"I hate the beauty industry. It is a monster selling unattainable dreams. It lies. It cheats. It exploits women."
Those words were made famous because the person who uttered them was Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop.
Roddick, who unfortunately passed away the other day, was not an entrepreneur who simply applied a thin green patina of ecological style to her business like many companies wishing to gain a share of the concerned consumers market. She was a genuine activist who criticized the same industry that she competed with. Not only did she reinvent the business, she used her success to support bold organizations that were willing to use direct action to confront corporate power head on, like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Ruckus Society.
Not that the Body Shop and Roddick didn't have their detractors. In 1994, for example, Jon Entine penned an article exposing what he called the Body Shop's "myth of good intentions" -- by which
he meant that BS "built its reputation on a mixture of hyperbole, operational dysfunctionality, and outright fabrications."
Entine later claimed that "Shattered Image" led to a reassessment of the company and the "corporate social responsibility" movement as a whole, because it demonstrated how credulous naove (sic) academicians and journalists had been in accepting at face value the misrepresentations at the heart of the Body Shop myth. It accelerated the movement toward transparency and accountability, rather than celebrating posturing and rhetoric at the expense of stakeholders -- the centerpiece of Anita Roddick's marketing strategy."
Although I can't judge whether or not the specific claims he made were right or not (I suspect there was some hyperbole on both sides), overall I think his timing was good. In the early 1990s, corporate greenwashing had reached a new high. In the wake of Earth Day 1990, when ecological consciousness reached a new peak and rippled out throughout the broader society, the environmental movement's fierce resistance to greenwashing led some businesspeople to try to make superficial changes to protect their reputations and brand. From outside, it looked like they absorbed the criticism only in order to develop more sophisticated marketing and advertising strategies that softened the blow and undermined collective political action by converting environmentalism into a question of consumer choice.
Alas, the debate over whether or not "corporate responsibility" is an oxymoron will probably never be resolved, but even if to many of us such efforts will always end up looking like lipstick on a corporate pig, we have to admit that there are some enterprises that were founded to try to make a difference.
Thus, as David Vogel says, "Corporate responsibility is like any business strategy. It makes sense for some companies some of the time."
With Roddick gone (and Body Shop sold off to L'Oreal), you'd think the cosmetics industry had outlasted its strongest critics and settled back into a comfortable norm.
But wait a second. A friend of mine has just published a new book that promises to peel away the superficial glamor that covers up some rather dirty truths about the cosmetics industry.
Stacy Malkan's "Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry" explores many of the toxic ingredients in lipstick (and you thought lead in toys imported from China was bad?)...shampoo (coal tar), etc. How is it possible that such ingredients get into products we apply directly to our bodies, you might (or might want to) ask?
Simple: the $35 billion cosmetics industry is so powerful that they've kept themselves virtually unregulated for decades.
No, this is not simply another sour expose. There's actually a bit of entertainment here. In fact, some of the book reads like the sequel to Thank You for Smoking -- like the part about how companies market themselves as "pink ribbon leaders in the fight against breast cancer" while using hormone-disrupting and carcinogenic chemicals that contribute to that very disease.
The good news is, there are already many alternatives on the market, and if the Body Shop is selling any of the toxic crap cited here, you can be sure they won't be for long. Hell, if L'Oreal were interested in carrying Roddick's vision forward, they'd buy up the entire first run and put the book on display at all their stores.
One other thing, I was surprised and saddened by Anita Roddick's death. She was truly a pioneer and one of the first to incorporate "Fair Trade" initiatives (before it was vogue) in her business practices. She left the world a better place.