Why Your “Clean” Skincare Might Still Be Leaving a Plastic Footprint

If you’re a nerd like me and read ingredient labels for fun in your free time, you’ve probably noticed a whole class of words that show up again and again in your beauty products: carbomers, acrylates, acrylate copolymers. These ingredients all fall into a broader category of synthetic liquid polymers — long chains of repeating molecules designed to thicken, stabilize, and give lotions that silky texture that feels so good on our skin.

Here’s the twist: many of these polymers behave, chemically and environmentally, like plastics. In fact, when they meet specific definitions used by regulators, they fall into the category of microplastics; those tiny plastic particles or materials that persist in the environment and can't break down in a soil or ocean ecosystem.

What Counts as a “Microplastic”?

Scientists define microplastics broadly as synthetic polymer particles that are small (typically less than 5 mm across) and not readily biodegradable. In the beauty world, that includes not just the obvious (like solid beads used for exfoliation), but also certain gel-forming polymers like acrylates and carbomers that don’t dissolve or biodegrade in nature.

Take carbomer, for example. It’s a synthetic polymer widely used to thicken and stabilize gels and creams — and under the EU’s microplastic regulations, carbomer itself is considered a synthetic polymer microparticle when added intentionally to cosmetic formulas. Likewise, acrylate copolymers and crosspolymers are on many lists of ingredients flagged as microplastic contributors.

Where might you find these carbomers, you ask? They're most common in moisturizers, serums, sunscreens, eye creams, facial cleansers, and even hand sanitizers –– they're everywhere.

Europe has been on the front lines of regulating microplastics for years, and in 2023 it took a major new step with Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/2055. This amendment to the EU’s REACH chemical law restricts the intentional use of synthetic polymer microparticles (SPMs)—essentially microplastics—across a wide range of products, including cosmetics.

Rather than an immediate blanket ban, the EU has set a series of phase-out deadlines so that companies can reformulate:

• Rinse-off cosmetic products must comply by October 2027

• Most leave-on products by October 2029

• And makeup, lip, and nail products by October 2035

These staggered timelines reflect the complexity of the issue — not just engineering challenges, but analytical ones too, because regulators have to decide precisely which polymers count as microplastics under the law.

What This Means in Practice

For decades, the cosmetic industry has used synthetic polymers to build appealing textures and stable formulas. But as the science around microplastic pollution has matured, and as regulators like the European Chemicals Agency and the EU Commission have codified definitions and restrictions, the industry is being pushed to rethink those ingredients from the ground up.

That doesn’t mean skincare is suddenly going to turn into a Zero Waste utopia overnight — the regulatory machinery moves slowly — but it does mean that some of the long-standing excuses for retaining plastic-like polymers (e.g., “there’s no alternative”) are becoming harder to sustain.

A Growing Movement — Not Just a Law

It’s worth noting that this regulatory shift reflects broader consumer and scientific concern about microplastics. In the U.S., the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 famously banned little plastic exfoliating beads from rinse-off products precisely because they pass right through wastewater treatment and into the ocean.

Today’s debate is bigger and more nuanced: it’s not just about visible beads, but about the thousands of polymeric ingredients that contribute to persistent pollution in ways we’re still mapping.

Not All is Lost

This shift towards cleaner personal care ingredients doesn’t require sacrificing performance. VERDE Biomaterials’s first commercial product was designed specifically to replace carbomers across many of their most common use cases — from gel moisturizers and serums to cleansers and sunscreens while being fully biodegradable. Unlike many natural thickeners that struggle outside narrow formulation windows, VERDE’s material remains stable across wide pH ranges and in formulations with high electrolyte loads, conditions that traditionally force formulators back to synthetic polymers. In other words, the same kinds of “tough” formulations that made carbomers indispensable are exactly where next-generation biomaterials now have to perform — and increasingly, can.