We've all heard of fast fashion. The trendy, in-the-moment clothing at affordable prices can sometimes get a bad rap for poor quality, rampant counterfeiting, and questionable labor practices and billions of pounds of waste. Some of our favorite clothing stores, such as Forever 21 and H&M have been found guilty of fast fashion. The insta-famous brand Fashion Nova is infamous for fast fashion practices.

But the lesser talked about category is fast beauty. Thriving companies such as Kylie Cosmetics churn out products at a break-neck pace for consumers demanding instant gratification. But how do they keep up with such a high demand in an incredibly competitive market?

"Fast Beauty: refers to companies who prioritize creating trendy makeup with subpar formulations by drastically slashing the turnaround time that is required from product conception to launch. In a market where you have five seconds of fame, the beauty industry has to move fast. Jenny Frazier, the senior vice president of Nielsen's Innovation Practice, says that companies "can no longer wait six months or a year to develop, evaluate, and optimize new products… They need to move at light speed to capitalize on trends in beauty."

Fats fashion and fast beauty are very alike, but not exactly the same. The principle is the same- to create a product as fast as possible using questionable means. Fast fashion is regarded to be very harmful for the environment. Just last year, H&M made headlines for logging $4.3 billion in unsold inventory, due to people choosing to buy more sustainable clothing. However, fast beauty companies tend to operate on an inventory-light basis. This means they can typically produce products more one demand. They can make smaller buys of inventory, and have less overproduction which causes a decreased risk of inventory loss. But that doesn't necessarily mean that fast beauty companies have a green thumb. Many of their products are made in plastic containers which is still a very harmful and dangerous process.

So while fast beauty may be on par with the trendiest makeup, it is still harming the environment. Urging companies to become more sustainable would reduce the plastic waste they create. Buying from more sustainable companies would also send a message to companies to have more environmentally ethical ways of creating products.