The beauty industry is still decades away from removing petrochemical ingredients from its supply chain, bound by practicality, reliability, and efficacy. According to the UK's Bio-Based and Biodegradable Industries Association (BBIA), around 87% of cosmetic formulations still contain petrochemical-derived ingredients.
Valued for an array of active and functional properties, petrochemical-derived ingredients have come under scrutiny for the lasting impact they can have on the environment and human health. Most come with huge energy and manufacturing costs, and many, but not all, are not biodegradable in the environment. Some have also been linked to toxicity effects in humans, such as endocrine disruption.
While efforts to develop greener alternatives have gained important ground, with many brands switching out petrochemicals where possible, scaling remains a long way off. So, why can't the industry get unstuck?
“The reason the industry is so heavily dependent is because of the reliability of petrochemical-based feedstocks and the reliability of the supply chain, the cost, the ability to make each of these ingredients at a very large scale, and, most importantly, proven performance,” said chemical engineering expert Dr. Samiul Amin, Professor of Professional Practice in Chemical Engineering at the University of Miami College.
Petrochemical-based polymers, surfactants, emulsifiers, silicone oils, and preservatives offer the beauty industry formulation stability, enhanced textural and sensory values, and strong film-forming qualities—all of which have become highly valued aspects of a final product, Amin told BeautyMatter.
Removing these cornerstone ingredients requires “rewriting the recipe book entirely,” he said.
Drop-in replacements can rarely be made without formulation compatibility issues, the professor said. “It's not a simple one-to-one replacement of taking a petrochemical surfactant out and putting in a biosurfactant or bio-based surfactant; you would be extremely lucky if that works.” Instead, in many cases, companies will have to reformulate entirely because of interaction effects around stability, sensory, and functional performance—efforts that can take from a couple of months to an entire year.
On top of this, Amin said the quality of sustainable alternatives—particularly those in mixture format—is still highly variable, making it difficult to achieve the same performance every time. And while variability issues are slowly being ironed out, he said, “there's still the whole challenge of reformulation, which will just not go away.”
Dr. Barbara Olioso, green chemistry expert and founder of consulting firm The Green Chemist and ingredients platform Green Chem Finder, said that when trying to phase out petrochemicals, cost and familiarity are certainly two hurdles, but added that “both are beatable.”
“Renewable ingredients cost more, and their different chemistry means they perform, just not identically. Formulators need to optimize; consumers need to understand that a greener product may feel a little different. Neither is a wall. Both are learning curves,” Olioso said.
Performance, low cost, and sustainability will never happen all at once or immediately, she said, because renewable materials take “years and serious money to develop and register.” The real shift will happen when business models allocate “a proper budget to ingredients.”
Ingredient innovation efforts, however, have already begun shifting the dial. “In skincare, green formulations can already match, and outperform, conventional ones,” Olioso said. “The last frontier is haircare styling, where polymer performance still rules, but every year the launches get more promising, and color cosmetics keep improving too. The gap isn't just closing; in some categories, it has already flipped.”
The most exciting shift, she said, is that green alternatives are no longer only available in the active ingredient category but increasingly in the functional sector too. “Surfactants, emollients, and glycols are arriving, many of them multifunctional, which means shorter ingredient lists: exactly what consumers are asking for.” The palette for silicone alternatives is also expanding fast with the arrival of green elastomers; biosurfactants are multiplying, and nylon, plastic glitter, and other microplastic polymers are on their way out. “The very companies that once campaigned on the virtues of petrochemicals are quietly filling their portfolios with innovative green materials. When the incumbents start hedging, you know the tide has turned,” Olioso said.
So, does the industry want to make the shift away from petrochemicals? And will beauty and chemical companies be able to scale the use of alternatives successfully?
“There is a strong desire to move towards more biodegradable and more sustainable ingredients,” Amin remarked. In the last five to seven years, many large beauty corporations have switched out the big classes of petrochemical ingredients used in their formulations, like surfactants and polymers, he said, and the bigger chemical ingredient companies have responded—acquiring specialized startups and scaling production in-house. “That's happening as we speak; slowly, but it is happening.”
