We Made Progress to Pass Clean Beauty Laws, Here's the Next Chapter in the Fight

Not that long ago, “clean beauty” was a fringe concept—a niche market of health-food-store staples with names that sounded like hiking trails. Today it’s a multi-billion dollar sector, major retailers have banned hundreds of chemicals from their shelves, and over a dozen states have passed laws restricting toxic ingredients in cosmetics.

The trend wasn’t just a marketing gimmick (although many brands did jump on the clean bandwagon), it was responding a large body of peer-reviewed science showing when we decrease our exposure to harmful ingredients in products, the levels go down in our bodies. And at the end of 2022, the U.S. finally updated its federal cosmetics law for the first time since 1938.

That’s real progress, and a lot of people worked very hard to make it happen.

And yet. The average American still uses nine personal care products every day, and our federal law still doesn’t require cosmetics companies to prove their products are safe before they hit shelves and the FDA doesn’t need to ensure ingredients are safe before they enter a beauty product. Fragrance can still hide thousands of undisclosed chemicals behind a single word on a label. PFAS, formaldehyde, and lead are still legal in products sold in most states.

The gap between “clean”, “natural”, and “safe”—and between marketing language and meaningful regulation—remains wide.

Here’s where thing clean beauty laws stand and what’s next in the fight for safer personal care and cosmetic products.

In the absence of strong federal action, states have become the most consequential battleground for cosmetic safety and the momentum over the last few years has been genuinely significant. I cut my teeth doing state policy, passing laws to ban toxic chemicals from consumer products, so the power of state legislatures to drive national action is close to my heart.

California moved first in 2020, banning 24 toxic chemicals from cosmetics—including mercury, formaldehyde, 13 PFAS, and some of the most harmful parabens and phthalates—in a joint effort between Counter (then Beautycounter), EWG, BCPP, and Black Women for Wellness. The Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act took effect January 1, 2025, the same month California also expanded its banned list to cover 26 additional substances under Assembly Bill 496.

Washington State went even further in its 2023 Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act—widely regarded as the strongest cosmetic safety law in the country—bans the entire class of PFAS rather than listing them one by one, along with very strict contaminant limits for lead, phthalates, formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasers, and other harmful chemicals. It also specifically requires assessment of chemicals that disproportionately impact vulnerable populations, which is an important and often overlooked piece.

The wave kept going: Oregon, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut have all passed legislation restricting toxic chemicals in cosmetics, with various effective dates between 2024 and 2027. As of early 2026, eight states have enacted bans on intentionally added PFAS in cosmetics as a class.

At the federal level, the Safer Beauty Bill Package—a suite of four bills reintroduced in July 2025 by Representatives Schakowsky (featured in my book Cleaning House for her leadership on the 2022 updates to cosmetic safety laws), Fletcher, Matsui, and Pressley—would go further than any state has gone and establish a national floor for cosmetic safety.

The bills have endorsements from more than 150 organizations and companies. They are currently sitting in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Getting them across the finish line is a long road—historically, cosmetics safety bills have moved slowly at the federal level—but their introduction matters, and the coalition behind them is serious.

Namely, Counter (formerly Beautycounter) and Breast Cancer Prevention Partners are leading the way driving national action.

Please sign Counter’s email to Congress asking for support of the Safer Beauty Bill package and for a clear definition of “clean beauty”.

The Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022 (MoCRA) was the biggest overhaul of U.S. cosmetics law in 84 years, and it was a genuinely hard-won achievement. It gave the FDA new authority to recall unsafe products, required companies to register their facilities and report adverse events, and directed the agency to issue a series of important rules on ingredient safety and labeling transparency.

01 - Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards were supposed to be proposed by December 2024 and finalized by December 2025. Both deadlines were missed. The GMP rulemaking has now been moved to the agency’s “long-term actions” list—which is bureaucratic language for “don’t hold your breath.” (See, I critique the FDA both under Biden and Trump…)

02 - Fragrance allergen labeling, one of the most important transparency provisions in the law, also stalled. A June 2024 deadline passed without action. A January 2025 target came and went. The current timeline projects a proposed rule no earlier than May 2026, with a final rule still years beyond that.

03 - And then there’s the talc and asbestos situation, which deserves its own paragraph.

