Are Sheet Masks the New Plastic Straws?
“Sheet masks are trash,” Lauren Singer announces. We’re chatting about the sustainability of the single-use skin-care products, and I start to laugh at her play on words—but Singer speeds right past the joke. “They’re unnecessary, they’re superfluous,” she rattles off. “They come wrapped in plastic.” To the environmental activist and founder of Package Free Shop, sheet masks are, quite literally, pre-packaged piles of glorified garbage.
Harsh, maybe—but as the news cycles through stories on climate change and carbon emissions and what to do about the planet’s compounding pollution problem, I can’t help but understand where she’s coming from. Entire cities have banned plastic straws and plastic bags. Extinction Rebellion protested at London Fashion Week while Greta Thunberg petitioned for political involvement at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. Fashion houses are pledging carbon-neutrality. And beauty? While clean beauty is a growing category, and many brands are implementing sustainable practices, single-use items are a special cause for concern.
“Beauty products made to use once and throw out, like makeup wipes and sheet masks, create a lot of unnecessary refuse,” Susan Stevens, the founder and CEO of Made With Respect, tells Vogue. “In the case of sheet masks, there’s a pouch, the mask, and sometimes the mask is wrapped in a plastic sheet.” Usually, none of the components are recyclable and all of them end up in the trash post sheet-masking session, making it one of the more wasteful things one can do in 20 minutes or less.
“The pouches that hold sheet masks are often a combination of aluminum and plastic, which cannot be recycled,” Stevens explains. Singer adds that the stiff, inner plastic sheets likely can’t be processed in recycling plants either (as is the case with a surprising amount of plastics). At best, these materials end up in a landfill; at worst, they end up in the ocean.
“We know plastic can take hundreds of years to decompose, breaking down over time into harmful microplastics—pieces of plastic less than five millimeters long that are manufactured using different toxic and carcinogenic chemicals,” Stevens says. “Research has proven that microplastics are abundant in water, air, and the food we eat.” Besides the potential health hazards of consuming microplastics, the particles release methane as they break down. “Methane emissions contribute to global warming, and global warming affects our climate, creating more severe and unpredictable weather patterns that impact entire ecosystems,” says Stevens.
Then, of course, there’s the mask itself. Most are made with a blend of synthetic materials (nylon, plastic microfibers, polyester), which—as Beauty Heroes founder Jeannie Jarnot so bluntly and beautifully puts it—“equates to laying saturated molten plastic over your face.” As appealing as that sounds, there’s a downside: These “cannot be composted and must go in the [garbage] bin,” says Stevens.
Recent “hydrogel” versions are either made of synthetic polymers—essentially, plastic—or eco-friendly biocellulose, but biodegradable sheet masks aren’t always better. Some come soaked in serums thick with silicones, a class of ingredients that leaves a thin, plastic-y film on the skin’s surface to create the illusion of a “glow.” This film is bioaccumulative, and prevents the “biodegradable” biocellulose or bamboo base from fully breaking down. Instead, silicone-coated sheet masks join their synthetic counterparts in “leaking toxins into the soil” for years, per Stevens. The same goes for under-eye masks, makeup wipes, and daily toning and exfoliating pads.
When you zoom out to consider the effort and emissions that go into producing the product in the first place (one organic cotton mask could require thousands of gallons of water) and the shipping materials associated with online orders, that’s a massive mountain of waste for a momentary thrill. Yet, the single-use sector continues to thrive. “The usage of wet wipes is increasing by 15% each year and the face mask market is expected to grow to over $50 billion by 2025,” Stevens says. “Ongoing production of non-recyclable, non-compostable, and non-biodegradable products will have a considerable impact on the environment.” (On a superficial note: Pollution particles will also have a considerable impact on your skin, hence the popularity of antioxidant beauty products. So technically, cutting down on waste isn’t only better for the earth—it’s better for your face.)