Green Beauty Conversations by Formula Botanica

When you start a beauty brand, every aspect of it from your own unique formulations to your packaging and branding are up for grabs. Every detail is in your hands and even if outsourcing tasks, you, as the founder, have control. If you embrace sustainability in your brand mission at the outset, it will drive every detail and decision. How much easier this is than struggling to audit a beauty busin...

Solid cosmetics are growing in popularity in line with our desire for less-is-more skincare and to do right by the planet. They can be multiuse, potentially use less water in their manufacture, strip out water as a "filler" in their formulation, and may not need preservatives. As they are waterless, they can be less weighty to ship thanks to their minimal packaging. For all their virtues however,...

Natural, indie, clean, green, organic skincare is now commonplace on store shelves and is talked about wherever you are online. This podcast is all about it, but if you've listened recently to Green Beauty Conversations, you will have noticed we've been focusing more on the topic of natural, sustainable haircare  and  attitudes to hair . But talk aside, are consumers actively looking to buy natura...

Indie beauty and the organic and natural cosmetics sector have typically focused more on skincare than haircare. This is to be expected; people can be reluctant to change their haircare routines and products once they have found brands that work for them. There are other reasons too for natural haircare lingering behind, such as the perceived higher cost of using natural shampoos and conditioners...

Visualising through storytelling is a good way to set our sights on what is desireable and possible, and then make the imagined become reality. Beauty brands have long used storytelling to create an appealing narrative about their products. It is in this context that Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier dares to air a new format in this green beauty opinion episode – a short story of life in th...

Would you like to hear a single, simple definition of sustainability that you can apply to your daily life in the beauty industry, whether as an indie business founder or consumer? The beauty industry media is clamouring to provide one, and at Formula Botanica, we've had journalists approach us for short sound-bites on what sustainable beauty means. Unfortunately, things aren't so simple. In reduc...

Whenever podcast host and Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier has tackled the issue of sustainability in the beauty industry, she has heard time and time again the refrain that various pioneering approaches can't be done or done safely, are too expensive or demand too much from beauty consumers to put into action. In this Green Beauty Opinion Lorraine shines the spotlight on some of the beauty...

As indie beauty consumers, formulators and brand founders, we want to act responsibly when it comes to making, packaging, buying and disposing of our beauty products. Yet, for all our goodwill, it is incredibly difficult to know if the measures we are taking to reduce, reuse and recycle, plastic containers in particular, are making a difference. We've talked to pioneering indie beauty brands runni...

In this first Green Beauty Conversations of 2023, podcast host and Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier and all the school team wish you a healthy, happy, prosperous year.  The start of the year is always an exciting time as we anticipate, envisage and make plans for the next 12 months. Lorraine dives right in to this topic throwing down some challenges. She asks what plans you have to change y...

What a year it's been for celebrity beauty brand launches. Not content with being on our screens, celebrities have been in overdrive in the beauty industry not as the "face" of this or that brand, but as cosmetic business founders themselves. In 2022 alone, we've seen Bradd Pitt's "Le Domaine", Jared Leto's "Twentynine Palms", and Kim Kardashian's "Skkn by Kim" launch along with a flurry of other...

Haircare seems on the surface such an everyday topic. Who doesn't regularly see mainstream shampoo brand adverts touting the ease, speed and convenience of using their haircare products for instant well-groomed and manageable hair? But, there is so much more to unpack in talk of hair and haircare. As we discovered in our previous episode in conversation with Formula Botanica haircare diploma cours...

Are you a person who shampoos daily? Do you also use a shelf of other haircare products like conditioners, detanglers, moisturisers, serums, leave-in shampoos and conditioners, sun protection products, styling gels, foams, hair fragrances, sprays, waxes and more? If this sounds like your haircare routine, then it is high time to start using fewer haircare products and less of them too. Not only wi...

