Beauty Heroes’ Jeannie Jarnot On The Evolution And Future Of Blue Beauty

Since its introduction in 2018, the concept of blue beauty mostly lived as a tab on the e-commerce website for Jeannie Jarnot’s monthly discover subscription service and store Beauty Heroes. Now, the entrepreneur is building on the initiative with a new site, forthcoming awards program and council with Krupa Koestline of KKT Consultants, Rachel Roberts Mattox of Oyl + Water and Jessie Baker of Provenance along with herself.

Blue beauty refers to beauty and wellness brands that go beyond “clean” and “green” positioning to use their businesses to make a positive impact on the world through innovation, sustainability, transparency and social responsibility by minimizing packaging, adhering to ethical sourcing guidelines, investing in environmental technologies and more.

Ahead, Jarnot elaborates on how she’s come to understand the blue beauty movement, highlights blue beauty brands doing good jobs, and dishes on the shortcomings of clean beauty.

What led to you create the website for Blue Beauty now?

We sort of soft-launched it, and we’re in the process of assembling the full Blue Beauty Council. We’ve been working on the site for the last nine months, and even though it’s a small presence, it was very thoughtfully created with a new identity, logo and content. We wanted to take what we’ve learned over the last four years and represent it as something independent of Beauty Heroes.

I think the thing that I had bumped up against a lot through the last four years was that, as the interest in blue beauty came through to me, it was hard for me to celebrate the accomplishments of brands that weren’t at Beauty Heroes. There are really amazing brands doing really amazing things and I felt this calling to have a bigger, more inclusive conversation that was not limited to just Beauty Heroes’ brands.

I started blue beauty as a way to celebrate our brands at Beauty Heroes and what they were doing because I was really inspired by some of the authentic initiatives that brands were putting into place. It was so exciting for me personally to see brands really investing money, time, sweat, thought and energy into making their brands not only lighter on the planet, but try to give back in some way.

It really started as a smaller thing, and it grew into a conversation that a lot of people wanted to be a part of and so putting this together has been a process of me honoring that. A statement for me personally is that I really want to invest in this work, and I want to invite more people to the table.

How will it be separate from Beauty Heroes?

At Beauty Heroes, we celebrate our brands and their blue beauty initiatives. Blue beauty is not a retailer. At this point, we are calling ourselves a movement, and we’re putting together a council of diverse voices who care about sustainability to create a think tank on how we can continue to inspire the beauty industry to be more transparent and be more sustainable and to do that in creative and innovative ways.

It really deserved its own separate thing, its own separate URLs, separate color, separate palettes, separate everything. Blue beauty was under the Beauty Heroes umbrella. Now, it is more like the reverse, and it will grow into something bigger.

What will the responsibilities of the council be?

First, I need to finish identifying the council. The plan is to have eight people. I don’t think anything bigger than that can be too productive. Right now, I’m calling it a think tank on sustainability in the beauty industry and also imagining how the blue beauty movement can serve the industry. I think there’s some work that needs to be done there and really looking at different issues and helping to guide the beauty industry.

Sustainability is such a complex issue, right? Packaging, ingredients, offsets, transparency. These are all sorts of big issues, and you can look at them in all these different ways. So, I see us creating some content that outlines the problems and offers some solutions that help guide anybody who’s interested in blue beauty down this path to being better. We are also partnering with Innocos on a Blue Beauty Awards, so the council will probably be the judges for that.

What have you learned over the past four years since you created the concept of blue beauty?

The initiatives that we outlined on the website, which we’re calling the blueprint for better beauty, are mostly what we came up with. So, the blue beauty pillars that we identified were ethical ingredients, supply chain transparency, low-waste packaging, recycling initiatives, water and biodiversity, carbon commitment and social impact. That was a lot of work. What are we talking about, actually? We wanted to create an outline and make that really easy and digestible.

“I really want to invest in this work, and I want to invite more people to the table.”

How would you say blue beauty differs from clean or green beauty?

When I started Beauty Heroes, we were all talking about green beauty, and it was really about plant-based, botanical beauty rather than synthetics. Brands were really leaning into the power of nature. That’s what I think of as green beauty. Obviously, going green means sustainability, and if you’re talking about being a green business, that means minimizing your impact on the environment, which we should all be doing.