Asbestos has no safe level of exposure, it is a known human carcinogen. Talc—used in pressed powders, baby powder, and dozens of other cosmetics—is mined close to asbestos deposits and can be contaminated during the process. Congress knew this when it passed MoCRA, and it specifically directed the FDA to establish standardized testing requirements for asbestos in talc-containing cosmetics. The rule wasn’t just because testing showing a clear trend, asbestos was found in children’s play makeup and at the time the FDA couldn’t recall the products. (Since MoCRA passed, the FDA now has what’s called mandatory recall authority, which empowers them to be able to force companies to take products like this off the market).

The point is, the roll back on asbestos testing in talc is a gross miscalculation, especially given asbestos recently showed up in children’s makeup.

In November 2025, the Trump administration withdrew the proposed testing rule. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. signed the withdrawal, citing industry comments about unintended consequences and pushing PR spin about how the rule wasn’t written properly (policy expert here, it was a simple and clear rule).

Health advocates immediately condemned the decision. EWG called it “dangerous and irresponsible” and noted that Congress had clearly required the rule. The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization called it “a profound setback for public health.”

This withdrawal came just weeks after a Los Angeles jury awarded nearly $1 billion to the family of a woman who died from asbestos exposure linked to talc-based cosmetics. The FDA has said it will issue a new proposed rule at some unspecified future date, no timeline has been announced.

Hot tip: shop for cosmetics that are talc free, but not for talc-free powder products like blush and bronzer. Stay with me here. Counter is my favorite talc free clean makeup brand and bonus, they don’t have powder talc free products.

Talc free powders are notoriously high in heavy metals. Talk about swapping one hazard mess for another.

There is no federal legal definition of “clean” in cosmetics. No regulatory body certifies a product as clean before it goes on shelves. “Natural,” “non-toxic,” “pure,” “pharma-grade”, and “green” are equally meaningless from a regulatory standpoint. A product can be marketed as “clean” and still contain PFAS, undisclosed fragrance chemicals, formaldehyde-releasers, or other ingredients that states and the EU have restricted or banned.

This clean-washing problem matters because it shifts the burden onto individual consumers to decode ingredient lists, cross-reference databases, and evaluate competing claims—while the companies selling the products face essentially no accountability for the gap between their marketing and their formulas.

To make matters even more annoying, many “clean” brands don’t have internal safety standards, scientists who understand environmental health science, and they rely on contract manufacturers for formulating and testing their products. That’s backwards.

Safe products should be the floor, not the premium.

Until the law catches up, third-party certification programs and transparent brands (very few) are the best available signal of meaningful ingredient standards.

If you want to shop based on something more substantive than a brand’s own marketing claims, here are the certification programs and retailers I trust:

• EWG Verified — The Environmental Working Group’s certification program requires products to meet strict ingredient standards, with no chemicals of concern, full transparency, and good manufacturing practices. Products must score well on EWG’s Skin Deep database. It’s one of the most rigorous standards available.

• MADE SAFE — This certification screens for more than 6,500 known or suspected harmful chemicals and uses a comprehensive hazard assessment that includes human health, animal welfare, and ecosystem impacts. If a product is MADE SAFE certified, the ingredient review is genuinely thorough.

• Credo Beauty — Credo has one of the most comprehensive restricted substances lists of any U.S. retailer, banning more than 2,700 ingredients. They also require fragrance transparency from their brands, which is not standard practice in the industry.

• Counter [Beauty] — The reboot of Beautycounter, with a much cooler name, the beauty industry’s awarded leader in ingredient and product safety, the same safer formulas and relentless dedication to non-partisan advocacy.

• Hilde — A digital platform that comprehensively reviews the safety, sustainability, and worker’s rights programs for brands. This isn’t a product level certification, Hilde is pushing brands to not think about safety as marketing, but recognizing those who actually build a best in class safety program (and share it transparently).

These retailers, certifications and brands continue to sit at the leading edge of a field of science that has only dramatically grown in recent years. Peer-reviewed scientific research shows us that

The Safer Beauty Bill Package, if passed, would close the most critical remaining gaps: banning the worst chemicals, requiring real transparency, and building protections specifically for the communities most harmed by the current system.

The most useful thing you can do right now is contact your members of Congress and ask them to support the Safer Beauty Bill Package.

And when brands tell you their products are “clean”—ask what they mean. Look for the certifications I suggest and purchase a copy of my book: Cleaning House. The industry has spent a lot of money teaching us to trust their marketing, we shouldn’t have to.