As European rules on green claims tighten, the challenge for cosmetic brands is no longer to find something green to say, but to say only what can be proven – and to build communication that holds up under scrutiny. Green claims carry the most weight when they are not, in the marketing sense, claims at all, but the natural output of how a business operates.
When sustainability is treated as a discipline embedded in everyday processes – in sourcing decisions, in formulation, in the choice of certification, in the way a product is described – the task of communication changes entirely. The message follows from the substance rather than being assembled around it.
This is the difference between a company that has something to communicate and one that is searching for something green to say.
Understood this way, green claims are a business imperative and a way of working, not a campaign appended to a finished product.
Choosing the Right Certification
If green claims are to rest on evidence, certification is where much of that evidence is anchored – but only if the certification itself is meaningful. A useful certification is verifiable, recognizable to the consumer, and genuinely reflective of the product and the brand behind it. The market is filled with labels, many of them niche, that imply much yet clarify little. The European Commission has counted more than 230 sustainability labels in use across the EU, with widely varying levels of transparency and rigor. The discipline is to choose an established standard over a proliferation of niche labels, and to choose it deliberately rather than collecting marks for their own sake.
This logic is now reinforced by European regulation. Under the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition directive, which becomes applicable across the EU from September 2026, sustainability labels that are not based on a recognized certification scheme will no longer be permitted. The effect is to make the choice of certification a question of credibility and compliance at once: a recognized, independently-governed standard is both what consumers can trust and what the law will accept.
Reclaiming a Language That Has Lost Its Meaning
The greatest challenge in communicating green claims today is not a shortage of things to say, but the state of the words available to say them. Much of the vocabulary of green communication has been misappropriated. Terms that once carried precise meaning have been used so widely, and so loosely, that they now signal very little – and, worse, they have come to attract mistrust. A consumer who hears a familiar green word is now more likely to feel suspicion than reassurance.
The wariness is not unfounded: a European Commission review found around 53% of environmental claims to be vague, misleading, or unfounded, and 40% to have no supporting evidence at all. Restoring it means reclaiming the words still worth using and deliberately re-linking them to trust. This is slow work, and it cannot be done with a single campaign. It is done by using language precisely, consistently, and only in ways that can be substantiated, until those words begin to mean something again.
Describe and Explain; Leave the Judgment to Others
Authenticity, transparency, and creativity are often discussed as though a brand had to balance them against one another. In practice they are not separate, and they need not compete. They converge in a single discipline: describing and explaining. A brand’s proper role is to set out what its claim is and how the product delivers it.
The evaluation of claims belongs largely elsewhere: to independent certifiers who verify against a standard, and to the consumers whose own experience and voice confirm or challenge the claims. This separation is also a safeguard. A claim a brand cannot bring itself to state plainly, and submit to outside verification, is usually one worth reconsidering. When a company keeps to description and leaves evaluation to those better placed to give it, authenticity, transparency, and creativity stop being competing aims and become simply the qualities of how its products are described and explained.
Credibility and Speed: Building Trust Through Dialogue
Social media places two demands on green communication that can appear to conflict: it must be credible, and it must be catchy and quick. The solution is not to sacrifice one for the other, but to insist that whatever is communicated makes sense and adds value. On these channels, the audience has the opportunity to answer back, and that response is itself a form of scrutiny a brand cannot control or stage-manage. A short format is not a license for an empty claim. Used well, these channels can be a space for knowledge sharing and education, and that is where their value for green claims lies. Trust is built through engagement on the substance of the product and the brand rather than through the volume or frequency of posting.
The pace of the channel sets the length of the message, never the strength of the proof beneath it. That is not negotiable.
From Greenwashing to Greentrusting
Fighting greenwashing is, for companies, a largely solitary task – tidying their own communication, defending their own claims, one product at a time. Greentrusting is collaborative. Because trust in green claims is shared across a category, no single brand can restore it alone: a misleading claim anywhere erodes confidence everywhere, while a well-evidenced claim strengthens the ground others stand on too. Seen this way, the trend worth pursuing is not the next claim to make, but a shared discipline that brands can build together. It also reframes a competitor not as someone to out-claim, but as a partner in keeping the category credible. Holding one another to verifiable standards and raising the baseline of what credible communication looks like allows credibility to be rebuilt collectively. For companies, the way forward in green claims is to shift the mindset entirely: from fighting greenwashing alone to building greentrusting together.
Monica Otten
Founder & CEO, Peruda GmbH, Zurich, Switzerland, www.perudaskincare.com