Green Beauty Conversations by Formula Botanica

Growing up in the Netherlands, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier learned the value of recycling plastic from an early age. However, the prevailing culture of single-use plastics Lorraine experienced in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States was in stark contrast to the practices she grew up with in the Netherlands.

Now, with her career in the cosmetics industry, and background as a Chartered Environmentalist and a biologist, Lorraine is finely tuned to any cosmetics firms’ claims about sustainable packaging, plastic-free alternatives and other green credentials. While many big players are moving towards more responsible packaging systems, a pressing question remains: what really happens to our recycled plastics? Is the labeling of certain plastic cosmetic packaging as recyclable, blindsiding us and akin to greenwashing?

In last week’s podcast, Lorraine interviewed Dr Suvi Haimi, Co-Founder and CEO of Sulapac, who brought to light the myth of plastic recyclability, revealing that some plastics can only be recycled once. In today’s Green Beauty Opinions, she explores this crucial issue. To learn more about this episode, all of the links that were mentioned and anything else, please visit the show notes on the Formula Botanica website.

Over the three years of the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, we have looked critically at almost all trending catchwords, phrases and terms used in the beauty industry. Clean, green, waterless, zero waste, upcycled, microbiome, essential, raw and blue beauty are just some we've covered. A term very much on the rise in early 2021 is conscious beauty.

And who better to define conscious beauty than The Conscious Beauty Union; an entity committed to informing and guiding beauty professionals such as makeup artists, beauticians and salon practitioners on how to make sound, informed conscious choices about the cosmetics they buy, use or promote?

In this episode, host and Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier talks to the three co-founders of The Conscious Beauty Union (CBU) - Khandiz Joni, Tahira Herold and Lou Dartford - to find out not only about the CBUs' role but also to drill into the fine print on conscious beauty, and in particular what it means to the wider industry as well as beauty consumers.

The Conscious Beauty Union is an informal education platform helping beauty professionals develop sustainable practices but its voice should resonate with anyone engaged in beauty. The CBU defines conscious beauty as making informed choices about one product over another by knowing as much as we can about its full lifecycle.

While sustainable beauty is about looking at perhaps single aspects of a brand or product, such as the packaging or how a key ingredient is harvested, conscious beauty takes a holistic, global view. Conscious beauty examines categories that go beyond sustainability. The aim is for us all, from beauty industry insiders to consumers to be able to make conscious beauty purchases based also, for example, on a brand's transparency, promotion of inclusivity and its ethics.

• Find out about the key differences between conscious beauty and sustainable beauty;
• Discover that conscious beauty is about giving us the information to start our own journey of travel towards making better beauty consumer choices and is not a prescriptive way of engaging with beauty products;
• Realise that conscious beauty will mean different things to different people; our ability to put conscious beauty into practice will vary with location and budget and, in the case of beauty professionals such as makeup artists or salon practitioners, with the role of beauty products in their jobs; and
• Find out that conscious beauty can mainstream if we all make steps to start asking questions everyday about our beauty purchasing habits and about the beauty brands we use.

• The Conscious Beauty Union offers an educational platform and movement to help beauty professionals (and others) start to ask the questions to make conscious choices about their beauty buying and usage habits. It has member-only advice, educational webinars, articles and other training and information as well as invaluable free resources on its site.
• We should celebrate and feel proud as beauty consumers, professionals and brands of the small wins on our journey to more conscious beauty rather than feel guilty about how we engaged with and used perhaps less ethical or sustainable beauty products in the past.
• We need to accept what we can do with the information we have at the time on a product or brand and lever that to motivate us to educate also our own audiences and circles, whether friends and family or beauty industry colleagues, partners and customers.

Parabens is a collective name for a group of chemicals used as preservatives in consumer products such as food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. They have been synthesised in labs for almost 100 years. So far then, parabens seem quite boring ingredients.

But, in just under two decades, parabens have become the bogeymen of the beauty industry, pitting at times the mainstream personal care industry and science against indie beauty, the media and beauty consumers. Even someone with just a passing interest in the personal care industry is bound to have heard about parabens in cosmetics products.

Just take a look at row of cosmetics on any drugstore shelf these days and you're likely to come across a good many brands sporting the words 'paraben free' on their packaging; even though in some places, like the EU, it is considered unfair competition. Parabens are permissible in cosmetics in the EU at regulated levels.

If they have been known of and in use since the 1920s, surely we know a great deal about their possible side effects in our consumer goods like cosmetics? When and why did consumers' parabenoia, as we call it, take hold and is the vilification of parabens justified? In this episode, Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier, a biologist and Chartered Environmentalist, digs deep into paraben science, history and hysteria. She takes a neutral standpoint to dissect the facts from the fiction.

Lorraine talks us through the controversy and timeline as parabens moved out of science labs into media stories provoking a crisis in beauty consumer confidence and on to their pivotal moment in pioneering the indie beauty movement.

This is the episode to listen to if you've ever wanted to get behind the headlines and truly understand the furore over parabens in cosmetics. Will parabens continue to coexist with natural, paraben-free beauty? Has indie beauty been too hard on them? Lorraine presents the debate, but only you can decide.

