Stunning Academy-Award winning actress Michelle Pfeiffer has always turned heads; but now she is doing it in the beauty industry with the launch of her unisex, Environmental Working Group(EWG)-verified and Cradle to Cradle-certified fragrance, Henry Rose, available in five distinct scents. Launched earlier this week, the Henry Rose line marks what is becoming requisite for beauty: products that are transparent, sustainable and clean. However, it is the first time such rigorous clean standards have been applied to a fragrance, making Henry Rose the very first fine fragrance to earn the EWG-Verified mark. Additionally, Cradle to Cradle looks at a product through five quality categories—material health, material reutilization, renewable energy and carbon management, water stewardship, and social fairness. Henry Rose is Cradle to Cradle-certified at the gold level, with a material health score of platinum.
The origins for Henry Rose began many years ago. "When I became a new mother, I started to see the world through my children’s eyes. I started to question our environment, the food my family ate and the products we used. As I was searching for reliable resources to help me find safer products, I came across Skin Deep, a database founded by the EWG, the Environmental Working Group, where personal care products are rated by levels of hazard for humans, and I went down the rabbit hole. No one ever really questions fragrance, and everything is protected by trade secrets and proprietary information," Pfeiffer said in an interview with the The Hollywood Reporter.
In fact, Pfeiffer gave up wearing perfume for 10 years. “I had given up wearing fragrance altogether, and I missed it,” she said in a press release. So Pfeiffer created a fragrance line that met EWG's strict standards with scents that evoked special people and places and named the line after her now adult children, daughter Claudia Rose and son John Henry.
The EWG sets rigorous criteria for health, ingredient disclosure and transparency. Fragrance can be formulated from any number of the nearly 4,000 chemical ingredients typically used by the industry, which is usually kept hidden from the consumer.
Henry Rose discloses all of its ingredients and follows certain manufacturing guidelines while also being assessed for renewable energy and water use. Some of its packaging is sustainably sourced, bottles are made of 90 percent recycled glass with caps made of soy.
“Earning the EWG-verified mark isn’t easy, as anyone who has read our exacting criteria can attest,” said EWG president Ken Cook. “We are thrilled to add a fine fragrance to the growing list of EWG-verified products. These scents prove that fragrance companies are capable of disclosing all of their ingredients.”
A self-funded venture, Henry Rose scents sell for $120 each exclusively at henryrose.com.