With clean beauty, what they’re really talking about is ingredients. There’s this glaring issue for me when it comes to clean beauty and what’s going on in the clean beauty space, which is a whole other article, but clean brands are really using a lot of ingredients that are not good to put back into our environment. They’re not biodegradable, they’re essentially invisible plastics and and silicones, and they’re going into our oceans and our waterways, and it’s this invisible problem that nobody’s talking about.

I think that’s actually the next wave of clean. Right now, the way that most people are looking at clean beauty is, is it safe to put on my body? Am I going to get cancer or am I going to have hormone disruption? What they’re not saying is, is it clean for the environment? That’s not on the table, that’s not a part of the clean beauty conversation.

Blue beauty’s really about, OK, you’re clean, and what else? The ingredient conversation fits into the blue beauty movement, but isn’t the only thing. What about all these other things like ethically sourcing? And how can we make sure that we’re looking at things holistically and thinking about end of life when it comes to packaging?

The way the term “blue beauty” came about is I was at this conference and there was a trend analyst. He was talking about how consumers are going to demand that brands be blue. He said, “If you aren’t green already, you’re kind of way behind the boat. We should all be minimizing our impact on the environment, but consumers are going to require brands to look at how they can actually use their businesses to make a positive impact on the environment.”

Blue beauty really is taking that extra step and saying, what can we do to be a better business? We are all creating products that help humans consume more stuff, how can we, A, make better products and, B, make sure that we are acting responsibly toward the planet? That’s the challenge and that’s how we look at blue beauty.

Are you or the council planning to mentor brands looking to do better?

We’ll decide if that’s something that we all have the bandwidth to do. I’m not announcing that now, but that’s possible.

When we spoke back in 2018, a piece of advice you had for brands was to sign up for 1% for the Planet. Are there steps that brands can take in order to become bluer?

I’ve learned over the years that there are so many ways to be a bluer company. I think brands really need to be authentic on what makes sense for them. Is there something that has to do with where they source their ingredients or where they’re located or something to do with the product? The blue beauty initiatives that the brands are embracing really need to tie into who they are as a brand.

I liken it to when I was in the hospitality industry and we would talk about, when you open a hotel in a location, really creating a sense of place. Say you’re going to open a hotel in Costa Rica and creating a hotel that looks like it could be in South Florida. Really saying, OK, well, what does the architecture look like here? And what does the culture look like here? How can we create an authentic experience?

I guess my advice is not to just do a bunch of things, but really outline your values and build initiatives that tie back to them and tell that story. People will connect to authentic initiatives. Be creative with it, and make it something that feels like a part of your brand.

Jeannie Jarnot, founder of Beauty Heroes, highlights Honua Skincare as a blue beauty brand making a difference.

Are there brands that are doing a good job of that now?

Athr is a great example. Every single one of their products gives back to a different cause, and they say that right on the product page. I think they’re tying it back to ingredients. She [founder Tiila Abbitt] has the right formula where she’s also really looking at packaging. She’s the first brand to do magnetic, plastic-free palettes that are 100% recyclable. I think that she’s a great example of a brand that really changed the industry and made us wonder, do we need mirrors in our palettes? Can we do it in a way that’s better and still create cool products that the consumer doesn’t feel like they’re missing the experience?

Again, there’s not one template for how to do it. I think what’s cool about Innersense, which is one of our top-selling brands at Beauty Heroes, is they have a real strong combination of initiatives, and I feel like they do everything that they can. When these founders talk about these initiatives, I can see that they actually mean something to them, and they’re involving their employees. They’re a bigger company, and they have the resources to do that.

Honua was one of the brands that inspired the blue beauty movement. The founder [Kapua Browning] is really cool and was inspired to bring biodiversity back to the farmers in Hawaii by funding their ability to grow indigenous plants that she would then use in her products. She partnered with Sustainable Coastline in Hawaii, and she has this really great compostable secondary packaging that has no glue and no plastic and that folds up. At the time that was totally new, nobody had that. Those are good examples of brands that authentically are doing what feels right to them. I think that is the sweet spot.

What are your aspirations for the future of blue beauty?

My aspiration for blue beauty is to find the highest way to serve the industry. I definitely feel like I have a calling to work in the environmental space in a way that’s really practical. I think that’s my personal aspiration. With blue beauty, there’s not this set agenda at the moment. We are working on setting that agenda. That’s the work the Blue Beauty Council and myself will be doing to move this movement forward.