The standards for “clean” beauty are about as opaque as this year’s Best of Beauty-winning liquid eyeliner (Lisa Eldridge Kitten Flick Liquid Eyeliner). While we do celebrate a little mystery in makeup, we would really like to see more transparency in so-called clean products. But there is no universal definition of clean in the beauty industry, and no agreed-upon rules a brand must follow to call its products “nontoxic”—a word that’s too alarmist, anyway, to be worth using. So we created Allure’s Clean Standard, a high bar that products must meet in order to win an Allure Best of Beauty Clean seal.
When you’re shopping for beauty products and see claims on a label like “clean,” or the even more vague “green,” it’s usually because that’s what a brand believes its product is. Yes, it’s completely up to the companies to decide which ingredients to use and not to use; and retailers choose what qualifies as such for their own sites.
To be fair, though, there is no right or wrong answer for what makes a product clean. There are so many cosmetic ingredients out there, and so many brands formulating with them, but no definitive study that weighs the risks and benefits of every single ingredient. In short, no one has all the answers.
But there are ways to make informed decisions, and that’s exactly what we set out to do when we created Allure’s Clean Standard in 2019. We interviewed epidemiologists, toxicologists, cosmetic chemists, and dermatologists about ingredients you can reasonably choose to avoid when shopping for cleaner skin-care, hair-care, makeup, and body-care products.
Ultimately, we identified 14 ingredient classes that a product cannot include if it is to qualify for our Clean awards: Parabens, phthalates, cyclic silicones, sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate, microbeads (polyethylene and polypropylene), triclosan, talc, aluminum salts (antiperspirant actives), mineral oil, petrolatum, hydroquinone, formaldehyde, toluene, and chemical UV filters must all be excluded from an ingredient list. This makes our Clean standard an especially transparent one for brands to meet.
Some of these ingredients are known to be harmful for us and/or the environment (formaldehyde, microbeads) and have generally been abandoned by the beauty industry already; others, however, fall into more of a gray area, with no solid proof that they are harmful nor enough evidence to indisputably deem them safe. (You can read more about each of these ingredients, and why we chose to omit them, here.)
To be clear, we love all different types of beauty products (except for those with formaldehyde), but we also love having access to good information; the kind of information that values accuracy over marketing claims. The 24 winners below are considered worthy by Allure of being called clean, and worthy of a hard-won spot in your beauty routine—and that includes one perfect, bold liquid eyeliner.
Best of Beauty Awards 2026: Clean
Shop your favorite category or keep scrolling for the year’s very best skin-care, hair-care, and makeup products in the clean category.
See our winners:
Best Clean Skin-Care Products
Farmacy Green Clean Cleansing Balm
Best Clean Skin-Care
Farmacy Green Clean Cleansing Balm
Beauty director Sarah Kinonen uses the Farmacy Green Clean Cleansing Balm.
Sarah Kinonen
