Where "Clean" Comes From
The word itself was borrowed from the "clean eating" trend in food and wellness, which was associated with eating seasonal, whole foods while avoiding processed foods and sugar-rich diets. Between 2010 and 2015, the word "clean" began to be used for skincare and makeup in the US, driven by growing concern over common ingredients linked to irritation, hormonal imbalances, cancer, or harm to the environment.
In the meantime, certain US retailers began curating brands built around natural ingredients, free from anything toxic or potentially toxic. There was real demand for it, and the category needed a name to set it apart from conventional beauty.
However, "clean" was never defined by a regulator or a scientific body. The Food and Drug Administration has said as much directly: it has no regulatory definition for "clean," "non-toxic," or "natural" in cosmetics, and treats all three as marketing claims, not scientific ones.
None of this means the word is useless. The idea behind it is a good one: know what you're putting on your skin, and choose products that respect your body and the planet. The word didn't fail, it just never got a real definition.
Why the Word "Clean" Became Problematic
The word was born into an industry that uses whatever sells, and "clean" sells well. So brands, retailers, and marketing teams ran with it, and the line between genuinely clean and just well-marketed got blurrier every year.
Here's an example: I see a lot of so-called clean boutiques selling the brand ILIA. It's not toxic, and it's safe for humans. But it uses ingredients like dimethicone (a silicone) and other polymeric ingredients, also known as liquid microplastics, the kind of ingredients that, in my opinion, sit uneasily with a "clean" claim. They're safe for skin, but they've been found to be burdensome for the environment and for the microorganisms in our water systems.
Twelve Beauty sits at the other end of that spectrum. No major organic certification, no clean-formula branding, nothing that signals "clean" the way the market has trained us to look for it. What it does have is genuinely good formulation, ingredients chosen for what they actually do rather than how they look on a label. It's proof that the loudest brands about being clean aren't always the ones who've actually earned it, and the quiet ones sometimes have.
Natural and Organic
Europe takes a different approach. Independent bodies like Ecocert, Cosmebio, Demeter, BDIH, and Soil Association certify natural and organic beauty products, so shoppers don't have to take a brand's word for it. Based on ongoing ingredient research, they've built a framework that excludes ingredients that are toxic, or even just potentially toxic, to humans and to the environment.
In practice, that means a label like Ecocert Natural or Organic isn't a marketing choice, it's earned through rigorous, independent checks on sourcing, formulation, and packaging. That's the real answer to the question this article opened with: those labels are your reassurance that a formula has been independently verified against a clear set of standards.
Screenshot the image below and save it to your photo gallery, so you can refer to it while you shop.
If a Brand Isn't Certified, Does That Mean It's Not Clean?
Not necessarily. Certification costs money and time, and a lot of smaller, newer brands simply haven't gotten there yet even though their formulas are genuinely well thought out.
Certification is a strong signal, but its absence isn't automatically a red flag, especially with brands that are still young. This is where things get less clear for consumers, who often end up relying on tools like apps, Instagram, and influencers instead, tools that aren't really built to answer this particular question.
Should You Trust Apps Like Yuka When It Comes to Clean Beauty?
Apps like Yuka are the most common stand-in for that missing certification, and it's tempting to let one do the work for you. To be straightforward about it: not for this. Not for judging whether something is genuinely clean.
Yuka scores cosmetics against several EU cosmetic regulations, the same regulations applied to every conventional product on the market, clean or not. It was never built around natural or organic formulation, so using it as a benchmark for clean beauty answers a slightly different question than the one you're actually asking, and the gap between those two questions matters more than people expect.
Sun protection is the clearest example. Yuka tends to score chemical UV filters well and mineral filters poorly, including titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. But mineral filters, nano forms included, are exactly what natural and organic certification standards support, and chemical filters are exactly what those same standards prohibit. Someone following Yuka's guidance would end up choosing the chemical filter, genuinely believing it was the cleaner option. It's the opposite.
Microplastics is another example. Copolymers, the synthetic polymers used to create texture in a lot of formulas, score green on Yuka, because the app is measuring risk to your skin, and copolymers don't pose much of one there. But that's not really the right question to be asking. The real risk shows up after the product gets rinsed off: those microplastics travel into wastewater, then rivers and oceans, then into the microorganisms sitting at the bottom of a food chain that we're part of too. If you eat fish or drink water, you eventually eat what they ate. That's exactly why natural and organic standards prohibit copolymers, not because of any risk to your skin, but because of the risk to everything downstream of it. Yuka simply isn't built to measure that.
