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At Credo, we lead by example with a comprehensive standard.

What is The Credo Clean Standard™?

In order for “clean” to have meaning, we need a vision, a common lexicon, and meaningful guidelines—and requiring compliance always helps to make it real, too. Enter The Credo Clean Standard™.

Credo has always had its Dirty List®, which is a file of specific ingredient names as well as types of ingredients that Credo prohibits or restricts, usually due to safety and/or sustainability reasons. The Dirty List is over 2700 chemicals (note that some of these are rarely used in our industry, but they could be, and we want to cover our bases). 

An abbreviated Dirty List® list is here. 

The Dirty List® is an important foundation for building a clean product, but The Credo Clean Standard™ goes much further than a “free of” list. Some elements of the policy include: 

• Use only official ingredient terminology (called INCI), not marketing language on ingredient lists
  
  
• Obtain documentation on ingredients’ composition, purity and sourcing information
  
  
• Conduct stability and shelf-life testing
  
  
• Back up product and ingredient claims
  
  
• Be transparent about “fragrance”—at a minimum, Credo brand partners must categorize the type of fragrance they use, and we encourage full disclosure of all fragrance ingredients. Learn More

Most of this criteria is not currently required by the US government, or comprehensively by other retailers (i.e. we don’t have a “clean” section of the store–every product we sell must meet The Credo Clean Standard™). 

Credo’s Clean Standard™ debuted in 2018, and in 2020, we added the Sustainable Packaging Guidelines to our store-wide policy.  Both will continue to evolve over time as we ask hard questions and review data, and we learn from allies up and down the supply chain. Raising the bar on safety, sustainability and transparency is not easy, but most things worthwhile aren’t.