Josie Maran dreams of an ice cream truck. Well, a repurposed ice cream truck. Perhaps we could keep the jaunty jingle, but instead of frozen treats this truck would be packed with bulk products. “The truck has body butter, sugar scrub, argan oil, plus all the food stuff, olive oil, rice, all those things,” Maran says. Shoppers would bring their brand-agnostic reusable glass jars to refill with all the essentials.

It’s a lovely vision for the future that looks a whole lot like the past. “When we look back hundreds, even thousands of years ago, cosmetics were stored in ceramic vessels or stone vessels, sometimes glass,” says Allison Kent-Gunn Garibay, an independent beauty packaging and sustainability consultant. “Containers were kept and reused. For most of humankind's existence, we've actually had a refill strategy for a lot of [grooming and personal care] packaging.”

But here in our delightful current day, the state of waste-reducing refills is not so rosy. When Allure reported on the then-buzzy refill category in 2022, experts were already skeptical. “Refills aren't the right thing for every [product],” Olga Kachook, director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition at the sustainable materials non-profit GreenBlue, said at the time. "There's so much experimentation [in beauty] and maybe not enough brand loyalty in some cases to justify the refill." And even if you are on the extremely loyal end of beauty consumers: Kachook estimated that you would need to refill a product 50 to 100 times to offset the extra packaging and resources that went into making it refillable.

At the time there was no firm data on exactly how many cycles would justify a refill. Four years later, the research is still spotty when it comes to beauty products, though there have been some recent studies on reusable food containers. “Takeout containers can break even after 6 to 12 uses, cups can break even as low as after 5 or 6 uses,” Kachook says. That’s definitely better than 50 to 100, but Kachook is hesitant to update her stance on beauty refills. “Because there is no existing breakeven data on personal care/beauty products refilled by consumers in their homes, I would rather not estimate,” she says.

Since that original Allure story was published, the beauty industry has only seen 7% growth in launches of refillable products, a recent Mintel report found. Sephora has a separate, easily accessible refillables section on the website; if a similar section exists on Ulta, Credo, Target, or Dermstore, it’s hidden somewhere outside the main dropdowns.

Four years ago, Allure also added “refillable” to the list of misleading sustainability buzzwords we don’t use without careful qualification. Since then, though refillable marketing has continued, increasingly savvy beauty consumers have come to increasingly see the concept as more about greenwashing than real impact on our massive packaging waste problem. In early 2026, cosmetic scientist Julian Sass posted a video to his Instagram story in which he lamented the common bottle-in-a-bottle format, where the refill component could easily stand alone. “It’s egregious,” he tells Allure. “This [inner bottle] could be the product.”

Garibay agrees. “[Brands] think [refills are] the most elevated and effective sustainability strategy without fully understanding the amount of material and waste that comes with launching essentially a bottle in a bottle,” she says. “Love sensible regular packaging over gigantic refill packaging every day of the week,” one commenter wrote on a video Garibay posted about refillable packaging versus lightweight single use products.

The situation isn’t helped by the slew of failed refill initiatives, largely driven by a lack of consumer enthusiasm for the product they’re supposed to be buying over and over. “I think in theory, refills could be a very effective sustainability strategy,” Garibay says. “But in real world applications, I see them fail—and fail pretty hard. I would say refills are one of the weakest sustainability strategies in my experience.”

Garibay recalls a brand that invested $300,000 in refillable packaging for a new serum. “They really felt confident it was going to fly off the shelves,” she says. But at the end of the day, “customers didn’t like the serum. It had nothing to do with the packaging.” No one wanted to repurchase the lackluster formula, so the brand ended up with “hundreds of thousands of refill cartridges filled with serum that no one wanted,” Garibay says. “They ultimately ended up scrapping that packaging and just going back to single use.” Google “refillable beauty products 2024” and you’ll find plenty of product roundups where half the products no longer seem to exist.

For instance, Dove launched refillable deodorants in 2023, but they appear to be discontinued. In 2020, P&G started offering refillable packaging in Europe for its largest haircare brands—like Pantene, Aussie, and Herbal Essences—but it’s unclear if these will ever come stateside. The refillable Chanel Beauty lipsticks Allure covered in 2022 do seem to still be available, although, like Dove and P&G, the brand did not respond to requests for comment ahead of publication.

