Green Beauty Conversations by Formula Botanica Formula Botanica

Sustainable beauty is a term laden with grand visions and vague concepts. It is enough to scare off even those indie beauty brands wanting to do their best to reduce their carbon impact and waste. 
Unraveling sustainability as a small business is complex, so imagine our excitement at coming across a new platform aimed specifically at making sustainability a simpler process for small beauty and wellness companies to navigate.
In this episode, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier talks to Anisha Gupta, chemical engineer, sustainability expert and co-founder of Bluebird Climate, a climate-tech firm handholding small beauty companies in their mission to decarbonise their operations and make lifecycle assessments of their products. Based on low-cost access to their transparent benchmarking tools, Bluebird believes that it doesn’t have to be complicated to tell a sustainability story.
If sustainability has been on your mind, and whether your beauty business is pre-launch, a start-up or established, this is an episode to help you get going on your brand’s sustainability journey.
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.

The word gentle is touted around in the beauty industry and familiar to consumers. However the ingredients inside certain cosmetics may be anything but gentle to our skin.
The beauty industry creates products to help reduce the visible signs of ageing, like fine lines and wrinkles, by over cleansing, exfoliating and peeling our skin.
But this removes the microbiome we so badly need for good skin health and for the maintenance of our skin barrier. We heard about the human microbiome and its vital role in maintaining skin health in our previous guest episode with Leo Salvi of Kind to Biome, a firm developing rigorous, verifiable tests to assess the microbiome gentleness of cosmetics.
In this opinion episode, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier asks: "Isn't it time we see the industry formulating with a different and gentler agenda than antiageing and turning back the clock on our skin?"

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.

Imagine the human microbiome as a planet with millions, and possibly billions, of microorganisms living in harmony to protect their host - our skin and scalp. Incredibly, one square centimetre of our skin, depending on the part of the body, could have that number of microbes living on it.
We are in early days of scientific research on the skin's microbiome and its function in maintaining the health of our skin and body. How then is it possible to have cosmetics sporting labels that say their formulations are microbiome friendly?
Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier dives into the mysterious and magical world of our skin's microbiome. Her guest is Leo Salvi, a chemist, qualified safety assessor for cosmetics and the Co-Founder and Head of Science at Kind to Biome® which provides a scientifically-validated methodology to back up microbiome-gentle claims for beauty products.
Will microbiome-friendly cosmetics be the next big industry trend? Listen in to discover and make your mind up.
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.
 

In this opinion podcast, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier asks us to look back and laugh – or else we’ll cry with despair – at her chart-topping ten most ridiculous claims that the beauty industry has made. In the previous episode, Lorraine and colleague Ana Green unpacked the facts behind one of the latest claims in cosmetics’ marketing – fossil fuel-free beauty. It proved to be yet another misleading term.
As a follow up, Lorraine takes us through her choice of most ridiculous claims starting over a hundred years ago at the beginning of the modern cosmetics industry. While today, most of those historic claims could not be made, Lorraine notes that we still find similar, if subtler messaging circulating in the beauty industry.
Look back and laugh or look back and be angry about what many global beauty firms are communicating today. We leave it up to you to decide. Listen in to an astounding round-up of ridiculous claims. You won’t believe what makes Lorraine’s top three.

Fossil fuel-free beauty - haven’t we covered this one before on Green Beauty Conversations? Not in its new form. Fossil fuel-free is yet another distinct claim we’ve seen popping up on cosmetics’ labels. You’d be right to think it's familiar as on this podcast we have delved into related claims of carbon-neutral, zero-waste and climate-neutral, along with a host of topics open to greenwashing such as waterless, green, clean and blue beauty.
However, while it may overlap with those other terms, we realised that fossil fuel-free beauty needs its own episode in order for us to unpack its meaning.
Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier is joined by School Education Manager Ana Green to shed light on exactly what fossil fuel-free beauty is and why it may be among the most confusing and misleading terms yet applied to beauty products. Listen in to decide for yourself if fossil fuel-free is a claim too far.
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. 
 

Big beauty has spent well over a century using fear-mongering to marketing its products to us. Even if today it is more sophisticated in its methods and use of media, the mainstream industry is still telling us we are not good enough or beautiful enough. In effect, it is telling us it’s not alright to embrace and celebrate our unique, inherent beauty and the normal part and parcel of being human – ageing.
But, there are some in the beauty industry daring to ditch this messaging and give voice to a different way of looking at beauty; one that celebrates us as we are and makes us feel good in our own skin without using negative messaging to make us buy their products.
In this green beauty opinion, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier explains how indie beauty formulators and entrepreneurs are helping dismantle decades of big beauty’s domination of the beauty narrative. Lorraine concludes with a clarion call for more of us to learn to formulate and change the industry for the better.
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.