Credo’s Mia Davis Is Stepping Away From Beauty. We Talk To Her About Why And Where She Thinks Clean Beauty Will Go.
When the beauty industry takes stock of its history, there may be no single person as instrumental as Mia Davis in shaping its clean beauty push. At the beginning of 10-year-old Beautycounter, she orchestrated the brand’s The Never List that banned some 1,500 ingredients from its products. The list has since increased to include 2,800-plus verboten ingredients. At Credo, where she’s been VP of sustainability and impact for over five years, she helped set The Credo Clean Standard outlining the clean beauty retailer’s transparency, sustainability, sourcing, ethics and safety principles.
Later, Davis spearheaded Credo’s fragrance transparency policy requiring brands to categorize their fragrance ingredients in a nudge toward broader openness, and sustainable packaging guidelines to eliminate single-use plastic from Credo’s assortment, encourage packaging with recycled content and get brands thinking about life-cycle management. She also co-founded Pact Collective, a beauty recycling program that recently rolled out to around 600 Sephora stores.
Her resume stacked with those clean beauty accomplishments and more, Davis is now leaving Credo and the beauty industry. Before she goes, we decided to talk to her about her major career milestones, packaging dilemmas brands should consider, whether clean beauty is to blame for recent beauty product quality issues, and where the segment should go next.
How did you get into the field you’re in?
I have always wanted to use the market as a tool for positive change. I am a very mission-driven, impact-driven individual and, even as a child, teenager and graduate student, I saw an opportunity to use the market for safer and more sustainable consumer products and services.
My early models were Ben & Jerry’s and Patagonia. There were not many other brands taking a triple bottom-line approach, which is people, planet and profit, and I knew I wanted to work on corporate social responsibility. I found myself at the early days of the clean beauty movement working hard, of course, but also being in the right place at the right time.
Where did your career start?
After I finished my master’s degree, I did environmental health advocacy work. I was at the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and also the Workgroup for Safe Markets, now called the Mind the Store campaign. I also did shareholder advocacy work. So, the early stages of my career were focused on corporate accountability, safter chemistry and more sustainable practices, but through the nonprofit avenue.
Very serendipitously, I met Gregg Renfrew, the founder of Beautycounter, through a mutual contact. We met for coffee, and it turned into a three-hour meeting. A couple of days later, she offered me a job. I was the first employee at Beautycounter before it had a name or distribution strategy. Gregg knew she wanted to build a very different brand and a legacy, and I was her early partner in creating a roadmap to better beauty.
What was it like at the start of Beautycounter?
We would call on ingredient suppliers and contract manufacturers, and I would say, “Hi, we have this very robust restricted list. Beyond that, we actually want to assess ingredients and learn about their safety and sustainability, what data can you share with me?” You could hear them roll their eyes on the phone. The stakeholders were really disinterested, if not dismissive, of my role and this new brand on the scene. It was incredible to see the tides start to turn.
When you got to Credo, what goals did you have?
I met Annie Jackson, the co-founder and COO of Credo, at a store opening in Boston. I proposed working on a Credo clean standard to help them operationalize clean and ensure there were guidelines and support for the independent brands that Credo sells. I anticipated it would be a consulting project that would maybe take six months, but Annie Jackson convinced me to join the team and help define and lock in Credo’s clean leadership in retail.
Beautycounter was different because we were starting out with a blank slate. We had more control over our products and a very strong commitment to safety. At Credo, safety is a core part, but we have less control because we are selling around 100 independent brands. From the outside, it’s very similar work and a similar commitment, but, on the inside, how you structure the standard is quite different.
What the brand partners have to adhere to to be compliant with The Credo Clean Standard is not easy. The challenges are many, and they can shift depending on the brand or the product. Packaging is consistently very challenging, and a big part of our Credo Clean Standard is the sustainable packaging guidelines we launched in 2020. I wanted them to be both aspirational and attainable.
I don’t believe in setting goals no one can meet, and I certainly don’t want to hamstring small beauty brands that already have a lot of challenges with MOQs and costs, but we have a massive challenge, and we can’t continue to do business the way it’s always been done. The status quo is not acceptable.