So someone using Yuka in good faith can end up buying products with ingredients that are actually banned under natural cosmetics certification, while believing they're making the responsible choice. INCI Beauty is the tool I'd point people to instead. It's built around natural and organic formulation rather than general regulatory compliance, so it's actually answering the question you meant to ask.
What "Clean" Means at Nuvola
When I use the word clean at Nuvola, I mean something even more specific, and I think about it in three parts.
Clean inside: the ingredient list is free of substances we know are genuinely problematic, microplastics, endocrine disruptors, chemical ingredients that build up in the body over time.
Clean outside: this covers packaging and the impact the beauty industry has on the planet and life around us. We need less plastic, more refillable, biodegradable products that reduce the environmental burden and show respect to the nature that has given us so many fantastic plants, extracts, and oils. And then we go further. Being certified organic or natural is a strong foundation, but at Nuvola it's not enough on its own.
The formula also has to work. A lot of brands stop at "we are organic" or "we are natural," and for someone without a specific skin concern, that's perfectly sufficient. But what if you have a real skin concern that needs to be addressed? Oily, blemish-prone skin, for example, needs certain actives: ingredients that improve pH, balance sebum production, and reduce pathogenic microflora. Rosacea-prone skin needs soothing, inflammation-reducing actives like azelaic acid or vitamin B12. A product that's simply free of bad ingredients isn't automatically doing anything useful for either one. Being inoffensive isn't the same as being effective. This is the standard I hold every product at Nuvola to: not just clean, not just certified, but genuinely active.
What Should You Actually Look For?
You don't need to read an ingredient list like a cosmetic chemist to make a good decision. A few things genuinely help. Certifications are a solid starting point: Ecocert, Cosmebio, Demeter, BDIH, Soil Association, look for them on the packaging. They're third-party audits of sourcing, formulation, and packaging, not marketing labels. A certification doesn't guarantee you're holding the single best formula on the market in terms of effectiveness, but it does mean there are no ingredients that are toxic or potentially toxic to us or to our planet.
Beyond that, use a tool built for this specific question: INCI Beauty rather than Yuka, for the reasons above.
And honestly, the thing that helps most is buying from someone who actually knows what they're selling. A retailer who has read the formulas, asked the brands real questions, and made deliberate choices about what to stock is doing a lot of that vetting work on your behalf, and that's worth more than any app score. That's the job I try to do at Nuvola.
Is Clean Beauty Getting Better?
Yes, and I think this is genuinely worth saying. A few years ago, going natural meant accepting weaker texture and weaker performance in exchange for cleaner ingredients. That trade-off has largely disappeared. The newer generation of clean brands formulates with the same level of active ingredients as conventional skincare: peptides, vitamin C, exfoliating acids, SOD, niacinamide, just without the ingredients that are genuinely bad for people or the environment.
Textures have improved. Fragrance is used thoughtfully where it's used at all. Packaging has mostly caught up too. There's very little left to justify choosing conventional skincare over a well-formulated clean alternative.
The one argument that used to hold up for conventional beauty was efficacy, the idea that clean simply couldn't compete on results. That's no longer true. Brands that take clean formulation seriously tend to also take actives seriously, and the two commitments usually go together. Not every brand in the category has caught up yet, some are still relying on certification alone without doing the rest of the work, but the overall direction is clearly the right one.
The Bottom Line
The word "clean" still remains vague on its own, so I wouldn't rely on it alone. The certifications mentioned above are a genuinely good starting point, look out for them on the packaging. And be a little wary of claims like "contains organic extract of something," since that might be the only natural ingredient in an otherwise ordinary formula. Beyond that, the thing that helps most is buying from someone who actually knows the products you're putting on your skin, that's worth more than any label or app score on its own. A genuinely clean product doesn't always need to scream clean. It just is.
Anna is the founder of Nuvola, a natural and organic beauty boutique in the Flon district of Lausanne. She curates products based on active ingredients rather than brand story, and has been reading INCI lists so you don't have to.