Welcome to the Society Botanica blog. Here, we take time with the questions that shape personal care, offering thoughtful perspectives where the conversation is often oversimplified. Our goal is to bring clarity without fear or exaggeration, and to share information that feels both calm and trustworthy. If you ever have a question, or see something that could be improved, we’d love to hear from you.
Palm oil is one of the most ubiquitous bio-origin materials in personal care. It can be used to create everything from glycerin to emulsifiers to surfactants (cleansers). Its versatility drives a vigorous cycle of demand and with demand, inevitably comes exploitation.
When we think of “natural” products, our minds drift to a mythical place of purity and safety, where we are free from the harmful bi-products of the chemical industrial establishment and we return to what we ultimately mythologize as a “pure state.” The reality is much more complicated when we take into account the naturally exploitative nature of mass agriculture.
Palm oil represents a unique lens for us to explore how the Appeal to Nature fallacy overlooks the environmental cost of such positioning and how mass production and mass farming are, on some level, inherently harmful. This post is not intended to demonize palm—in fact palm is an essential part of our formulas. I want to highlight the complexity of what formulators like me face when discussing things like natrality. Every ingredient we use requires its own investigation, a weighing of the pros and cons, limitations of its sourcing, its effectiveness, and its long term impact on our world both upstream and downstream from the products we consume.
Why is Palm Oil Controversial?
The chocolate industry (in particular a very large company we all know) is probably the poster child of unsustainable palm farming today. However, the use of palm is so much larger than the food space and is intricately connected to personal care. It makes up a huge percentage of ingredients that are essential to production of lotions and washes. The global palm market was estimated at greater than $70 billion USD in 2023. Personal care raw materials make up ~16% of that total (food & beverage is 66%) or $11 billion USD.
Palm is farmed in plantations that require the clearing of forest to plant the trees. It is a simple truth that mass production of anything natural will have an impact on the land it is grown on. The regions of the world primarily impacted by this clearing are rainforest regions in Madagascar, Indonesia, and Brazil where critical habitat and species biodiversity is being irreparably destroyed. Orangutans are the species most often mentioned in this context, but deforestation affects species biodiversity across the board for these regions.
Despite its status as an objectively better alternative to non-renewable sources like petroleum, palm plantations also have a non-renewable footprint due to the use of petroleum and petroleum derivatives in farming. Arguably, this footprint is significantly smaller compared to use of petro-derivatives themselves. The point being, their bio-origins do not negate the fact that petroleum plays a role in their production.
Some of these plantations have been the source of human rights abuses with slave labor including children. These are obviously problematic issues, but it becomes more complicated when we look at the self-determining, economic viability of these regions. The answer is not simply “no palm,” as this is a critical export for families in these regions. Both embargoes and oversight from the western world can be patriarchal, heavy-handed, and have strong imperialist overtones that rob these communities of self-determination.
In short, palm oil sourcing can be destructive and problematic, but is also vital to both the communities that produce it and to modern personal care.
Why is Palm Problematic but Not Coconut?
There is some information out there suggesting that coconut is a reliably sustainable alternative to palm. Like all mass-production materials, coconut is not completely innocent. The perception that it doesn’t carry the same environmental burden is complicated. Coconuts are grown in plantations, but often side by side with other crops making it hard to parse the ecological impact of scaled farming practices. Some argue that coconut plantation holdings are vastly smaller than palm plantations, reducing their impact.
However, there is also no analog organization to the RSPO for coconuts to prescribe guidelines for sustainability (even if dubiously enforced or rigorous—see below regarding RSPO). Studying their impact has proven a challenge.
In 2020, a research report suggesting coconut is 5x more destructive than palm re-ignited conversation on this topic. It was largely found to be biased (including RSPO funding), skewed, and not a true picture of coconut production. But it’s an important reminder that our “safe” fallbacks are not always so safe. There is no perfect solution—any form of mass agricultural production will at some point require exploitation of natural resources. It’s a simple fact.
Palm-Oil Alternatives
Coconut is not the only alternative oil to palm. Both rapeseed, sunflower, and soybean are viable alternatives for some categories of production. The challenge is yield, land use, and their own energy requirements for production. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the reduced yield of these alternatives requires even more land to meet the commercial demand. Additionally, these crops are not necessarily viable alternatives for all palm oil production needs. In personal care/cosmetics, palm oil’s unique composition, which is high in C-16 hydrocarbons (palmitic acid/cetyl alcohol) makes it hard to replace for several essential personal care material categories.