What’s most important for a brand to be doing when it comes to packaging?
Design a product from soup to nuts in the beginning with packaging as a part of it. Packaging shouldn’t be step two, three or four. It should be part of the concept out of the gate.
Thinking through the impact of that package, the material type, the weight of that material, if there’s any chance it can be recyclable in curbside collection programs, that shouldn’t happen after you come up with the concept and the goop. When brands are thinking, “Oh, I would love to make this sustainable,” the incremental nice-to-have approach isn’t enough. It’s not moving the needle enough, and we are in a packaging waste crisis.
What’s the biggest sustainability myth in regard to packaging?
There’s no silver bullet. If there was one easy answer, we wouldn’t have to have the conversation. We’re not going to live in a plastic-free world, and sometimes plastic is the right choice for a consumer good when it comes to sustainability, user experience and cost, but we have to have our eyes wide open and do a full accounting. We can’t get paralyzed by the number of choices or the confusing landscape.
There are a lot of problems, and we have to be asking hard questions, btu we can’t also be like, “Oh god, this is hard, so I will just use virgin plastic.” Through our sustainability packaging guidelines and our co-founding of Pact Collective, we are doing our best to improve access to information and call out greenwashers.
When people are making real-time decisions on which packaging to use, they can at least see the likelihood of where that packaging should end up. Spoiler alert, most will go into the trash because this industry isn’t designing packaging to be recycled at the rate they should be recycled.
We recently had a stakeholder call at Credo on packaging. I left that call very optimistic because I finally see more sustainable options. So, more refillable packaging that’s actually more beautiful and sustainable, not just stuff that nobody is going to use, and definitely more metal and more recycled content, including some ocean-bound plastic content. I’m not saying everyone should be running out to use ocean-bound plastic.
There are many levers we can pull—and that’s what we need to be doing. It’s not about mixed virgin plastics that are fused together, metalized and overdecorated. We absolutely need to be moving away from that.
It seems like beauty refills are often simply creating more products. What’s your take on refills?
If refill is designed poorly or if you are refilling something that people have for years and are unlikely to consume quickly and refill with the same loyalty, then you are not doing much and, in fact, you may be doing more harm than good. You can’t just be refillable for the sake of being refillable because then you just have two new SKUs. That’s not helpful, and merchants don’t want that.
For high-volume, highly consumable products, I want to see more refillable packaging that makes sense and also more concentrates. We are seeing that more in home care than we are seeing it in beauty, but why are we shipping so much water around in virgin plastic? We need more innovative formulas and more innovative packaging.
There will be some risk and some trial and error. The path to commercialization isn’t always clear, but the status quo is not tenable. There will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. No matter how you vote and where you live, that should be alarming and unacceptable.
Is there anything you’ve changed in Credo’s ingredient standards?
We have some changes to make it stronger and more environmentally and consumer protective, but some changes relaxed it. I think that’s important to note because we are taking a very science-based, data-driven approach to this. It’s not just pro-environment and pro-customer, it’s pro-industry and pro-brand.
We used to have an outright ban on ethoxylated ingredients. That’s because of the use of ethylene oxide and 1,4-dioxane as a contaminant. But, over the years, when we took a look at the way the supply chain and the chemical industry has cleaned up this class of materials, we were glad to see that.
When I started this work at the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, no one was talking about ethoxylated ingredients until we wrote on a report on them saying there are carcinogens in baby shampoo, why is this the case? We found out that suppliers could strip out the 1,4-dioxane for pennies, and we called attention to that. In the decade-plus since, we are seeing chemical suppliers stripping out the contamination.
We are not here to say, “Yay for ethoxylated ingredients,” but we did relax the rule because we don’t believe that it’s very enforceable, and we didn’t think an across-the-board ban reflected the evolution of the chemical suppliers. I like sharing that example because it shows we are not just saying no. We are about moving the industry toward safety, sustainability, disclosure and better practices. When stakeholders in the industry respond, we are happy to applaud them.
Can there be improvement with PFAS (per- and polyfluorinated substances)?
