About Good Brands Earth

Shopping ethically shouldn’t take a research degree. We do the digging on brands and ingredients so you don’t have to, and all of it is free.

Who runs this

I’m Leo. I’m based in Southern California, and I run Good Brands Earth on my own. I research every brand in the directory, write every review, and I’m the one who gets it wrong when we get it wrong.

Why I started it

A while back I went through the products I’d been using for years, most of them picked up at a department store without a second thought, and actually read what was in them.

What I found was worse than I expected. Ingredients researchers have linked to cancer. Hormone disruptors. Things that cause the exact skin problems people spend years and a lot of money trying to treat. Sitting in my bathroom cabinet the whole time, in products I’d bought from stores I trusted.

That’s the thing that got me. Convenience had been quietly costing me something, one purchase at a time.

So I tried to shop better, and found out how hard that is. Ingredient lists run thirty items long and half of them are words you’d need a chemistry degree to place. Checking a single product properly takes twenty minutes. Doing that for a whole bathroom is exhausting, and most people don’t have that kind of time. I didn’t either.

So I did what most people do. I’d stumble across a post on social media featuring a brand, save it, and hope whoever posted it had checked. Sometimes I’d use an app that scores products, right up until it asked me for a subscription. That part bothered me most. Shopping without poisoning yourself had turned into something you pay a monthly fee for.

That’s what this site is. A free resource for people who want to shop more consciously without turning it into a second job.

The brands I want to find

There’s a second reason this exists, and it matters to me just as much.

Plenty of companies take the shortcut. They use the cheaper ingredient, skip the certification, and count on nobody reading the back of the bottle. It’s more profitable, and their customers never find out. That’s a decision made at the expense of the people who trust them.

Some companies don’t do that. They pay more for better ingredients, put real money into getting audited, and accept a thinner margin for it. Those are the ones I want people to find.

Especially the small ones. Doing this properly is hardest when you’re small, because certification is expensive, better ingredients cost more per unit, and you can’t spread that cost over a hundred million dollars of revenue. When a small brand gets this right, it’s a real sacrifice. Those are the brands that deserve to be found, and they’re the ones with the smallest marketing budget to make it happen.

How we research a brand

Every brand in the directory is scored against five criteria, and the working is published next to the score.

The short version: we check the certifier’s own database rather than the badge on a brand’s website, because those disagree more often than you’d think. We look ownership up in company filings instead of taking an About page’s word for it. And we check prices against the brand’s own storefront rather than writing them from memory.

The full method, including what gets a brand left out on purpose, is in how we rate brands.

How this is paid for

Affiliate links. If you buy something through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That’s the whole model.

No paid placements, no sponsored reviews, and no brand has ever paid to be included or to change what we said about it. If a commission could move a verdict, this site would be worthless, and it would be worthless to me first. The full detail is in our affiliate disclosure.

When we get it wrong

We correct things in the open rather than quietly editing the page. A few real examples, because a corrections policy nobody can check isn’t worth much.

We couldn’t find Ethique’s B Corp certification in B Lab’s own directory months after publishing a rating that leaned on it, so the rating came down and the profile now says only what we could verify. We wrongly reported that Pai had lost its Leaping Bunny status, because we checked the US register and Leaping Bunny keeps two. And we had Pact’s founders and ownership wrong for months, repeated it on four other pages, and fixed all five when we found out.

If you spot something wrong, tell us and we’ll check it.

Get in touch

Suggest a brand worth researching, flag a correction, or ask about the affiliate policy on the contact page. Everything that comes in gets read.