Going Sustainable and Looking Good with ILIA Beauty

Finding good, clean beauty brands can be a real struggle. Sometimes it seems like all the best makeup comes from harmful and unethical companies while all the clean beauty products are ineffective and don’t perform well. That’s exactly why the Laguna Beach-based ILIA Beauty stands out -- they figured out how to be both clean and effective. 

The brand was founded by mother, former branding executive, and health and wellness pioneer Sasha Plavsic. Her mission with ILIA was to create a company and a line of products that were transparent about the ingredients they used. She made a conscious effort from the beginning to find the balance between using natural ingredients that would be good for her customers’ skin without sacrificing a well-performing product. 

“I saw a huge gap in the market at the time,” says Plavsic of the clean beauty space. “I was always paying attention to what I ate, what type of cleaning products I was using, what body care or makeup I put on my body… but I felt that nothing in the makeup category was really resonating with me.” 

A former branding specialist, Plavsic had an aesthetic and environment-focused vision for the company from the beginning. She acknowledges that there are a lot of challenges when it comes to trying to create makeup that is sustainable or recyclable, especially with products that require a lot of smaller parts to function. Plavsic firmly believes that it’s her and her team’s responsibility to look at the product all the way from conception to disposal. 

“We are setting up an initiative with TerraCycle later this fall to be able to have a program where customers can return their empty components of cosmetics, of any brand, to us on a monthly basis,” explains Plavsic. 

“In my eyes, it’s the only way to be sustainable and to make sure something does not end up in the landfill, because even when we are recycling things they don’t always make it to the recycling center.”

In addition to their sustainability efforts, Plavsic notes that their focus on skin health is what separates ILIA from the rest. While other companies may advertise that they are now integrating skincare and buzzword ingredients into their products, ILIA does the opposite. They don’t just integrate skin health, they base their brand on it. It’s why they make sure to vet every single ingredient they use in their products and why Plasvic says they don’t feel the need to test their products on animals. She maintains that testing on animals is unnecessary, especially when she’d rather test the products on the beings that will be buying her products -- actual people.

All of ILIA’s products, from their Limitless Lash Mascara to their award-winning Radiant Translucent Powder, were created with the environment and the user in mind. Each product is created from a mix of natural and organic botanics, but Plavsic notes that they do include safe synthetics from time to time. She points out that, although synthetics get a bad rap today, not all natural ingredients are inherently good and not all synthetics are inherently bad. In the end, it truly takes a combination of both to create clean and ethical makeup that is also a high quality product. 

“People can have skin sensitivities to something whether it’s natural or synthetic,” explains Plavsic. “For example, a natural ingredient that people have a lot of skin sensitivities to is coconut oil and even though it can be very healing, it can actually also be comedogenic and cause certain people to break out. There are a lot of myths around this claim that all synthetics are bad.” 

Plavsic and the ILIA team have a long list of new and exciting products they hope to launch over the next year, including complexion-related products she says no one has ever seen before. In addition to the new products, ILIA partnered up with Laguna Beach Living’s sister magazine, the fullest, this past September for Unwell. Unwell is a wellness event hosted throughout the US by Nikki Bostwick, the founder and editor-in-chief of the fullest, where people of all walks of life came together to discuss and reevaluate our society’s obsession with perfection. 

To keep up with ILIA Beauty and all of their new launches, you can find their Instagram here. 

Logan Cross is a writer, editor, and dancer based in Los Angeles. You can find her scrolling through her own Twitter likes and listening to every fictional podcast her phone allows her to download. You can also follow her on Instagram.

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