Does we really need more beauty brands? No, of course we don't, we hear you reply. With thousands of beauty products on the market, and with the hundreds more that arrive – often born of celebrity brands and containing trending, so-called high-performance ingredients – it is reasonable to assume the cosmetics' market is saturated. However, as with all opinions there are counter arguments to explor...

When we came across a cosmetics' company publicly declaring that it would love to see its customers buy fewer of its products, we knew we just had to interview its founder on Green Beauty Conversations. This podcast, as one focused heavily on the ethics and practice of green beauty, has heard industry journalists ask time and again how a cosmetics company would survive if it encouraged its custome...

This Green Beauty Opinion airs just before Black Friday; the day on which the world experiences a retail rush. With Black Friday now extending to a week – even a month – of heavy discounted prices on everything from big-ticket tech items to small business beauty products, we asked in our previous episode whether we – as beauty consumers and indie beauty businesses – should participate in Black Fri...

Black Friday, love it or hate it, is that annual event that sees consumers snap up bargains and big businesses add billions to their profits. Lasting a day, weekend, week and even a month for some businesses, Black Friday is embraced also by small indie beauty brands. It can be a tipping point in the year moving any size of business closer to its profit goals for the year. The sheer rampant consum...

Is the metaverse a liberating space in which we can shake off our physical selves and explore multiple new identities freely and for fun? Or is it a means to escape very real-world, pressing and critical problems such as sustainability, climate change, and, where beauty is concerned, issues like body shaming? In other words, is the metaverse a place to bury our heads in the sand? In this Green Bea...

If you are a gamer, then the metaverse will be a familiar space. But, if you are a natural cosmetics' formulator helping friends, family and customers with real-world skincare and haircare issues, a hyper-virtual reality metaverse of avatars, immersive digital experiences and the concept of the post-human body is going to be light years away from how you live your life in the beauty sector. As wit...

Can synthetic biology offer a more sustainable way to bring "natural" cosmetic ingredients to market? Can a branch of bioscience that includes the word synthetic in its name ever be considered natural? These are questions Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier tackles in this opinion episode. Following her interview in the  previous episode  with Jake Wintermute, developer-evange...

Imagine a future in which bacteria is king and you might give a friend the skincare equivalent of a sourdough bread starter so they can grow their own moisturiser at home. Our podcast guest in this episode is on record as seeding this idea. We love the concept of cosmetic science being ever more in the hands of the home formulator, but is this concept just too futuristic? In this episode, Formula...

You may not have loved history lessons at school, but there is plenty to love about the history of cosmetic formulation. It shows that everyone can become a natural cosmetic formulator and be part of our millennia-old birthright to make our own beauty products at home whether for ourselves or to start a new career or small business. Making skincare is not a recent phenomenon. The vast global beaut...

What can history possibly teach us about the modern-day beauty industry? As it happens, there is a quite a lot. The lives of early beauty industry pioneers alone hold clues to how we have arrived at today's global cosmetic industry. There are parallels, for example, between how those early-20th century industry personalities started their businesses and the indie beauty founders of today; word-of-...

Never has the barrier to entry to becoming a skincare formulator and starting your own beauty business been so low. Yet, with all the social media hype and hustle, we can get distracted by news of the indie beauty brand personalities who raise millions in funding and then sell their businesses to mainstream brands, and decide it's all too overwhelming to think about. It is easy to lose sight of wh...

When you come across indie beauty founders on social media, you may feel overwhelmed. Their branding, websites and social channels seem so visually together and focused, while you may still be at the stage of wondering how to formulate, let alone build a business with a clear mission. What is it really like to start your own skincare brand? Until you speak to an indie beauty entrepreneur who has t...

In this Green Beauty Opinion, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier shares the stories behind a poll she ran on refillable beauty. When asked whether they would go out of their way to clean, return and refill beauty packaging, some 75% of respondents said a resounding yes. While this is an encouraging sign, Lorraine paints a realistic picture of what is actually involved in real...