Shampoo bars, toothpaste tablets, compostable deodorant — zero waste personal care has moved well past novelty. The brands in this district have figured out that sustainable packaging and high performance aren't in conflict: they're the same goal. Each one has made the switch-out seamless, eliminating plastic at the source rather than offsetting it somewhere downstream. These aren't brands asking you to sacrifice. They're proving the sacrifice was never necessary.
Toothpaste tablets in a glass jar. Effective, plastic-free, and travel-ready.
Two founders started Bite after realizing toothpaste tubes are essentially unrecyclable. The solution was a tablet — bite it, brush, done — delivered in a refillable glass jar. No plastic. No water weight. No compromise on clean.
Concentrated beauty bars — shampoo, conditioner, body wash, no plastic.
New Zealand-born Ethique makes everything in bar form: shampoo, conditioner, face wash, body lotion, deodorant. Their bars are five to ten times more concentrated than their liquid equivalents. They've calculated they've helped offset more than 20 million plastic bottles. The numbers matter; the products work.
Solid shampoo and conditioner bars that lather like their bottled counterparts.
Most solid shampoo bars fail for people with specific hair types. HiBar formulated theirs for different textures — moisturizing, volumizing, maintaining — and the results rival bottled shampoo. The challenge was always performance, not sustainability. They solved it.
Refillable deodorant, mouthwash, and more. The refill revolution, made easy.
This brand designs around the moment of switching. Dissolvable mouthwash tablets, deodorant refill pouches, concentrated cleaner sachets — they've made the sustainable option as frictionless as possible. The point isn't perfection. It's making the obvious choice the better one.
Zero waste deodorant, soap, and skincare. Handmade in small batches.
Rachel Winard and Jeff Kurosaki have been making zero-waste, vegan personal care in Brooklyn since 2009 — before it was a category. Their baking-soda deodorant sticks and paper-tube lip balms were the originals. Some products have barely changed because they didn't need to.
Lipstick in 100% recycled packaging. Zero waste makeup that's genuinely beautiful.
Ericka Rodriguez decided that zero-waste cosmetics shouldn't look or feel like a compromise. The lip sticks arrive in recycled crayon-paper packaging; the colors are genuinely wearable. Proof that working within a constraint makes for better design.
Plastic-free makeup and skincare. Clean ingredients, honest packaging.
A small Asheville-based brand making plastic-free makeup and skincare. Eyeshadow palettes in recycled metal tins. Foundations in glass jars. Everything organic, everything in packaging you can compost, repurpose, or feel good throwing away.
Reusable menstrual cups and discs. Sustainable period care done right.
Saalt entered the menstrual cup category with a specific goal: make it approachable. Soft, flexible, available in multiple sizes, with genuinely useful guidance on how to use them. The brand that brought a lot of people to the category for the first time.
Zero waste personal care brands have matured past the early-adopter phase where you had to choose between sustainability and a functional product. The best plastic-free beauty brands now outperform their conventional counterparts on multiple dimensions — shampoo bars with protein-bond technology that rival professional salon formulas, toothpaste tablets that remineralise as well as any fluoride paste, and deodorants that actually work through a full gym session. The key to a successful switch to zero waste personal care is sequencing. Start with the products you use least frequently, where a slight formula adjustment matters less — body bars, hand soap, face cloths. Once you're comfortable with the category logic, move to higher-stakes products like shampoo and deodorant. The first two to four weeks of a shampoo bar transition involve a sebum recalibration period that many people interpret as failure; it isn't. Stick through it. With plastic-free beauty brands, look at the full lifecycle of the packaging, not just the primary container. A glass bottle refill scheme is genuinely circular; a 'recyclable' plastic pouch often isn't. Compostable packaging is only compostable under specific industrial conditions — check whether your local facility accepts it. The brands in this district have done the due diligence on their end; do yours on whether the local infrastructure supports the end-of-life story. When it does, the system works.
