Kosas Brand Overview: Are They Clean & Sustainable?

Kosas is a beauty brand founded in 2015 and heavily marketing itself as clean beauty. Their tagline is “makeup for skincare freaks,” and riding high on their colorful branding and focus on clean beauty, they’ve quickly amassed a large following.

At the time of writing, they have 282k followers on Instagram. They’re a brand that took full advantage of the social media landscape to grow as quickly as possible.

Is Kosas as clean as they say? We closely looked at the brand and rated them on our three pillars: ingredients, sustainability, and animal welfare.

Ingredients (Rating: Best)

Kosas is a brand that leans heavily into the “clean beauty” angle, so it’s essential for us to analyze them closely.

We looked at the ingredients in 15+ products from Kosas, and our findings were surprisingly good.

Kosas is transparent about its formulations, and we can find complete ingredient lists on the website for all of its products. This also includes their fragrances, all of which are made from essential oils or other plant-based sources.

The only actual offender we found is synthetic dyes like RED 22 LAKE (CI 45380) and RED 7 LAKE (CI 15850) in their Wet Lip Oil Glosses. Red synthetic dyes like these are very common in beauty products, even those labeled clean. Dyes are an ingredient that’s very difficult to replace with natural ingredients.

Other than that, the ingredients in Kosas products appear to be genuinely good. For this reason, along with their transparency, we give them a rating of best.

Sustainability (Rating: Iffy)

Although a handful are made in Italy, most Kosas products are made in the U.S.. This means a much smaller carbon footprint than brands that have their products made overseas and shipped to the U.S.

Kosas doesn’t give much information on their website about sustainability practices. Nothing is mentioned about packaging, and most of their products are in plastic, so it’s safe to assume that there’s nothing sustainable about the brand.

For these reasons, we give them a rating of iffy in terms of sustainability.

Animal Welfare (Rating: Good)

Cruelty-Free

Kosas is a genuinely cruelty-free brand. This means that Kosas never tests on animals at any point of production.

Not Vegan

On the other hand, Kosas isn’t a 100% vegan brand. While most of their products are vegan, some items like their lipsticks include non-vegan ingredients like beeswax.

Brand Ratings

Our rating scale ranges from “Best” (for having the best practices) to “Bad” (for having unacceptable practices). We rated Kosas as follows.

INGREDIENTS	Best – Kosas has clean formulations, with a few synthetic dyes being the only ingredient even remotely iffy.
SUSTAINABILITY	Iffy – Most Kosas products are packaged in plastic, and no information can be found regarding any sustainability initiatives or efforts in improving in this area.
ANIMAL WELFARE	Good – Kosas is fully cruelty-free and has many vegan products, but some contain non-vegan ingredients like beeswax.

Overall Rating: Good

Kosas is a brand marketed as clean beauty, and they perform well according to our three pillars: ingredients, sustainability, and animal welfare.

They have a few products that contain synthetic dyes, but their ingredients are overall good. Their sustainability practices could be better, as they do not focus on sustainable packaging. Kosas is cruelty-free and most of their products are vegan.