These types of examples make other brands more hesitant to explore the category. “They [say], ‘See that’s evidence that consumers don’t want refills,’” Kachook says. Making a package that can be refilled is generally more expensive, plus “if your refill is basically the size of your product … your manufacturing costs are going to be exactly the same,” Sass says. This means the company doing refills will inherently lose out on profits, because consumers (understandably) don’t want to pay the same price for that refill pod or pouch as they did for the full product. A survey done by GreenBlue found that savings are the number one reason customers will buy a refill; another survey by the Fédération des Entreprises de la Beauté (FEBEA) noted that buyers expect a 10% to 20% savings.

“I was foolish, perhaps, early on thinking that the customer didn’t need to be incentivized [to buy refills],” says Dr. Antony Nakhla, a board-certified dermatologist and founder of the skin-care brand Eighth Day. “The incentive is to save the planet!.” Now that Eighth Day is offering a lower price for its refills, Dr. Nakhla says that he’s more hopeful about that part of the business.

There’s also the issue that many types of products just aren’t conducive to refills, especially the popular pouch variety which need to be made from a thinner plastic so they can be squeezed. “You don’t want to have any, for lack of a better term, ‘spicy’ ingredients in there,” Sass says. “Those ingredients will literally just eat through the [pouch] packaging.” Any formulas with light-sensitive actives — like vitamin C or retinol — aren’t a good idea either, and you definitely don’t want the refill for those to come alongside the original packaging you purchase, since it’ll likely expire before the consumer can use it up.

Chemistry is key to any conversation about refill viability—but so is consumer psychology. “Getting the consumer to adopt new behaviors is really, really hard,” says Sass. “In my past life, I did epidemiology and getting consumer behavior to change in response to public health stuff is hard enough. But when it's something as comparatively trivial as beauty… it's so hard to change how people think about products.”

And unless you’re actually refilling a product several times, its theoretical refillability is doing diddly-squat to reduce packaging waste. If a brand simply adds refills to its production lineup, rather than replacing some standard packaging with refillable options, it’s just adding to all our beautiful trash. “The fact that you are producing something means that there is an impact,” says Sass. Even a packaging-free product will create carbon emissions and other environmental impacts during production and distribution.

And yet, Kachook says she still sees a ton of potential in refills done right. Plus, she thinks some of the backlash to current formats is due to a misunderstanding of the many ways a company can reduce its environmental footprint.

“I think the plastic inserts make people uncomfortable because it's like, well, look, the plastic isn't recyclable,” Kachook says. However, “that insert is substantially less material than the whole glass jar” it sits in. That means a reduction in overall material use and fewer carbon emissions to ship those lighter refills. (Plus of course, only 9% of the plastic ever produced has actually been recycled so even “recyclable” plastic is a pretty theoretical concept.)

“I think if we were to run a lifecycle assessment on [the plastic refill versus the original glass jar], you would see that there's a carbon savings,” Kachook posits. It’s not perfect, of course: “The end of life story hasn't particularly changed or hasn't gotten better, unfortunately”—both pieces will eventually end up in the trash.

Still, there are a few companies for whom refills seem to be a successful strategy, both from a business and environmental impact standpoint. Kachook, Sass, and Garibay all namechecked Maran when asked for examples of beauty brands doing refills well. Her namesake brand has been around for 19 years, but rebranded in 2024 with refillable products as the priority.

Maran originally shot to popularity on QVC, and the line expanded to, by her estimation, “five million products.” “I was on QVC and putting out a bajillion plastic packages a day and it broke my soul,” Maran says.

The rebrand was a chance to refocus on the best sellers, like body lotions, washes, and scrubs—all of which happen to lend themselves quite well to being refilled. “We totally shrunk the line, repackaged, refocused, and remixed the whole thing and just tightened it up,” she says. Now, 30% of Maran’s current sales are refills, most of which are contained in photogenic, sensorially satisfying pouches. Reupping your Whipped Argan Oil Body Butter is more of a delight than a slog, and the refills are pretty enough to sit on the shelf at Sephora or be featured in an influencer’s product flatlay. (In fact, we know a few people in that 30% who only buy the Josie Maran refills—which offer anywhere from a 15 to 35% savings—and never the “real packaging” because they’re so good-looking and functional.)

Those bajillion products sold on QVC meant Maran knew she had a loyal customer base, which made the pivot to refills less of a risk. It also meant she had the financial flexibility to experiment, something a smaller brand might not:“I can sacrifice some profit for [the customer] to start being sustainable.”

“I’m in it for the planet, mostly,” Maran says. “But I’m also in it for the people and I’m also in it for the business because money is what actually changes the world.” She might technically be losing money on the individual refills, but business overall is doing quite well. “I hope this becomes table stakes,” Dr. Nakhla says. Now that he understands the backend of the beauty industry and “how much obscene waste is involved,” he believes “sustainability and refills should become a given.”

