Advancing Transparency Across the Product Journey

As featured in The Estée Lauder Companies FY26 Social Impact and Sustainability report, published October 28, 2026.

A product’s impact is shaped by every stage of its life cycle. It reflects a series of decisions about ingredients, sourcing, packaging, manufacturing, energy use, consumer use, and what happens when the product reaches the end of its life.

At The Estée Lauder Companies, we are working to connect these decisions to create a more transparent and complete view of our products’ impact. This work is critical to our commercial business because product transparency strengthens consumer trust, informs innovation, and helps our brands respond to growing interest in how beauty products are made, used, and experienced.

UNDERSTANDING THE PRODUCT FOOTPRINT

Building product transparency begins with understanding a product’s total environmental footprint. This year, ELC committed to developing a more comprehensive understanding of products throughout their life cycle, with the ambition to evaluate 100% of our formulated product portfolio using a life-cycle assessment (LCA) tool. Our formulated product portfolio refers to products for which the formula is developed and owned by ELC.

As implementation expands across the portfolio, LCA insights can help identify areas of impact, inform product and packaging decisions, and strengthen the data foundation for product transparency. The goal is to turn product-level information into insights that support better decisions for our brands and more meaningful information for consumers.

FORMULATION APPROACH

Our approach to product formulation is guided by green chemistry principles, which inform ingredient selection, formulation decisions, and innovation. For more than a decade, we have collaborated with experts, strengthened our internal capabilities, and developed tools that enable our teams to incorporate green chemistry into their daily work. We apply these methods to evaluate ingredients, innovate across our ingredient portfolio, and support the design of our products.

ELC’s Green Score provides a structured way to consider selected environmental attributes during product development. By bringing greater visibility to factors such as ingredient sourcing and formulation choices, as well as other elements of a product’s profile, Green Score helps teams identify opportunities to improve product performance and make more informed decisions that reduce environmental impacts.

Product formulation is a critical component of how our brands advance product transparency and respond to evolving consumer expectations.

The examples below demonstrate how ingredient sourcing and formulation processes can be considered alongside product performance and environmental stewardship, helping integrate sustainability considerations into innovation.

DESIGNING SUSTAINABLE PACKAGING

Packaging protects the formula, shapes the consumer experience, and provides an important opportunity to advance product sustainability. ELC’s packaging efforts include exploring refillable and reusable formats, increasing recycled content, using responsibly sourced materials, and improving recyclability. LCA can serve as an additional tool to help assess the potential impacts of different packaging choices and inform decisions across the product portfolio. As implementation expands, product-level insights can complement existing packaging sustainability efforts and help teams better understand tradeoffs across materials, formats, and life-cycle stages.

These examples demonstrate how packaging can be leveraged to support the product experience while advancing packaging sustainability priorities and integrating sustainability considerations into design and innovation.

MAKING TRANSPARENCY VISIBLE TO CONSUMERS

Transparency becomes most meaningful when consumers can see, understand, and use the information provided. Packaging, brand websites, retail environments, digital marketplaces, ingredient glossaries, and external certifications each offer opportunities to communicate product and brand attributes.

Our corporate ingredient glossary helps consumers better understand the purpose of key ingredients and the role they play in our products. By making ingredient information more accessible, the glossary supports informed consumer decision-making and reinforces our commitment to clear, consistent product communication. Brands also play an important role in making product attributes clear and accessible by communicating relevant information directly on product pages and packaging.

Product transparency brings together science, data, design, commercial strategy, and communication. As ELC advances its LCA work, insights from across the product journey can help inform innovation, strengthen decision-making, and support more relevant information for consumers.

From an ingredient glossary to a refill system, from packaging design to an external certification, each touchpoint can help tell a more complete product story. By building greater visibility into how products are developed and experienced, ELC is working to support innovation that is commercially meaningful, data-informed, and more thoughtful for the future of beauty.

Where our brands appear in retail environments also matters, creating opportunities to connect consumers with recognized sustainability attributes at the point of purchase. This year, ELC achieved GreenCircle Sustainable Energy Practices certification for products manufactured at our owned and operated manufacturing sites, reflecting the use of 100% renewable electricity. As a result, thousands of products across multiple ELC brands are eligible for Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly program, helping consumers identify products associated with recognized sustainability standards and certifications.

Read more in the FY26 Social Impact and Sustainability Report.