You can now buy products including lip balms, face masks, body butters and shower gels from 5 companies including Boots, Essential Care, Lush and Neal’s Yard. Each beauty product contains one or more Fairtrade certified ingredient such as cocoa butter, shea nut butter, sugar or brazil nut oil, benefitting disadvantaged producers from countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Fearne Cotton, a UK TV presenter and long standing Fairtrade supporter, says: ‘I am really excited about this new opportunity to transform trade through the way I shop. I’ve tried out several of the new beauty products for myself and love them. Not only are they great quality, but they make me feel good using them because I know that the farmers who grew the ingredients that went into them are now abl to improve their lives.’
Beauty products, toiletries and fragrance products play an important part in our lives. In Europe at least 5 billion units of cosmetics are sold each year using around 1.5 million tonnes of ingredients. Increasingly, people are keen to lead a Fairtrade lifestyle and expect sustainable attributes to be an inherent part of the products and serices that they buy. There is huge potential within the beauty and cosmetics sector for producers of existing Fairtrade certified ingredients and aso of potential new ingredients or their derivatives to benefit from this new market opportunity.
Introducing Fairtrade labelling to beauty products will increase the overall number of Fairtrade products in Irish shops and th volumes of ingredients which producers are able to sell under Fairtrade terms, which in turn increases the benefits back to farmers.