Credo has been extremely active and vocal on the subject of PFAS in the beauty industry. We don’t believe there is any need for the intentional use of PFAS in beauty. Furthermore, the companies that are making this class of persistent bioaccumulative chemicals need to stop, and we need regulation and market demand for them to turn off the taps.
It contaminates rainwater, drinking water, breastmilk, cosmetics and more. Brands that are going out of the way to formulate without them will have PFAS contamination through no intention of their own because they are up and down the supply chain. That’s not unique to cosmetics.
We have weighed on that on the state and federal levels, and we have been working with stakeholders in the industry to figure out the most likely sources of contamination and how we can control for them. PFAS might be found in a contract manufacturing lab, they could be in storage totes that ingredients are held in, they could be in cleaning supplies. We are not blaming one actor other than the people making PFAS.
What other areas does the industry need to think about tightening standards around?
The beauty industry overall still has a long way to go on restricted substance lists. At Credo, it’s called The Dirty list, and it’s over 2,700 ingredients. We see a lot of brands today pick one or two things like parabens, but there are a bunch of toxic chemicals still used in this industry on a daily basis.
It takes reformulation and a commitment to replace them. There are potential effects to business when you make a pivot, but it’s table stakes now. It’s like, come on, why are there still formaldehyde donors in beauty products? That’s nuts. Why are we still using hydroquinone? That’s a toxic ingredient with toxic messaging. There’s still more basic stuff to be done.
What I’m more excited about is going beyond that to assess ingredients for sustainability and safety so we don’t have regrettable substitution. That’s where you remove one bad actor and move to another that’s not on a restricted substance list, but could be a bad actor, too.
Do you believe clean beauty is to blame for product quality issues the beauty industry has been dealing with lately?
Definitely not. Yeast, bacterial and mold are opportunistic. They like to grow, and they will when they can in anything that is under-preserved or not adequately stored and when the customer introduces too much bacteria.
It can happen with clean beauty. It can happen with conventional beauty. I don’t think it’s a clean beauty problem per se. We live in a very quick to react and fan flames society right now. That’s not a clean beauty problem, that’s a broad observation.
We are not anti-preservative. We just hosted a brand consortium call to talk about how important the need for preservation is. You don’t want to over-preserve, but you also don’t want to under-preserve.
Where should clean beauty head?
I hope that, in a couple of years, clean beauty is not confused as a marketing term, but is seen as a solidly different sector, and conventional beauty is running to catch up with it, and there isn’t confusion about what it means.
Because it’s my job, almost on a daily basis I hear, “Does clean beauty mean anything? It’s an unregulated term.” Almost every term in the beauty industry is unregulated. But, at Credo, we do have a definition, and we have a whole standard with an operational guideline and proprietary database to help enforce that definition. We are putting a lot behind that definition. It’s a journey, not a destination, and it will continue to evolve.
For those of in the space who really believe that we need safer chemistry and more sustainable materials and greater transparency, clean is very meaningful, and I hope it won’t be confused or watered down because that doesn’t serve the mission. The reason I got into this work is for the mission. We can’t continue to use toxic, unsustainable chemistry and materials and suspect we are going to have a healthy society, healthy planet or healthy industry.
Do you think biotechnology is a beauty industry savior?
I think there are tools in the tool chest. That’s true for packaging decisions, and that’s true for biotechnology. You can have a lab-made ingredient that’s replacing a very unsustainable or very toxic material, and if that biotech ingredient has the data and they come right out saying, “Here’s the hazard data, here’s the carbon footprint and here’s everything we want to share about why this is a better choice,” that’s awesome, and it could be a great solution for specific things like, for example, palm oil, but I don’t think the answer is biotech.
There’s no one answer to a complex challenge, and I think someone who tries to sell on you it being the answer is probably evangelizing for their own benefit.
Credo implemented a fragrance transparency policy in 2019. Do you think the fragrance bar can be pushed higher?
Fragrance is a fascinating space. It’s a huge industry onto itself. Also, it’s embedded in the industry because it’s in so many of our products as scent. The fragrance industry has long been enjoying secrecy and lack of disclosure. Fragrance has been considered confidential business information, and certainly there’s some merit to that, but the lack of sharing hazard data is concerning. I think state and federal policy around this topic is very helpful, but the market can serve here, too.
