Green Beauty Conversations by Formula Botanica

Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make and sell your natural beauty formulations. We tackle topics that will make you think and encourage debate about green beauty with your friends, followers or customers. In today's In Conversation with Formula Botanica podcast episode, we are talking carbon neutral beauty and the environmenta...

Have you ever wondered how a cosmetic formulator innovates and creates new formulations? What is it like to formulate? How does the creative process work? In this episode of The Green Beauty Conversations podcast we delve in to the mind of a cosmetic formulator and explore the processes involved in creating new and innovative products. We speak to Timi Racz, Formula Botanica's Head of Research and...

You've probably heard of food miles, but have you ever heard of beauty miles? Food miles measure the distance that your food travels before it reaches your plate, while beauty miles measure the distance that our beauty products are transported from the time of harvesting, to processing, to manufacturing, to retail until that lotion finally ends up on your bathroom shelf. Similar to food miles, bea...

Should vegan beauty brands be run by vegans? That is the question we tackle in this episode of the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, the podcast that challenges you to change the way you think about the way you buy, use, make and sell your natural beauty formulations. Veganism is on the rise Interest in veganism has increased seven-fold in the last five years according to Google trends. And as p...

Can Indie beauty brands ever partner successfully with large multinationals? Or are Indie brands who sell to large corporations, in fact selling out? In this episode of The Green Beauty Conversations Podcast, we tackle the tricky subject of Indie brand acquisitions and why all brand founders should have an exit strategy for their business. Recently, brands such as Dermalogica, Schmidt's Naturals,...

This is Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make and sell your natural beauty formulations.  We tackle topics that that will make you think and encourage debate about Green Beauty with your friends, followers or customers. In this episode we delve in to the difficult topic of conscious consumerism and its effect on the beauty industry. What...

What is clean beauty? It is one of the current buzz words in the cosmetics industry with major brands such as Drunk Elephant adopting the term as a key part of their marketing message. Large retailers such as Sephora now stock a selection of brands they consider clean and have adopted their own clean standards.  Despite its rapid rise, clean beauty can also be controversial. There is an increasing...

If you're dreaming of launching an indie beauty brand you may wonder if you have the mindset to become a successful skincare entrepreneur. Even just a decade ago, we would tend to use the word entrepreneur to describe the personalities driving big conglomerates and reserve the epithet for figures like Richard Branson. Now though, entrepreneurs are just as likely to be individual makers and creativ...

It seems that barely a week goes by without beauty industry headlines covering the latest Asian beauty trends or the meteoric growth of the cosmetics' spending in Asia, including also the rise of the natural beauty market. Cosmetics Business commented in early 2019 that online beauty sales were set to help Asia-Pacific outpace North America as global cosmetics' leader: "Growing e-commerce and onli...

When an emergency physician decides on a radical shift in life to choose natural skincare as a career over medicine, you begin to realise just how powerful a sector green beauty is becoming. However, as Dr Sarah Villafranco , founder of Osmia organics and our guest in this episode says, while her career change certainly raised some eyebrows back in 2012, it proved a logical move that had parallels...

The thought of selling beauty products on Amazon either gets indie beauty brands excited or in a tailspin. The behemoth of e-tailing may be our go-to place to shop for everything these days, yet for all our familiarity with it as consumers, many new beauty brand entrepreneurs find Amazon an impenetrable platform and beyond their grasp. A few years ago, the mantra used to be 'if you're not on socia...

Is the beauty industry finally adopting the notion of ageless beauty rather than using the term 'anti-ageing'? The misnomer 'anti-ageing' has been viewed as politically incorrect for quite some time. If our guest in this episode of Green Beauty Conversations has her way, it will be a thing of the past sooner rather than later. Kari Gran, founder of Kari Gran skincare, which she runs with business...

We're all familiar with seeing the words probiotic on everyday foods like yoghurts, but in the past few years skincare products are sporting similar labels and the beauty industry is abuzz with talk of skin microbiome skincare. You may have seen pro-, pre- and even post-biotic skincare products and wondered what they are and what they do for our skin. We came across all three microbiome skincare p...

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 di...

Did you know that one of the most effective ways to pitch your beauty products to a buyer is to formulate your cosmetics' range from the start with your ideal retailer in mind? Understanding what a retailer is looking for in your beauty brand and getting to know their retail space inside out is just some of the groundwork you need to do before approaching a buyer. After all, they get hundreds of e...

It is hard to imagine today with organic-certified beauty products readily available a time when launching a high-performance organic skincare brand would have required the founder to make the market, educating customers to the benefits of organic beauty. Now, barely a week passes without us hearing of a big brand in the personal care industry buying up clean, green, organic beauty brands as well...

This Green Beauty Conversations episode sees the Formula Botanica team report on the top beauty trends 2019 as seen at In-Cosmetics Global held this year in Paris in early April. In-Cosmetics is one of the beauty industry's key calendar events, and is a vast gathering of all branches of the cosmetics' sector and is open to both trade and the public. The Formula Botanica team comprising School Dire...

At Formula Botanica, one of the most frequent questions our community asks is where to buy certain organic skincare ingredients. Our students have access to our resources list of recommended, trusted suppliers around the world. However, knowing more about how suppliers work behind the scenes can help you ask the right questions when sourcing ingredients to suit your formulating needs. Being a supp...

If you have been hanging out in our Skincare Entrepreneur Mastermind Facebook group or other beautypreneur forums, you are likely to have come across our guest Rachel Whittaker of Indie Beauty Delivers , who is a tour de force in beauty logistics. She loves telling us why beauty logistics are not boring and why you should consider them as a really important part of how you set-up your business. Ra...

Formula Botanica students and graduates are unsurprisingly mainly women, so we decided in this Green Beauty Conversation to focus unapologetically on women's health and well being; also because we're still in our designated Women's Month of March as we hit the airwaves. In this episode, we talk to Natasha Richardson , herbalist, women's health expert and founder of Forage Botanicals , a business a...

Most of us in the green beauty sector are familiar with long-established organic brands Weleda and Dr Haushka, but what we might not know is that they run their skincare businesses according to biodynamic principles. Biodynamic skincare is often described as 'organic plus' as it takes a caring, holistic approach that defines not only the farming of botanical ingredients for skincare products but a...

If you thought solid shampoo bars were a recent trend, you should listen to our latest Green Beauty Conversation with Akua Wood who is the founder of Sheabutter Cottage , a pioneering business that supplies natural haircare ingredients as well as skincare and haircare products. Akua's solid shampoo bars have been best sellers in her online store almost since she started out in the early 2000s. Gha...

We met Jo Chidley, beauty entrepreneur and founder of Beauty Kitchen , effective, natural, and sustainable beauty, almost a year ago and have been stalking her ever since to give us some airtime.  We are so excited to have caught up with her in her busy schedule running a multi-million turnover business from her native Scotland. Jo has won multiple industry awards, including the Natwest Everywoman...

There is no better time to take stock and review indie beauty trends and events than the start of a new year; nor is there a better time for a change. So, in this episode of Green Beauty Conversations podcast we see a role reversal with host Gemma in the hot seat as our interviewee, while school director Lorraine asks the questions. This is one of our longer podcasts as Gemma does an extensive, in...

It takes one to know one, so the adage goes and never more so than when referring to the incredibly diverse and mysterious roles played by the green beauty influencer. To help shed light on how new indie and niche beauty brands can make the most of collaborating with green beauty influencers, we invited Callie Lions of The Green Beauty Mom fame to the podcast . Callie, a graduate of Formula Botani...