There are technologies emerging that may enable us to replace palm sourced materials with sustainable alternatives. For instance, the U.S. based C-16 Sciences has created a process that synthesizes palm alternative materials from yeast/fungus grown in tanks.
The most common palm alternative is petroleum—which obviously has its own problematic history, environmental burden and considerations. Both palm and petroleum are rich in the essential building blocks of many personal care ingredients. However, the prevalence of petrochemical derivatives compared to palm is down to its cost, infrastructure, and efficiency to produce—in spite of its environmental impact. The decision to choose a material derived from palm vs petroleum or another material is down to the personal preferences of the formulator. For my own purposes, I’ve given preference to palm over petroleum, preference to certified RSPO palm over general palm sources, and above all, palm/petroleum alternatives if possible.
Cosmetic Ingredients that Commonly Include Palm Oil
The list is far too large to fully include here, but to get a sense of the scope and size of the use of palm in personal care, here is a short list of common material categories that are palm-derived. If you’re a cosmetic chemist/formulator looking at this list, you know that this list encompasses almost every building block of modern personal care:
- Emulsifiers: the building blocks of all lotions and creams, are very often palm-derived.
- Glycerin: is most often derived from palm, but can come from other natural sources like coconut and flax seed.
- Fatty Alcohols: Another essential building block of lotions and creams. Fatty alcohols like cetearyl and cetyl alcohol are both palm derived, indispensable for building lotion haptics (the feel/experience) and providing stability.
- Surfactants: The cleaning agents that make up body washes—like Cocamidopropyl betaine and sodium lauryl sulfoacetate—are frequently made from palm (but notably, can also be derived from petroleum and coconut). See our Modern Cleansers post for more on surfactant choices v. traditional soap.
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Emollient Esters: “Light oils” often derived from palm (oils) including isopropyl myristate and coco caprylate/caprate.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO Standard)
In response to the issues associated with palm, the RSPO was founded in 2004 and focuses on regulating and certifying production of two palm species: Elaeis guineensis, native to West Africa, and Elaeis oleifera, native to Central and South America.
As of this writing, they are the leading/most recognizable certifier of sustainable palm oil in the world. However, its effectiveness has been (rightly) called into question since its inception. It has, at times, served as a greenwashing shield for large companies due to limited/non-existent auditing of its members and ineffective enforcement of its own by-laws. EthicalConsumer.org did an excellent write up on this in 2021. Because the RSPO’s 4,000 members are predominantly for-profit companies and on a very limited basis NGOs, the organization has a muddy history of being ineffective at their stated purpose, instead helping to soften the negative public image of participating companies.
That said, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm has also been an essential step towards a more sustainable palm future. RSPO members like the World Wildlife Fund, seek measured shifts to sustainable palm oil that honors local economic determinism while mitigating the ecological and environmental impact.
What is RSPO Mass Balance?
RSPO Mass Balance allows for the mixing of certified and non-certified palm oil at any stage of manufacturing. The rule is the non-certified material must not exceed certified material. It’s a tough trade off, but one that provides a stepping stone to scaled sustainability.
Detractors would argue that Mass Balance continues promotion and reliance on non-certified palm and allows bad actors to maintain the status quo. It also disrupts traceability, making it easier for bad actors to go unpunished. Alternatively, Mass Balance is seen as an essential building block on the long road to a sustainable future. It addresses areas where supply chain cannot be easily segregated and creates cost effective building blocks to ease the transition to fully sustainable palm.
Responsible Palm & Society Botanica
While deeply imperfect, at times conflicted and of limited effectiveness—RSPO is currently the best palm certification system that exists today. For indie personal care brands like Society Botanica, we are often faced with complex and imperfect options and this is no exception. We seek to have 100% RSPO/Mass Balance or palm alternative materials. This information can be found on our product pages.
This is a space that I continue to monitor and re-evaluate to ensure that we are making the most compassionate and safe decisions for our line. For example, our Cedar & Mandarin Body Wash and Cedar & Mandarin Body Lotion both rely on RSPO-certified palm where palm cannot be avoided, paired with thoughtful formulation to minimize reliance overall.
Related Reading & Products
Continue Learning
- Clarity in Cosmetics: Making Sense of Ingredients and Misinformation
- Traditional Soap vs. Modern Cleansers
- “Non-Toxic” Labels and the Complexity of Perfume Safety
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