Cosmetics: rating a formula when no score is mandatory

In cosmetics, no regulation requires you to rate a product. And yet the rating arrives from every direction: a retailer wants an environmental index before listing a range, a brand owner demands a CSR assessment before signing, a brand wants to display its own scale. Nobody obliges you to produce a figure — everybody asks for one.

The demand comes from the market, not the legislator

The contrast with food is sharp. There, a score rests on legislation or a public program, and some countries make it mandatory; here, it applies because a customer wrote it into a specification. The practical consequence is identical — it has to be computed, justified and kept current — but the source of the scale changes everything: it is private, it evolves without regulatory notice, and it differs from one brand owner to the next.

So a single product record ends up carrying assessments of very different origins: a corporate CSR rating, an industry index, a brand’s own impact score.

Some are entered by hand because they come from an outside body; others are computed from the formula and the packaging. Mixing them in a spreadsheet means losing track of what was calculated and what was copied across.

Building your own scale

This is the sector’s peculiarity: many companies end up defining an in-house score, because no existing index reflects their priorities — naturality, raw material origin, process, packaging, biodegradability.

Such a scale is not a gimmick: it combines weighted criteria, often many of them, and outputs a score converted into a letter.

The important part: in beCPG, it is built through configuration, with evaluation criteria — criteria, weightings, calculation formulas and a letter grade (A, B, C, D). That is what lets it change when the CSR team revises a trade-off, without waiting for a software release.

What an in-house score needs to be defensible

• A version. A revised scale gets a new version number, and you know which one each product was rated against.
• The calculation detail. You cannot argue an overall grade with a customer; you can argue a criterion. When a brand owner challenges a B, the answer lies in the indicators behind it.
• A date. An attestation has a validity period. A score with no calculation date proves nothing.

Compute it before the formula is frozen

The costliest mistake is rating the product once it has been developed. At that point a poor score is paid for in full reformulation, packaging redesign, or a lost listing.

Computed during formulation, the score becomes a design criterion like cost or regulatory compliance: you see what a surfactant substitution or a lighter bottle does, while the choice is still open. It is the logic already described for calculating the Green Impact Index, extended to every scale your customers impose on you.

In cosmetics a score is not an obligation. It is a condition of entry. If you want to see what your own formulas return, let’s talk.