When I spoke with Krupa Koestline, a cosmetic chemist, in 2023, she predicted that brands like Josie Maran and Eighth Day that had embraced the “clean” positioning would start to focus on the environmental impacts of the industry as well. Irene Forte is another example: The founder of the eponymous brand says refills make up 40% of direct-to-consumer sales of the hero products. Forte mostly uses the hard plastic refills that can cause some consumers to cringe, but the material is bio based and relatively light. Plus, since the original packaging is a heavy, glass container, Forte says the brand’s margins are actually better on the refill SKUs.

On the beauty conglomerate side, L’Oréal Groupe also seems committed to making refills happen. Marissa McGowan, chief sustainability officer at L’Oréal North America, says the company has been building its refill portfolio “for the last few years,” and launched World Refill Day — a symbolic holiday meant to encourage consumers to buy refillables — in 2025.

Again, a lot of the success of the program is because L’Oréal focused on its best sellers to start. Doing so creates the most potential for environmental impact, McGowan says, though “it’s also risky to touch your best sellers.” Cerave, La Roche-Posay, and Youth to the People’s cleansers are some of the products leading L’Oréal’s refill business, as are Kiehl’s Ultra Facial Cream, Kérastase Elixir Ultime Hair Oil, and YSL Libre Eau de Parfum. While L’Oréal didn’t confirm what percentage refills make up of the group’s total sales, a representative for the company says someone who purchased a refill “remains loyal to that product and is 3.5 times more likely to repurchase that refill than the equivalent product’s standard size.”

There are serious material reductions if the customer actually purchases the refills (McGowan says the company’s sustainability claims are based on three refills). On the lower end, the 100ml YSL perfume refill uses 48% less glass, 59% less plastic, and 42% less paper than repurchasing two 50ml bottles. The Kiehl’s cream and Youth to the People cleanser refills use a whopping 94% and 96% less packaging material, respectively.

Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all model of sustainability. “I feel like so many brands want to be better across all fronts,” Sass says. “It’s okay to just stick to one lane.” For some brands, using bio-based plastics — like polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) — might be ideal, particularly if their products’ packaging is way too small to ever be recycled. Others might be able to invest in aluminum, which is infinitely recyclable but has skyrocketed in price since Trump implemented tariffs on the material.

Refills will also probably get better, especially as more brands seek those options out in order to hit the requirements of the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), which went into effect in 2025 and came up in most of the interviews for this piece. It requires that all packaging sold in the EU be recyclable (which can mean reusable or refillable) by 2030. If a brand sells in the EU, they’re probably going to bring that packaging to the U.S. too. That could create a snowball effect, since more demand for refills will drive down the price of those packaging molds.

“We do a ton of R&D with brands [that are] all in… until you get to the supply chain team,’” says Jon Hursey, senior director at Ecologic Brands, a division of Jabil Packaging Solutions that focuses on plastic alternatives. “The supply chain team says, ‘OK, so, same price as my plastic option, right?’ No, it’s 50% more, so they’re done.” Cheaper options will help seal the deal in the future.

Ecologic Brands is currently developing a refill pod made of paper that could be used in a glass jar component. “It’s a paper capsule that brings the same product protection from moisture or oxygen,” Hursey says. “It can be recycled in the paper stream or, if it ends up in a landfill, eventually it will biodegrade because it’s paper-based.” I asked him if this would hold up to the “spicy” ingredients Sass mentioned, and he says yes: These paper pods have a very thin plastic coating that would protect the ingredients inside, but still be insubstantial enough to get screened out in the recycling sorting process.

In the meantime, Garibay says she knows of some brands who’ve given up on making sustainability a marketing point, though that doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned the effort altogether. “‘Green hushing’ is actually becoming increasingly popular,” she says. “Some brands are just quietly implementing small sustainability improvements [without] doing any sort of consumer-facing education on it just because they feel like it almost puts a bit of a spotlight on them in a way. Avoiding the conversation altogether is just safer from a PR perspective.”

All that’s to say: It’s up to the individual consumer to do some digging before they decide which beauty brands match their personal values. (I know, sorry.) In the end, at the risk of sounding like a killjoy, a real way to save the planet and save money is to just buy and produce less. “Every week there’s, give or take, eight million things launching,” Sass says. Maybe we could all focus on the existing best sellers instead.

Read more about sustainability in beauty:

• Why Allure Will Never Tell You Plastic Packaging Is “Recyclable”
• Is Aluminum Packaging Really That Much Better Than Plastic?
• Shampoo Bars Are Finally Ready for Their Moment