LONDON—As of June 24, 2009, the public will be able to buy products, including lip balms, face masks, body butters and shower gels from five companies, including Boots, Bubble & Balm, Essential Care, Lush and Neal’s Yard. Each beauty product contains one or more Fair Trade-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. To date, 57 beauty products have been licensed by the FairTrade Foundation and it is expected that many more will follow.
Fearne Cotton, TV presenter and long-standing Fair Trade supporter, said: “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 able 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 tons of ingredients. Increasingly, people are keen to lead a Fair-Trade lifestyle and expect sustainable attributes to be an inherent part of the products and services they buy. In a recent survey by Globescan, 31 percent of people in the U.K. said they are interested in purchasing cosmetics carrying the FAIRTRADE Mark. There is huge potential within the beauty and cosmetics sector for producers of existing Fair Trade-certified ingredients and also of potential new ingredients or their derivatives to benefit from this new market opportunity.
Harriet Lamb, executive director of the FairTrade Foundation said: “It’s great news that the beauty industry will get a Fair Trade makeover and the farmers who grow the natural ingredients will get a fairer deal because we think they’re worth it. This exciting launch brings much needed positive change for producers who need Fair Trade now more than ever. The public has said they want to lead a sustainable lifestyle and this is the next step along the path to looking good and feeling great. So go out and treat yourself to these great new products!”
Introducing Fair Trade labeling to beauty products will increase the overall number of Fair Trade products in U.K. shops and the volumes of ingredients which producers are able to sell under Fair Trade terms, which in turn increases the benefits back to farmers.
Nana Yago, a Fair Trade shea nut producer from Burkina Faso said: “When we work together, we can help many people out of poverty. Most importantly, Fair Trade enables us to help ourselves and to support each other. The premium allows us to offer training courses to the women in our group. They learn to write and can see how important it is to have their independence in life. The status of women in our society has now increased.”
Landlocked Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world. Yago is a member of the Union of Women Producers of Shea Products of the Sissili and Ziro provinces, a group representing 2,000 women. The group was set up to improve the position of women involved in shea butter production, most of who are illiterate, and reduce poverty in the villages. Traditional shea butter processing is done by village women who gather, boil and sun-dry the nuts before they are pounded and ground to a paste. The paste is mixed with water to separate the fat, which is then manually churned into creamy butter.
Through Fair Trade labeled beauty products, producers will benefit in three ways:
1. Producers will get the Fair Trade minimum price plus a premium, a bit extra to invest in community projects such as schools and health care.
2. The companies behind the products will have a partnership plan in place showing how they will additionally support producers to develop their businesses and communities.
3. The FairTrade Foundation has worked hard to set minimum thresholds of Fair Trade ingredients at levels which allow best selling volume lines of beauty products containing natural ingredients to be certified.