Here's the definitive guide to every single symbol on your beauty products
Let's be honest, the beauty world isn't exactly easy to understand. From green-washing, to perplexing percentage claims of ingredients, to vague language ('clean beauty' and 'natural' are our personal favourites), it can be hard to find a single beauty formula that meets all your criteria and delivers the results you want.
And that's just the formula. Then there's the confusion behind the packaging and the manufacturing process. There are products that are recycled and ones that are recyclable (these two are not the same, by the way), there's Fair Trade claims and various other eco-signalling.
In beauty's defence, all of this informative is available on the label of your beauty products in the form of tiny, indecipherable symbols. You've probably seen them - the twisting arrow, the funny shaped 'e', the flying rabbit or the hourglass timer. It's easy to ignore them, but it's even easier to be mislead by them. Often they don't have any context, explanation or further information surrounding them, so unless you took the time to Google each one, you probably wouldn't have the faintest idea what they meant.
Whether you insist on buying vegan products, or are passionate about organic ingredients, you deserve to be able to determine which product is right for you without having to do any detective work, which is why we've decoded all of the symbols that are often stamped on the back of packaging so you know exactly what you're buying.
If you want to know more about how to safely recycle your beauty products, we've done a deep dive into different materials so you can be sure to dispose of your empties correctly. We've also broken down exactly how to check a brand's sustainability claims, so you can easily steer clear of green-washing.












