Walking into any uptown beauty store in Johannesburg, Nairobi, or Lagos, you will notice something interesting. The products labelled “clean”, “organic”, or “natural” are often the most expensive on the shelf. The language suggests purity and care. The pricing suggests exclusion. Clean beauty, as it is currently marketed, has become less about what is in the product and more about who can afford to participate. Serums made with marula oil or baobab extract are packaged in minimalist glass bottles and sold at prices that place them firmly out of reach for the majority of consumers.
This raises a simple question. When did “better for you” become synonymous with “not for everyone”?
The growth of the global organic personal care market offers some context. Much of this expansion is driven by premium positioning and consumer perception rather than accessibility (https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/organic-personal-care-market). Clean, in this sense, is not only a standard. It is a market category designed to signal value through price.
When the same ingredient lives two lives
The contradiction becomes clearer when looking at the ingredients themselves. Marula oil, for example, is neither rare nor unfamiliar in Southern Africa. It is processed and used in various forms across communities, often without the framing of luxury. The same applies to shea butter in West Africa or aloe in many parts of the continent.
Yet once these ingredients enter formal retail systems, they take on a different identity. They are refined, packaged, certified, and priced in ways that position them as premium goods. The movement from local use to commercial product is not simply a change in format. It is a shift in who the product is for.
This creates a quiet but significant divide. On one side are everyday practices that remain accessible but undervalued. On the other are formal products that are recognised, validated, and priced accordingly. The ingredient does not change. The system around it does.
The barriers built into doing it “properly”
Certification is often presented as the mechanism that guarantees quality and safety. Labels such as “organic” or “eco-certified” are intended to build trust, and in many cases they do. However, the process of obtaining these certifications introduces a set of requirements that not all producers can meet.
Small-scale producers working with natural ingredients frequently operate outside formal systems, not because their products lack quality, but because the cost and complexity of certification are prohibitive. Documentation, audits, and compliance processes require resources that are simply not available to everyone.
As a result, those who are closest to the source of these ingredients are often excluded from the most profitable parts of the market. Larger companies, with the capacity to navigate these systems, are better positioned to secure certification and capture value.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has highlighted the importance of ensuring that value from biodiversity-based products is retained in producing regions, rather than being extracted through global value chains (https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ditcted2017d6_en.pdf). In the beauty industry, this remains an ongoing challenge.
What the industry still refuses to acknowledge
Despite the growth of clean beauty as a category, there is still limited recognition of the systems that exist outside it. Across African markets, people continue to use oils, butters, and plant-based mixtures in ways that are practical and effective. These practices are not framed as sustainable, yet they often align closely with that idea.
The issue is not absence, but visibility. What is informal is rarely seen as authoritative. What is unbranded is rarely seen as valuable. The industry continues to centre products that fit within its own structures, even when those structures exclude a significant portion of real-world use.
This raises a deeper concern about how standards are defined. If clean beauty only recognises what passes through formal certification and premium retail, then it is not measuring sustainability in a broad or meaningful way. It is measuring compliance with a particular system.
Rethinking what accessibility should mean
If the goal is to build a more sustainable beauty industry, then accessibility cannot remain secondary. It has to be part of the definition itself. A product cannot claim to be responsible while remaining out of reach for most people.
This does not require abandoning standards or rejecting innovation. It requires expanding the framework so that it reflects how people already live and engage with beauty. It means acknowledging that sustainability is not only something to be purchased, but something that is already practised in different forms.
A more inclusive approach would not begin with price points or packaging. It would begin with recognising value where it already exists and ensuring that the systems built around it do not erase or exclude it.
Until then, clean beauty will continue to operate as both a solution and a barrier, offering better choices to some while quietly limiting access for others.
