Cosmetic packaging: the chemistry no one explains to you

For Earth Day, everything behind our choices. 

Last night, I dropped a toothpaste tube in the recycling bin. This morning, my daughter fished it out and held it up to my face. "Mom. Soft plastic. Gray bin." She's twelve. I'm dreading the teenage years — she is going to destroy me for every sorting mistake. I have a few months left. I'm terrified.

Today is Earth Day. Rather than talk to you about oceans or forests, I wanted to talk about what I have in front of me every single day. Packaging, plastic, aluminum, silicones, words that float around everywhere and that nobody ever stops to actually look at.

THE NUMBERS WE KEEP REPEATING

Two figures show up in nearly every beauty brand's communications. 120 billion units of packaging produced worldwide every year. 20 to 500 years for plastic to decompose.

The first comes from aggregators and NGO reports, with methodologies that vary from one source to the next. No peer-reviewed primary study at the root. The second is mathematically impossible to measure, since modern plastic hasn't existed for 500 years. It's an extrapolation, repeated so often it's started to pass for fact.

The real problem with cosmetic packaging isn't solved with an impressive number. It's solved with chemistry.

Translation: these figures have become the Einstein quotes of Instagram. The more they circulate, the less anyone knows where they came from.

PLASTIC DOESN'T DECOMPOSE. IT FRAGMENTS.

The difference matters. Decomposing, chemically, means breaking the bonds between atoms to return to simple elements like carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Plastic doesn't do that. Under the effect of UV rays, oxygen, and friction, its polymer chains break into shorter chains, until they become microplastics and then nanoplastics. The molecules themselves stay intact.

These particles are now found in soils, oceans, and living organisms across multiple generations. What we've measured over the last ten years is unsettling. What we'll know in twenty years will probably be more so.

What plastic becomes isn't packaging anymore. It's particles. And they're everywhere.

Translation: plastic that fragments is like a puzzle dropped on the floor. There are more pieces. The puzzle hasn't disappeared.

PLASTIC IS A FAMILY

When we say "plastic," we're actually talking about ten very different materials, hiding behind abbreviations that read like license plates.

ABS, acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene, is nearly indestructible. It's the plastic in Lego bricks, helmets, and technical components.

PET, polyethylene terephthalate, is lightweight, transparent, and widely recyclable. It's what water bottles are made of.

HDPE and PP, high-density polyethylene and polypropylene, are also recycled in France and come back as new packaging. This is the plastic we use for EVERYDAY 50.

PLA and compostable bioplastics require a specific industrial infrastructure that doesn't exist in most municipalities. A bioplastic thrown into standard recycling isn't recycled. In a home composter, it doesn't break down either.

Before buying a product in "recyclable plastic," the only real question is: which of these families is actually in your hand?

Translation: saying "plastic" is like saying "music." There's Bach, and there are ringtones. Both come out of a speaker. They are not the same thing.

COSMETIC ALUMINUM ISN'T PURE ALUMINUM

Pure aluminum can be recycled infinitely without any loss of quality. Our cosmetic aluminum packaging? Not quite. Our tubes and bottles carry interior varnishes that protect the formula, exterior coatings, inks, and decorative finishes. To actually recycle them, all of that has to be separated from the aluminum, and the separation remains partial.

The real good news is in the infrastructure. In France, 61% of aluminum packaging is recycled as of 2024, up from 32% in 2009. The Projet Métal initiative, launched by Citeo with local authorities, equipped sorting centers to capture the small cosmetic packaging that used to slip through. As of 2025, all of it can be sorted, everywhere.

Translation: pure aluminum is like modeling clay. You reshape it endlessly. A cosmetic bottle is the same clay with paint and glitter on top. You have to clean everything off before you can reshape anything.

SILICONES

I love silicones. Silky feel, slip, flawless finish. For a formulator, they're an incredibly useful tool.

You often hear that silicones come from petroleum. That's a shortcut. Their backbone is mineral, built on silica, the stuff of sand. The groups grafted onto it are synthesized in a lab. The real question isn't where they come from. It's what they do on skin.

On skin, silicones aren't recognized by cells. They form a film on the surface. That film fills in visually and sensorially, but it doesn't enter the biological functioning of the skin. After rinsing, they're not biodegradable in the conventional sense. They break down slowly into silica and CO2, partially retained by wastewater treatment plants.

Our approach is biomimetic. We bring the skin molecules it recognizes, molecules it knows how to use. Silicones don't belong to that family. That's not a judgment. It's a coherence.

Translation: a silicone on skin is a silk shirt on a tired back. Pleasant, smooth, beautiful drape. Under the shirt, the back is what it was.

THE WORDS

Five words show up everywhere on cosmetic packaging. Clean. Natural. Eco-responsible. Reef safe. Ocean friendly. Not one of them has a harmonized regulatory definition in Europe. Any brand can print them on a box tomorrow morning, with no justification, no oversight, and no consequences.

A European directive, Green Claims, was supposed to change that by requiring proof for every environmental claim. In mid-2025, the Commission announced that its adoption was under reconsideration. Its entry into force in its original form is no longer guaranteed.

Translation: "clean" on packaging is a medal you give yourself. Shiny on the box. Worthless everywhere else.

And where does Mimétique stand in all of this?

Our bottles are glass when the formula allows. Our tubes are aluminum when the format calls for it. We choose suppliers who minimize the varnishes and additives that complicate recycling.

Our daily SPF care is in plastic. An SPF formula requires packaging that protects it from photodegradation. Aluminum isn't chemically compatible. Glass is too fragile for something you carry every day. We chose plastic because it was the only option compatible with the integrity of the formula. We're working on the type of plastic, on reducing wall thickness, on moving to mono-material. I'll keep you posted when we've actually improved what can be improved.

Our formulas contain no silicones. 220 iterations to get a texture we were happy with on the SPF care, without them. We're still at it.

We don't use any of the five vague words. We describe what our cares do, molecule by molecule, with a percentage. That's more precise.

There's also what we don't control. Packaging suppliers have made enormous progress in the last ten years. Recycled plastics, mono-materials, thinner walls, eliminated additives. Today, the bottleneck is no longer mostly technical. It's infrastructural. Public policy on collection and sorting is moving more slowly than industrial innovation. We're doing our part. Our part isn't enough.