What Credo is aiming to do with our fragrance transparency policy is to say, let’s celebrate and reward the brand and suppliers that are OK with disclosure. While we have requirements where brands have to categorize what type of fragrance they are using because, at a minimum a customer should know if it’s natural or synthetic, ideally we are incentivizing disclosure.
Even the indie brands don’t have the luxury of knowing all the constituents in the fragrance they are buying. So, we can’t penalize them and say you have to disclose because we can’t build a standard the industry isn’t ready to uphold, but we can celebrate the actors that have chosen to disclose. It’s more of a carrot than stick approach.
If you were building a brand today, what are choices you would make to make sure it’s the most safe and sustainable brand it could be?
I would build in values and principles really early. Don’t assume everyone is on the same page and that those values will be intact in one year, five years or 10 years. So, be clear about why you exist and how your brand is going to have a positive impact on the industry and the planet.
When we make consumable products, we have an impact on sustainability. There’s no way around that. I think we need to be honest about that and not try to market our way out of that or make one small step forward in terms of safer chemistry or more sustainable materials and think you are done. Even little brands need to take a more holistic approach to creating products and choosing ingredients, packaging, shipping, all aspects of business.
We have a pretty saturated industry, and I know that’s not a popular thing to talk about, but do we really need another luxury serum? I don’t know. I think we have a lot of them, so how is yours really different? How is it really helping a customer or the planet? If you are not really doing it better or for a segment that’s underserved, then maybe don’t do it. Do something else. Use your creative talents, money and time in another way.
Where do contract manufacturers enter into conversations about transparency and sustainability?
Contract manufacturers are incredibly powerful stakeholders in the indie sector. So few brands are able to manufacture their own products because it’s incredibly complicated and expensive to do that. Contract manufacturers are amazing because they know how to make stuff, and they largely know how to make it so it won’t grow mold. They have libraries of ingredients and know how to economize them.
When we think about safety, sustainability and formulating a beautiful product, they hold the keys, but they’ve really enjoyed lack of disclosure and accountability, and many of them are not really innovative. Many of them are not thinking, how can we really do this differently, and data share and resource share? How can we be sure we are not wasting thousands of pieces of packaging in a trial run for nothing? That’s just going to the landfill.
It’s a dirty secret that contract manufacturers and brands are overbuying hundreds of thousands of units that will never be sold and that are not recycled, and they’re placing the onus on the customer to recycle. This is not a customer problem. This is a systemic industry problem that we need to be honest and address.
While the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act (MoCRA) has been largely welcomed, we are hearing that a downside is it could make things tougher for indie brands. What’s your view?
Since 1938, we had a largely unregulated industry. The federal law on the books was one-and-a-half pages long and virtually toothless. So, the need for an overhaul of federal cosmetic legislation was very real and something I was on the record as being for my entire career. The bar was in the basement, and it needed to come up. MoCRA did that in several important ways, but the bar is still low, and I do believe in the market and policies like The Credo Clean Standard.
I’m not worried about Credo brands complying with MoCRA. Yes, there are some reporting aspects that are new and independent brands need to be ready for, but, in terms of the goop they are making, Credo brands are exceeding most of what we know about MoCRA in terms of safety and disclosure.
There’s still a lot to be determined because we are waiting to hear more about fragrance allergens and what safety substantiation really mean. The safety substantiation piece is really big, and we are in a holding pattern.
Also, it could be a lot stronger. For my whole career, I’ve been working with brands and stakeholders to say, OK, we know what we want to put on this restricted substance list, and that’s just the beginning. So, beyond that, how do we know about the potential hazard of an ingredient? Has it been assessed for end points? How do we know about the sustainability if we don’t even know what plant it’s from?
What are your professional plans?
I am so proud of the work that I’ve been able to do in this industry and so grateful for the opportunities I have had at Beautycounter and Credo. I want to take my passion for safety, sustainability and impact to other sectors.
It’s not a hard goodbye to beauty, but it’s going to be some sort of pivot. I’m ready to disrupt other sectors. I didn’t get into this because I was a cosmetic chemist or a beauty junkie. I got into this to move markets, so I need to expand.
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