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The Rise of Women-Powered Brands in Clean Beauty: Meet the Leaders of 2025

Published March 8, 2025 in CertClean 

 

Cert Clean - The Rise of Women-Powered Brands in Clean Beauty Meet the Leaders of 2025

In an industry often dominated by corporate giants, women entrepreneurs are leading a quiet revolution—one that prioritizes safety, transparency, and sustainability in beauty. Yet, despite their innovation and impact, women-powered brands still face challenges in gaining the recognition they deserve.

While women drive nearly 90% of consumer beauty purchases (Nielsen, 2023), only 29% of beauty brands are founded by women (Fashion Institute of Technology, 2024). The funding gap is even more alarming—women-led startups across all industries secured less than 2% of venture capital funding in 2025 (PitchBook, 2025), highlighting the barriers that still exist.

The 2025 Clean Beauty Awards is committed to changing that. By recognizing and amplifying the work of women-led brands, the awards provide a powerful platform for innovation to thrive. This International Women’s Day, we’re celebrating the founders, formulators, and visionaries behind some of the most groundbreaking clean beauty products today.

Discover the women-powered brands shaping the future of beauty—proving that when women lead, the entire industry moves forward.

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Cert Clean - The Rise of Women-Powered Brands in Clean Beauty Meet the Leaders of 2025

Zakiella was born out of the founder’s search for a high-performing lipstick that was fully natural and organic and didn’t use aluminum-containing pigments. The lipsticks she found at the time either performed poorly or contained ingredients she wanted to avoid. This sparked her desire to learn cosmetic formulation and develop her own formulas that give impressive color payoff and are comfortable to wear all day. Throughout this process, she also learned of the prevalence of microplastic ingredients in the cosmetics industry, even within clean beauty products. Determined to make a positive change, Zahra and her mother, Barbara, collaborated to develop Zakiella, a brand that reimagines clean beauty with proprietary formulas free from microplastic ingredients, offering eco-conscious cosmetics that celebrate nature and self-expression.

Developing Zakiella’s formulas was a meticulous labor of love, with many trials along the way. Creating makeup that lasts well, applies smoothly, and gives a strong color payoff without using any microplastic ingredients wasn’t easy! Using synthetic film formers makes it so much easier, but at the cost of the environment. Each aspect of developing the products was carefully considered, such as using organic beeswax from the United States (more local) instead of China (easier to find), composting most materials used to make them, and printing labels directly on the product itself instead of using individual cardboard boxes.