Modern Slavery

Modern slavery is one of the most complex and important human rights challenges of our time. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the term modern slavery covers a set of legal concepts, including forced labor, debt bondage, and human trafficking. It's an umbrella term to refer to situations of exploitation that an individual cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuse of power. (Source)

What We Do

Adept Cosmetics® does not tolerate modern slavery. In 2021, we strengthened our efforts to identify and prevent the risk of modern slavery by hiring third party inspectors from France to perform thorough inspections of every supplier we do business with, outside of the USA. This includes scheduled and unscheduled inspections. These inspections continue to look for and address indicators of modern slavery. In addition, we require our manufacturers to renew their SA 8000, ISO 9001, ISO 22716, GMP certificates in a timely manner and have a fully operational HVAC unit (heating and air conditioning) throughout the building.

Although we do not manufacturer our own products, we do personally assess and purchase our own raw materials that go into our finished product. We recognize the potential risk of forced labour in the production of agriculture-based raw materials used in our products, such as mica and soybean. In addition, extra care is put into every product to obtain DRC, conflict free, certified mica, when applicable.

The key to our approach is establishing long-term, personal relationships with suppliers, which facilitates opportunities to identify, evaluate and address risk. We intentionally maintain a curated supply chain and assess all new suppliers on financial and reputational risk as well as their human and labour rights practices. We will approve a new supplier only if the required level of performance is achieved.

Through our policies we communicate our values and expectations with our suppliers before any money is exchanged, setting a high bar for ourselves and our partners and making clear that we do not tolerate modern slavery. We are committed to consistently evolving and improving our approach. We regularly review our policies with our inspectors to identify areas for update and improvement. We conduct in-depth inspections, benchmarking against international standards and evolving industry norms at least every 8 months in line with industry best practice.