Shady Beauty

Palm oil is the most widely-used vegetable oil in the world, a globally traded commodity that is used in approximately half of all consumer goods, including cosmetics. Palm oil comes from the fruit pulp of oil palm trees grown on vast plantations. Approximately 83% of the world’s total palm oil is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia.

In cosmetics, palm oil can be found nearly anywhere, appearing in the ingredients lists of liquid eyeliners, cream foundations, shampoo, lip balm, and lipstick. It can be difficult to identify palm oil in any given list of ingredients since there are at least 200 names of ingredients derived from palm oil including:

1.5 million children in Indonesia work in the agricultural sector, including on palm oil plantations, where they often labour in unsafe conditions. 

These are children as young as five years old, and not just in Indonesia, but also Malaysia, Ecuador, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, and Colombia. Workers on these palm oil plantations are often forced to enlist the help of their spouse or children to meet their given quotas, get bonuses, or avoid penalties — since they are often paid by weight.

While about 90% of the global cocoa crop ends up in chocolate confectionary products, cocoa is increasingly used in skincare and cosmetics for its healing and skin-softening properties. This is due to the increased demand for natural beauty as cosmetics companies reformulate their products to replace synthetic compounds with natural ones.

In cosmetics, cocoa can be found in moisturising creams, lotions, soaps, bath bombs, sugar scrubs, face masks, blush and bronzer.

The world’s leading producer of cocoa is Côte D’Ivoire, a small country on the western coast of Africa, followed by Ghana. It's generally grown by small-scale farmers. The pay is low and the work is labour-intensive, and as a result, many families who grow cocoa cannot afford to hire adult workers. Instead, they turn to their children to make ends meet.

An estimated 2.1 million children work on cocoa farms in Côte D’Ivoire and Ghana alone, and during COVID-19 lockdowns, researchers saw a 21% increase in child labour in Cote d’Ivoire. 

Do you know all the steps involved in the processing cocoa?

In cosmetics, vanilla is widely used in skincare products for its antioxidant properties and fragrance. You'll likely recognize vanilla as a key ingredient found in body lotions, lip balms, body butters, foundations, and creams.

Farming vanilla is tedious work. In Mexico, where vanilla is native, the bees pollinate the plants naturally. In East Africa, however, the absence of these bees means that each vanilla orchid must be pollinated by hand, making it a time-intensive product to grow. After all of this, vanilla middlemen pay farmers low rates for their crops, only to sell them for high prices on the global market.

Children as young as 10 can be found helping their parents on the vanilla fields instead of attending school, and farmers reported that child labour had been increasing in a 2020 assessment in Uganda.

Instead of going to school, boys and girls spend six to seven hours a day pollinating every orchid by hand in the late morning hours in order to have a successful harvest. To make matters worse, in some rural areas of Madagascar, it's common for the daughters of poor vanilla farmers to be forced to "repay" their family debt through sexual exploitation.

You can find shea butter in a wide variety of products, including eye makeup, lotions and creams, suntan products, lipstick, and hair care. In the last decade, the global demand for shea kernels has doubled.

The majority of commercial shea nuts are sourced from West Africa, where shea trees are native and an estimated 16 million women work in picking, crushing, roasting, grinding, and cooking the shea nuts for selling.

When paid a fair price, women-led shea cooperatives can be an important source of livelihoods for local communities. We've seen the demand for natural cosmetics in recent years cause an increase of direct-traded shea products marketed for their ability to empower communities of women.

The problem is that there is a lack of published investigations into child involvement in collecting and processing shea – especially in poor agricultural communities where children may be at higher risk – which highlights the need for additional research and awareness by companies and consumers.

Mica adds sparkle to highlighter and blush, eye shadows, lipsticks, and nail polishes. Any product that shimmers likely contains mica, which can be either natural (mined) or synthetic. In addition to shine, mica also serves as an anti-caking agent in powdered cosmetics, such as foundation and blush.

Mica is mined in various countries, including Brazil, Canada, China, Madagascar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the United States. However, 25% of the total mica in use around the world comes from just two states in India: Jharkhand and Bihar. Mica from these states is considered higher grade and perfect for providing the pearly sheen in cosmetics products.

In these two states, more than 22,000 children, some as young as five years old, work in small mines with their family members, who often have no other source of income.

Mica mining is incredibly dangerous for children. The risks they face include broken bones and severe injuries in accidents, death from exhaustion and heatstroke, and a type of lung disease known as silicosis, which is caused by inhaling quartz or silica dust that causes lung inflammation and scarring. Not to mention, many children work in mine shafts up to 300 metres deep which are known to collapse.

Although incredibly important for use in electronics and engineering, there has been an explosion in the use of copper derivatives in high-tech serums and other skincare products in recent years, thanks to its skin healing and plumping properties. Cosmetics only make up a very small percentage of overall copper use worldwide, but there is mined material in popular ingredients like copper sulphates, copper gluconate and copper peptides.

Chile mined the most copper worldwide in 2022, with Peru and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) tied for second place. In addition to being a large producer of copper, the DRC also has a large problem with child labour; it’s estimated that four in 10 miners in DRC are under the age of 18.

Children might work up to 12 hours and earn just USD $2 per day as low-paid washers or sorters. However, there was an increase in child labour at the mines during COVID-19, as decreased prices for artisanal miners drove even more children out of schools and into the mines.

Despite protective legislation, the fight against child labour in mines in DRC continues. In general, risks are higher in the informal artisanal mining sector where children are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by armed guards and mine owners, as well as significant immediate and long-term adverse impacts on their health. Tunnels are often hand dug, poorly supported, and badly ventilated – deaths due to mine collapses, and ‘hard metal lung disease’ are well documented.