of individual products, helping consumers and retailers better trust sustainability claims.

Supported by industry giants like L’Oréal Paris, Neutrogena, Nivea Q10 and Eucerin, EcoBeautyScore is set to redefine how both brands and shoppers evaluate the ecological effects of their preferred beauty products.

“EcoBeautyScore is a much-needed step towards greater transparency in the beauty industry. Today’s consumers expect to make informed, responsible choices – but that’s only possible if we all measure sustainability in the same way. Until now, there’s been no consistent, credible standard,” explains Jean-Baptiste Massignon, Managing Director, EcoBeautyScore Association.

“This independent, science-based scoring system – developed not-for-profit and designed to be accessible to both global brands and smaller independents – is helping level the playing field. 

“It provides a common language for planetary impact, regardless of a brand’s size or in-house sustainability expertise.”

Oliver Price, Global Head of Product Resiliency and Sustainability at Kenvue, explores why Neutrogena has come on board with EcoBeautyScore.

Please introduce yourself

I am a member of Kenvue's R&D Leadership team, responsible for Product Resiliency and Sustainability. I lead a team of material scientists, environmental experts, and product stewards, integrating sustainable innovation into our human-centered design process and collaborating with product and packaging development teams.

I also represent Kenvue on the EcoBeautyScore Board of Directors, coordinating our contributions to various work groups. The primary objective of EcoBeautyScore ‘to enable consumers to make more informed purchasing decisions through clear, transparent, and effective communication of the environmental performance of products’ aligns well with our own Healthy Lives Mission commitments on sustainable innovation and transparency. Collectively, we must unlock consumer adoption of more sustainable products, and EcoBeautyScore offers a pathway to achieve this.

What motivated Neutrogena to participate in the EcoBeautyScore initiative, and how does it align with your broader sustainability strategy?

Science has always been at the core of how we provide care at Kenvue. As part of our Healthy Lives Mission, we are committed to improving the environmental performance of our products and providing greater product transparency, beginning with our ingredients.

By helping lead the development of EcoBeautyScore and being first adopters of the methodology, Kenvue is taking an important step toward our commitments and our continued efforts to make more sustainable actions part of people’s everyday rituals.

EcoBeautyScore offers a scientifically-backed, consumer-friendly platform for communicating product sustainability, making it easier for consumers to take informed choices.  

In this first phase, Neutrogena has published their scores for face care products in Germany, adopting a test-and-learn approach.

How has Neutrogena integrated the EcoBeautyScore into its product development and marketing processes?

By joining EcoBeautyScore, we have committed to continually improve our products and enhance transparency for our consumers, in part the EcoBeautyScore supports these commitments.

Internally, we have incorporated many aspects of the EcoBeautyScore methodology into our Sustainable Innovation Profiler, a new patent pending tool that our product designers use to assess and improve the environmental impact of new products from their inception. With the Profiler now embedded into our product development process, we are pursuing improvements across our portfolio, resulting in continuously better EcoBeautyScore scores.

What challenges did Neutrogena face in implementing the EcoBeautyScore, particularly regarding data collection and lifecycle analysis?

EcoBeautyScore requires participating brands to publish scores for at least 75% of products in a given market, within a product category to ensure consistent transparency.

We are incredibly proud to include scores for all Neutrogena face care products in Germany, which will be available digitally in the coming weeks.

This accomplishment highlights the successful collaboration and dedication of our teams across Kenvue and Neutrogena in establishing a standardised process and governance framework to collect, store and maintain the data that underpins this lifecycle analysis.

In what ways does the EcoBeautyScore provide added value to Neutrogena consumers, and how do you anticipate it influencing consumer choice?

Our innovation process focuses on the consumer; a successful sustainable product must deliver value and meet the consumer need. Achieving this balance begins in the early stage of product design. Communicating performance and sustainability can be complex, and many consumers share confusion over the plethora of labels and third-party certifications on the market, each with its own distinct methodology. One of the reasons we joined EcoBeautyScore was its resolute focus on translating environmental impacts into comparable information to consumers, helping them make more informed and sustainable purchasing decisions.

We expect these scores to help raise consumer awareness about the environmental performance of products as well as to influence innovation across our industry toward more sustainable ingredients and packaging choices.

How does the EcoBeautyScore factor into Neutrogena’s supply chain management and the sourcing of ingredients and packaging materials?

The EcoBeautyScore methodology is one of many factors in our sourcing strategy, which is guided by our Sustainable Innovation Profiler. This approach goes well beyond a traditional lifecycle assessment, incorporating, for example, green chemistry principles and packaging circularity following principles from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. 

We are actively engaging our suppliers to identify ingredients and materials with superior sustainability profiles, focusing on reducing carbon impact and enhancing the biodegradability of our ingredients.

As we integrate these new materials into innovations, our EcoBeautyScores will improve, contingent on the continued evolution of EcoBeautyScore Association’s database that will also need to reflect these advancements.

Looking ahead, how does Neutrogena plan to expand its use of EcoBeautyScore beyond initial product categories, and what role does the system play in Neutrogena future sustainability ambitions?

Our commitment, as part of our Healthy Lives Mission, is to continue enhancing product transparency and environmental performance across our portfolio.

This pilot aims to learn from consumer engagement with our EBS-rated products as we consider expanding to additional brand market combinations.

Ensuring consumers can make informed choices based on a product`s environmental impact is crucial, and consumer education will be a primary factor as we continue on this journey.