Dr. Jen Vanderhoven, CEO of BBIA, said that while use of petrochemical ingredients has remained relatively constant in recent years, the conversations throughout the supply chain and with the consumer have “shifted dramatically.”
“Ten years ago, sustainability discussions largely focused on natural ingredients, meaning extracts from plants and seaweeds, etc., and avoiding controversial chemicals like parabens. Today, we're talking about the entire carbon footprint of ingredients, supply chain resilience, renewable feedstocks, and circular manufacturing, dealing with both sourcing and the fate of materials,” Vanderhoven said.
These conversations are also sparking action, with large brands increasingly questioning suppliers on sourcing, circularity, and biotech alternatives and suppliers investing more in precision fermentation, engineered biology, and renewable feedstocks. Today, precision fermentation, for example, can produce biosurfactants, peptides, hyaluronic acid, emulsifiers, lipids, and many other ingredients using microorganisms like yeast, bacteria, and algae. Enzyme engineering and AI-driven molecular design are also enabling the development of cleaner and more consistent alternatives that are often impossible to produce through conventional chemistry, she said. “The pace of innovation has accelerated remarkably.”
Sian Sutherland, co-founder of global social impact organization A Plastic Planet, said the speed at which advances are being made is certainly surprising. “A few years ago, we were talking about early-stage biodegradable polymers that couldn't match performance. Now, we're seeing fermentation technology producing ingredients at commercial quality, marine-based and mycelium-derived materials entering formulation, and much more sophisticated plant-based actives that perform equally well on metrics of texture and stability.”
Most importantly, Sutherland said the credibility of these alternatives is also rising because many are already outperforming petrochemical originals on both sustainable and sensorial aspects.
What's needed now, she said, is wider investment to back innovation pipelines and shift developments from “lab curiosity to commercial scale.”
Amarjit Sahota, founder of market research, consulting, and training firm Ecovia Intelligence, agrees. “More investment is needed in renewable chemicals and their chemistry in general,” Sahota said, but particularly for bio-based alternatives of surfactants, emulsifiers, and preservatives, which are far more complex to replace in cosmetic formulations.
While very clear advances have been made to replace mineral oils with plant oils and paraffin waxes with beeswax and carnauba, the rest requires “considerable R&D.”
Eva Lagarde, CEO and founder of sustainability consulting and education platform re/sources, said investment and integration of innovation is definitely the beauty industry's main hurdle today.
“Currently, big players are not willing to take the risk to invest in one particular technology; they are all waiting on each other to make the first step,” Lagarde said. Advances in AI, however, should help resolve this, and the private sector is increasingly aware that “not all investments will pay off, but that they are necessary to secure groundbreaking technologies.”
Biotech is one space, for example, that should be carefully looked at and heavily invested in, she said. Amin agrees, noting that a closer alignment between biotechnology and cosmetics will be positive for the industry. That, along with wider onboarding of technologies like AI, machine learning, automation, and robotics, will enable faster, more efficient material exploration and formulation optimization. “We need to have different approaches,” he said. “The reality is there needs to be this avenue of exploration and substitution ongoing.”
According to the experts, a wider move away from petrochemical-derived ingredients is still a long way off in beauty.
“We are probably looking at least on the horizon of another 10 to 15 years for a switchover, but even then, not a 100% switchover; maybe 50%-60% of the ingredients being non-petrochemical based,” Amin said. Costs have to come down, the supply chain has to be reliable, quality control must be good, and the performance needs to be there for alternatives to scale successfully, he added.
Vanderhoven suggests it will take even longer. “Over the next 10 years, we will see bio-based ingredients move from being relatively niche to becoming mainstream across many beauty product categories, particularly surfactants, emollients, polymers, lipids, and active ingredients. A near-complete transition away from fossil-derived chemistry across the entire beauty industry is likely to take 20 to 30 years, reflecting the time needed to replace manufacturing assets, scale production capacity, update regulations, and reformulate thousands of products.”