• Find out that the defining moment for parabens was research published in 2004 showing that parabens had been found in breast cancer tissue. While no evidence of causal linkage was provided by this research, from then on, parabens were vilified by many as 'toxic chemicals'.
• Learn that no scientific evidence has yet suggested that all parabens need to be removed from cosmetics but that the lack of concrete evidence hasn’t shifted public opinion on parabens.
• Hear that since the outcry over parabens, a long list of chemicals used in cosmetics including Sodium laureth sulfate, phthalates and PEG compounds were added to those to avoid in personal care - often to the disdain of cosmetic scientists.
• Discover that first the DIY beauty movement and then early entrant natural beauty brands emerged as consumers sought to avoid buying 'nasty chemical-laden' beauty products.
• Early indie beauty products often couldn't compete with mainstream products in terms of performance. This gave big beauty leverage - and so the two camps of natural and mainstream cosmetics became even more divided and not only over the paraben issue.

• Thanks to the paraben saga and its aftermath, consumers are far more aware of science's role in cosmetic formulation and are sceptical of claims whether made by mainstream or indie beauty brands.
• Indie beauty/natural beauty are coming of age and realising they need to present the inherent benefits of natural cosmetics rather than live off scaremongering and using 'free-from' claims.
• The paraben story has now come full circle as mainstream cosmetics giants and ingredients manufacturers are ploughing research into natural ingredients and products and also listening to and even investing in indie beauty brands.
• Parabens and their fellow decried chemicals not only created the indie beauty sector but also changed the mainstream too - time will tell just how defining parabens have been to both camps in the beauty industry!

At Formula Botanica, we receive a good many queries from prospective students wanting to know if they need to be a qualified cosmetic chemist to formulate skincare products. The cosmetic chemist vs skincare formulator conundrum has gone higher up the agenda in recent years as we've seen ever more non chemists as formulators and founders of indie beauty businesses.

At Formula Botanica, we teach diplomas and certificates in cosmetic product formulating. An increasing number of our graduates go on to formulate beautiful, high-performance products as well as run successful indie beauty businesses having been inspired and empowered by the courses they took with us.

This is possible because in nearly all parts of the world, irrespective of whether the formulator is a cosmetic chemist or skincare formulator, the cosmetic products themselves must meet strict compliance regulations to be sold legally.

What we teach at Formula Botanica are the key concepts of chemistry; a competent cosmetic product formulator would need to know to create products that are safe, stable and meet - and often exceed - consumer expectations. Some core components of cosmetic chemistry that we include in our Diplomas are pH measurement and monitoring, emulsification, methods of natural cosmetics' preservation, and the use of solubilisers and surfactants.

There are of course some fundamental differences between a cosmetic chemist and skincare formulator. A cosmetic chemist would be steeped in the science of how cosmetic ingredients work together and would know the likely outcome of any formula even without a practical lab trial. A cosmetic chemist would need formal, recognised, usually graduate-level qualifications in chemistry along with a specialist training (a post-graduate qualification) in cosmetic science. They may well end up working in the R&D lab of a large cosmetics' firm.

A cosmetic product formulator would not necessarily know the in-depth science of how ingredients work but could, through applied study and practical application of their formulating skills coupled with detailed observation, build up a considerable knowledge bank about their ingredients and formulation outcomes.

A cosmetic chemist working in a large lab might not be the one who dreams up the lovely new formulas as they might be more restricted in how much of the route from first creative idea to marketable product they get their hands on. However, they may be at the forefront of R&D bringing innovative cosmetic ingredients to market.

It is inevitable that there is some overlap in roles and also a lot of grey areas and misconceptions about what both careers involve. In this podcast, Formula Botanica School Director, Lorraine Dallmeier and podcast host and Relationship Manager Gemma discuss the two roles and career paths along with their respective pros and cons. This podcast is a must-listen for anyone wondering about the training and career options in formulating cosmetics' products especially if looking to focus on natural, organic formulation.

• Why your decision to choose one training route over the other may be more down to personal circumstances such as lifestyle, finances, commitments and time, and your desired career in the cosmetics' industry;
• How a cosmetic chemist has the chance to work in world-leading beauty brand labs but conversely how a product formulator may enjoy more freedom and creativity in formulating products and in career options;
• Why a cosmetic product placed for sale in most parts of the world, whether it is formulated by a chemist or product formulator, will have had to undergone the safety, stability and microbial testing to be placed legally on the market for sale;
• Why it is imperative that any cosmetics' business founder is transparent about their own personal or their employees' cosmetic formulating qualifications and must be confident in explaining how and why their qualifications - whichever route they choose - enable them to do their job professionally;
• Why building a successful cosmetics' brand requires a swathe of skills that are not inherent in either product formulation nor chemistry backgrounds and would require extra skill sets;
• Why the lack of formal, tertiary-level cosmetic chemistry courses worldwide and the costs entailed in continuing in higher education might make a shorter-term, distance-learning formulation course a more accessible option for some.

• Step one: First, get to know your ingredients thoroughly and learn how to ...

In this episode, we’re addressing a question that has surfaced time and again, and that is whether age is a barrier to becoming a beauty entrepreneur. This stems from the inspiring interactions we had during a recent VIP webinar we held at Formula Botanica, where attendees opened up about their concerns, particularly around one recurring question: “Am I too old to start a beauty brand?”

This episode addresses that very question and extends a message to those who may feel limited by age, appearance, or indeed any demographic or societal expectations. Podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier, a chartered environmentalist, biologist, and the CEO of Formula Botanica gives her Green Beauty Opinion on these issues, sharing her takeaways from the previous week’s episode with Birch Babe founder Debbie Alger, who started her beauty empire in her sixties.

Join Lorraine in debunking the myths surrounding age and entrepreneurship in the beauty industry.