Key Takeaways:
In the beauty industry, sustainability is no longer enough. Previously begun as a movement toward recyclable packaging and clean formulas, the ecosystem has matured into something far more systemic, and that is a push toward regeneration. A growing group of brands are taking accountability for the ecosystems behind their products, owning forests, co-founding farms, funding wildlife conservation, and designing new sourcing models that restore what the industry once depleted. This shift is the very redefinition of how beauty interacts with the planet’s resources and the people who steward them.
“Clean and responsible sourcing is just the baseline,” Chelsea Riggs, CEO and founding member of Amika, said to BeautyMatter. “True sustainability goes beyond reducing harm. It’s about creating a positive impact.” That statement captures a broader truth sweeping through the sector, and that is the realization that sustainability must move from maintenance to renewal. For Amika, this meant forming a partnership with Forested, a women-led ingredients company in East Africa that works with smallholder farmers and indigenous land stewards across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda.
Through that partnership, Amika is helping shift beauty’s role from consumer to co-creator. “Partnering with Forested allows us to take responsibility for the full system,” Riggs explained. “Not just sourcing responsibly, but restoring ecosystems and regenerating livelihoods,” she continued.
According to Ariana Day Yuen, CEO of Forested, this type of collaboration represents the next era of supply chain development. “We co-design regenerative practices with communities, [including] things like farmer-managed natural regeneration, intercropping, and pollinator restoration,” she said to BeautyMatter. “Amika understood that this would require working far outside of the norm. Our partnership has been a true collaboration between their ESG, product R&D, and supply chain teams.”
The result is a supply network that produces not only ingredients, but impact. “When regenerative sourcing delivers verified carbon reductions, biodiversity gains, and stronger relationships with producers, it’s no longer niche, it’s smart business,” Yuen added.
The Roots of Ethical Enterprise
Few companies have modeled this philosophy longer than Dr. Bronner’s, whose regenerative supply chains predate the language now used to describe them. “Our commitment to progressive business practices stems from wanting to honor and be true to our founder Emanuel Bronner’s statement: ‘Share the profits with the workers and the earth from which you made it,’” said Ryan Fletcher, VP of Public Relations, to BeautyMatter.
For Dr. Bronner’s, those words are operational and not rhetorical. The company has co-founded initiatives such as Serendipol in Sri Lanka and Serendipalm in Ghana, cultivating coconut and palm oils under fair-trade and regenerative organic principles. “We actively seek partnerships that align with our social and environmental standards,” Fletcher explained. “Once a partnership is established, we invest in long-term development by providing training, infrastructure, and support to help communities meet organic and fair-trade standards.”
The company’s fair trade premiums are reinvested in education, healthcare, and clean water initiatives, creating a model where environmental and social regeneration reinforce each other. “Ethical sourcing, for us, is rooted in the creation of resilient, empowered farming networks,” Fletcher said. “These are key to our broader mission of social justice and environmental sustainability.”
Even amid global trade pressures, that long-term approach has built resilience. “By maintaining direct relationships with our suppliers, we’ve built trust and mutual support that helped us weather crises like COVID-19,” Fletcher continued. “We’re not just minimizing harm, [but] actively healing the land and supporting small-scale farmers.”
For Akash Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Fable & Mane, regeneration isn’t a supply chain strategy, but a personal calling. Through the Fable Fund, Mehta is directing profits from his haircare brand toward wildlife conservation initiatives, partnering with organizations such as the Elephant Family and the Jane Goodall Institute. “The fund is our legacy. It’s [also] a long-term commitment beyond the brand and the products,” he told BeautyMatter. “We’re building a fund for the new age—social-media-first, content-driven, transparent, and fun. A fund should have the word fun in it.”
His philosophy stems from early passion rather than market positioning. “If you asked three-year-old Akash what he wanted to do, it wasn’t to create shampoo,” he reflected. “I just wanted to be around animals and see them thrive.” Now, the British entrepreneur and businessman is building a fund that promotes human-wildlife coexistence through community-driven conservation by investing locally, educating globally, and supporting sustainable solutions, especially through the lenses of minoritized groups.
For Mehta, that clarity of purpose defines the line between performance and authenticity. “You don’t need the whole world to come together to change the world,” he said. “A few people with a mighty heart can do it too.”
Beyond Ethics: Regeneration as Strategy
What unites these distinct approaches, that is, Dr. Bronner’s regenerative farming projects, Fable & Mane’s wildlife fund, and Amika’s ingredient collaborations, is a shared understanding that sustainability isn’t a PR exercise but a business model for longevity. “Beauty brands must move beyond sustainability as a marketing claim and take real responsibility for protecting biodiversity,” Fletcher said. “The health of our planet is inseparable from the health of our products, people, and communities.”
That sentiment was echoed by Yuen, who sees regenerative agriculture as both ecological and economic insurance. “Our goal is to make the regenerative shift more possible and practical for brands,” she said. “We want to make it easier for them to source ingredients that help them meet their climate and nature goals while making even more beautiful products people love.”
At a time when consumers are demanding transparency and investors are beginning to quantify impact, regeneration is fast becoming an operational necessity. For brands built on storytelling, community, and culture, it’s also a return to one of beauty’s oldest truths that the earth gives before it can receive.
As sustainability continues to raise the stakes for the industry, regeneration is growing to become beauty’s next act, and an evolution that asks not only how brands can minimize harm, but how they can actively contribute to planetary healing. Whether through forest partnerships, cooperative farming, or conservation funds, these brands are proving that environmental responsibility and business resilience are not opposites, but symbiotic.