Sutherland, Sahota, and Lagarde agree on the 20-year mark being the more realistic timeline for industry-wide change.
For Vanderhoven, the pace of change will depend less on scientific capability, which is advancing rapidly, and more on whether policy, regulation, and investment keep pace with innovation. “The challenge now isn't whether the technology exists—it largely does. The challenge is creating the market conditions that allow those innovations to scale. If we get regulation, investment, and infrastructure right, the beauty industry could become one of the first major consumer sectors to demonstrate that sustainable chemistry and commercial success can go hand in hand.”
Sutherland said beauty brands need to stop treating sustainable reformulation as a cost to be minimized and start treating it as an innovation opportunity for true change to take place. “This is an industry that has constantly reinvented itself through new science, new ingredients, and changing consumer expectations. With the right regulation and the right buy-in, a beauty industry built on regenerative, nature-derived materials rather than fossil-fuel derivatives could be the next chapter.”
Real change will also require transparency, she said. “Many of these ingredients still hide behind scientific names that mean nothing to the average consumer. The change is happening, but it's happening at the pace industry finds comfortable, which ultimately is too slow for what science demands.”
Olioso added, “Imagine if products declared not just their natural content but their petrochemical content—plus greenhouse gas emissions, water footprint, land use, biodegradability, and aquatic toxicity. Suddenly, the hidden costs would be visible on the shelf.”
Amin adds, however, that the beauty industry shouldn't necessarily replace all petrochemical-based ingredients by default. “The thing we have to understand, and it's a very important point, is that just because something is petrochemical-derived does not mean it is not biodegradable or is not an environmentally friendly alternative.” Some petrochemical ingredients possess good biodegradability, and some are also a smarter choice when looking at the overall lifecycle of a final beauty product.
Replacing a traditional surfactant, for example, often requires using multiple bio-based surfactants, each of which requires energy to be processed. If the surfactant is being replaced by a biosurfactant, feedstock like molasses or a food product is also required during the fermentation process to feed the bacteria. Companies must therefore conduct a lifecycle assessment (LCA) of these ingredient alternatives to be certain that the environmental impact is lower than the existing surfactant, Amin said. “A lot of people aren't doing that because it's expensive and difficult—even the large corporations. A lot of companies are doing what is called 'greenwashing'; they're telling you they have a plant-based or biosurfactant, but they haven't done a full LCA of that ingredient.”
Conducting LCAs on petrochemical alternatives is important if the industry wants to scale sustainably, smartly, and where necessary, the professor said.
Olioso agrees that focusing on the total impact on human and environmental health is key, given “not all petrochemicals are equal; some do biodegrade.”
According to Amin, building out LCA data on existing and new ingredients will require a “collaborative effort.” Chemical ingredient companies have to be central, given their knowledge of all the processing steps, but larger beauty companies need to contribute data on manufacturing and product usage in tandem.
More LCAs will very likely show that not all petrochemicals need to be replaced, Amin said, and this will need to be met with better industry efforts to educate consumers. “This is where proper scientific understanding needs to emanate throughout the industry, and it's missing. I'm going to be very harsh here: The level of depth of science in the beauty industry, especially in the beauty companies, is very limited.”
Globally, he said, there are probably about four or five major corporations where the science is really good, but the industry cannot rely on the science of a handful of companies to move forward. “We need the entire industry's level of science raised, and there are not a lot of people advocating for that.”
According to the professor, beauty education today is “a little bit stagnant.” Cosmetic chemistry and beauty formulation programs are still centered on formulations that were developed 30 to 40 years ago, he added, despite huge advances in ingredients, new metrics, and various sustainability and regulatory drivers coming in. “We need to move forward as an industry, and that is difficult if we stagnate.”