Natural beauty product founders are all the same - passionate (obsessed even) - whether a pharmacist, herbalist or a naturopath - about truly healthy bodies as the centre point for beauty. And their respect for what they are putting into your body is what defines their brands.Businesses like Edible Beauty - and literally everyone else in this story, believe that what goes into a beauty product should be good enough to eat. After all, what you put on your skin absorbs, in some cases, more than what you put in your mouth.And, by definition, that is one of the central tenets of natural body care products - keeping what goes into them as pure as possible. For too long, the entire beauty industry was driven by central marketing, who seem to want to make the product ingredients as hyped and complex as possible - and expensive. Increasing exotic (bizarre) ingredients, driven by shelf life needs & the cost of marketing out stripped the real agenda years ago.While we are more hip to pseudoscientific body issues marketing, there is still plenty of fear based marketing around and trying to understand the ingredients in skin care is still up there with trying to understand the bible. And that's never going to happen. I do have to confess to being one of those people who sees organic, botanicals, natural or a well designed label and I am reaching for my wallet. Especially if there's a rather gorgeous pic of some Australian botanicals on the label. And to be frank, that's actually not far from a good way to make a decision - as long as what's inside is legit.
These days there are many many small batch makers around and many of them well qualified. Like Mokosh, Wild Leaf Botanicals or James Street Organics, small batch producers who are committed to pure organic ingredients without preservatives, palm oil-derived emulsifiers and other synthetic ingredients. And who are using native and indigenous ingredients. Others like Caim & Able believe skin products should be super simple and so their products philosophy centres around the most pure magnesium, which delivered through the skin becomes directly available to the muscular systems that require magnesium to function. Even though Caim & Able source their magnesium from the ancient, deep mineral deposits of the Dead Sea, they often pair with Australian botanicals. Naturopath Anna Mitsios of Edible Beauty and Anna Scullie from Frankly Eco were both Mums with young bubs when they started their businesses and have a very real motivation for believing that body products should be so pure that a baby could eat them. (In the case of Frankly Eco, this is literally true as one of their products is a Nipple Ointment for breast feeding.)In the end, if you are looking for quality, natural, transparent body products and don't really want to have to think about it much, the fastest way to a reasonable sure fire decision is to buy from one of the retail organics shops like Santos Organics who often have a practitioner on premises or buy online through eco websites like ekko.world who require sellers to tell you what is in their products, offer reviews and support.
When you support products that are transparent about their origins, their manufacture and their ingredients list, you reinforce a behaviour and support a market that will continue to go from strength, innovate and produce even better products.
Images: Edible Beauty (Main image & 1st image) | Mokosh, | Caim & Able | Frankly Eco | Santos Organics.