Nobody Wants an Oil Slick on Their Face

By Jane Palmer, CEO, Nature Coatings

In 2022, I was standing in a factory outside of Milan  watching a batch of black ink run through a mixing tank. The smell hit me first — acrid, petrochemical. The batch was destined for a fashion brand I'd been working with. Beautiful clothes. Thoughtfully designed. Marketed on values I believed in. But the black? Straight from an oil refinery.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. Not just in textiles, but everywhere black pigment appeared. Packaging. Paint. And then — the thought that truly wouldn't leave me alone — cosmetics. Mascaras. Eyeliners. Products applied millimeters from the human eye, every single day, by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The pigment behind the black was carbon black: a byproduct of burning ethylene  tar or heavy fuel oil at extreme temperatures. The same basic chemistry that produces industrial rubber compounds. But applied to your lashes. Your lips. Your skin.

Carbon black inherently contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — PAHs. Some PAHs are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as Group 1 carcinogens. The particles are often nanoscale, small enough to raise legitimate questions about bloodstream penetration and systemic exposure over a lifetime of daily application. And the entire supply chain — from the petroleum feedstock to the furnace combustion process to the finished pigment — runs on fossil fuels, emitting the kind of carbon footprint that sits uncomfortably alongside any brand's sustainability commitments.

Carbon black's closest cosmetic alternative — black iron oxide — has never been a real solution. It tends to produce a gray, ashy appearance on skin rather than a true black, and it costs more than carbon black to boot. So formulators have been stuck. And the workarounds compounds the problem: to make mascara waterproof, brands have historically turned to PFAS — the same "forever chemicals" used to coat rain jackets and non-stick pans — now sitting in a tube next to your eye.

I knew something had to change.  The hardest part: there was no alternative.

To understand where we are today, you have to understand how carbon black became so dominant in the first place — and why no one replaced it sooner. It wasn't indifference. It was physics.

Carbon black performs. It delivers a depth of black that no other ingredient in the cosmetic chemist's toolkit could replicate at commercial scale. When you're formulating a mascara that needs to survive humidity, tears, and twelve hours of wear, you don't have the luxury of working with an ingredient that's almost good enough. So the industry did what every industry does when faced with an imperfect material and no alternative: it managed the risk, worked within the regulatory frameworks it had, and kept moving forward. 

As I searched for an alternative, the answer turned out to be wood waste. Specifically, FSC®-certified wood waste — a material otherwise be discarded. Through a closed-loop thermal conversion process, with no added chemicals and no fossil fuel inputs, we transformed that waste into a rich, deep black pigment. We then manufactured it on 100% renewable energy. Nothing goes to waste. And the result is a pigment that is, by its very nature, non-toxic, non-nano, and free of PAHs, VOCs, and PFAS.

To be honest, the first time a cosmetic chemist ran a side-by-side drawdown comparing BioBlack Beauty to carbon black, I was nervous. Sustainability is nice, but performance is everything. If BioBlack couldn't match the jetness, the dispersibility, the stability that formulators had come to expect, none of the rest of it would matter.

It matched! Then, in some applications, it exceeded. As our partners found in their own evaluations — detailed in Black Cosmetics Without Toxic Baggage — the performance was there. The dispersions were clean. And for the first time, a formulator didn't have to make a tradeoff between color depth and ingredient integrity.

We also knew early on that a claim without proof wasn't worth making. The beauty industry has heard "clean" and "natural" and "sustainable" so many times, attached to so little evidence, that the words have nearly lost meaning.

BioBlack Beauty is USDA Certified 100% Biobased — the first and only black pigment for cosmetics to hold that certification. It's China NMPA-compliant, EU REACH-compliant, and aligned with U.S. cosmetic regulations. It meets the retailer clean standards — Clean at Sephora, Clean at Amazon, Clean at Walmart — that brands increasingly need to satisfy before a product even reaches a shelf. It then won the Cosmetics & Toiletries Allēe Award in the Base Cosmetic Ingredient Color Cosmetics category — an honor judged on innovation and performance, not intention.

And the emissions data is verified, independently, under ISO 14040, 14044, and 14067 standards. Our third-party Life Cycle Assessment puts BioBlack's cradle-to-gate carbon footprint at 0.847 kg CO₂ eq per kg of pigment. When biogenic carbon uptake is included, BioBlack achieves a net footprint of –2.247 kg CO₂ eq per kg. It stores more carbon than it emits.

The reason all this matters isn't just compliance. It's because, as we've argued in 5 Challenges & Solutions to De-Risk Your Supply Chain, the cost of staying with a high-risk ingredient compounds over time — in reformulation cycles, in retailer negotiations, in the regulatory reckoning that is already underway across the EU and U.S.

The beauty industry made do with carbon black for as long as it had to. The formulators who built their careers around it were talented, rigorous, and working with the best available materials. That history deserves respect. But history is also the setup for what comes next.

The factories that once had no option are now being approached by brands who want to tell a different story — one that doesn’t start at a refinery and ends with a consumer applying an oil slick to their face. Now, thanks to BioBlack Beauty, the black pigment applied closest to our eyes could be the cleanest one in the formula.