Over the three years of the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, we have looked critically at almost all trending catchwords, phrases and terms used in the beauty industry. Clean, green, waterless, zero waste, upcycled, microbiome, essential, raw and blue beauty are just some we've covered. A term very much on the rise in early 2021 is conscious beauty.

And who better to define conscious beauty than The Conscious Beauty Union; an entity committed to informing and guiding beauty professionals such as makeup artists, beauticians and salon practitioners on how to make sound, informed conscious choices about the cosmetics they buy, use or promote?

In this episode, host and Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier talks to the three co-founders of The Conscious Beauty Union (CBU) - Khandiz Joni, Tahira Herold and Lou Dartford - to find out not only about the CBUs' role but also to drill into the fine print on conscious beauty, and in particular what it means to the wider industry as well as beauty consumers.

The Conscious Beauty Union is an informal education platform helping beauty professionals develop sustainable practices but its voice should resonate with anyone engaged in beauty. The CBU defines conscious beauty as making informed choices about one product over another by knowing as much as we can about its full lifecycle.

While sustainable beauty is about looking at perhaps single aspects of a brand or product, such as the packaging or how a key ingredient is harvested, conscious beauty takes a holistic, global view. Conscious beauty examines categories that go beyond sustainability. The aim is for us all, from beauty industry insiders to consumers to be able to make conscious beauty purchases based also, for example, on a brand's transparency, promotion of inclusivity and its ethics.

In this episode on conscious beauty, you will:

• Find out about the key differences between conscious beauty and sustainable beauty;
• Discover that conscious beauty is about giving us the information to start our own journey of travel towards making better beauty consumer choices and is not a prescriptive way of engaging with beauty products;
• Realise that conscious beauty will mean different things to different people; our ability to put conscious beauty into practice will vary with location and budget and, in the case of beauty professionals such as makeup artists or salon practitioners, with the role of beauty products in their jobs; and
• Find out that conscious beauty can mainstream if we all make steps to start asking questions everyday about our beauty purchasing habits and about the beauty brands we use.

Key take-outs include:

• The Conscious Beauty Union offers an educational platform and movement to help beauty professionals (and others) start to ask the questions to make conscious choices about their beauty buying and usage habits. It has member-only advice, educational webinars, articles and other training and information as well as invaluable free resources on its site.
• We should celebrate and feel proud as beauty consumers, professionals and brands of the small wins on our journey to more conscious beauty rather than feel guilty about how we engaged with and used perhaps less ethical or sustainable beauty products in the past.
• We need to accept what we can do with the information we have at the time on a product or brand and lever that to motivate us to educate also our own audiences and circles, whether friends and family or beauty industry colleagues, partners and customers.