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 beauty industry is a newcomer at just under 200 years old. Well before lab scientists in white coats featured in cosmetics’ advertising came thousands of years of home formulation dating back at least to Ancient Egyptian times. Following her interview with Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at Harvard Business School and author of Beauty Imagined – A History of the Global Beauty Industry, podcast host and Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier highlights in this episode events in cosmetic history that show humankind had the inherent skills to formulate cosmetics. This Green Beauty Opinion takes you on a brief journey through the centuries to show you that it is time to bring cosmetic formulation home. Listen in to hear how history shows us that everyone can formulate.

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-mouth marketing of a century ago and social media marketing of today are similar in their aims. Fueled by a desire to unearth the secrets of today's phenomenally-successfully global beauty industry and discover indie beauty's place in it, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier read dozens of books on the sector. One in particular stood out for its sheer depth and breadth of analysis of how the past continues to shapes the beauty sector today. In this podcast episode, Lorraine interviews Geoffrey Jones, author of Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry, who is Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School. Listen in for some fascinating insights into, among other topics, the myths, lies and makeup that helped shaped the modern beauty industry we know today.

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 what formulating your own natural, organic skincare is all about – from learning a new, empowering skill to changing your life in ways that don’t necessarily mean becoming a superstar beauty entrepreneur. In this opinion short, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier talks about how indie beauty can empower you if you take the leap to learn to formulate. She urges us to go at our own pace and on our own terms without the pressure of comparisonitis. Don't wait for permission to start; just give it a go. Be the person you are meant to be. Create a natural beauty business that you shape and own and discover just how positive a life-changing experience it can be. 

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 truly changed their life and you see it happen before your very eyes, being an indie founder can seem an impossible journey. If these thoughts have run through your mind, then listen to Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier interview Naz Bashir, founder of Solo Skin London.  Naz's story is one of someone who started small, thinking of formulating for her own skincare issues only.  From DIY hobbyist to trained organic formulator and indie brand  founder with awards to her name, Naz Bashir talks about how her Formula Botanica courses changed her life. In learning to formulate professionally, Naz grew in confidence as a formulator and realised she was not alone with her skin issues. A business was far from her thoughts at the outset, but it is now her life's mission and very much a revenue stream for Naz and her family. We promise you that this episode will leave you feeling totally inspired about joining the community of natural, organic formulators. Just see where learning to formulate can take you too.

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 realising a future where refillable beauty is the norm, not the exception. Some respondents commented that they simply didn't have time to go out of their way to make those refill trips. Others said beauty products were a luxury for them and they wanted shiny new packaging to complete their consumer experience. One said that reuse and refill was better suited to household cleaning products than beauty. However, Lorraine remains ever the optimist that refillable and reusable beauty packaging will prevail for the planet's sake. She challenges us to change our beauty consumer habits and help make refills the norm.

Imagine shopping in two years from now for anything from your favourite nut milk to face cleanser and struggling to see products on the shelves housed in plastic packaging. Futuristic perhaps, but it may arrive in a store near you sooner than you think if pioneering entrepreneur Jo Chidley, the founder of sustainable, natural personal care brand Beauty Kitchen, has her way. Jo’s latest venture ReRe, an amibitious return, refill, repeat scheme, is tackling the seemingly impossible by championing a far-reaching reuse revolution. Jo and co-founder Stuart Chidley set up ReRe not only to implement cradle-to-cradle design into Beauty Kitchen’s own products, but also as the world’s first closed-loop solution for packaging through its ground-breaking Re programme and refill stations. Already counting some of the UK’s biggest retailers like Asda, Marks & Spencer and Holland & Barrett as participating partners, ReRe is on a mission to change the way brands create packaging and bottle goods, how retailers sell almost anything, and how consumers shop. Join Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier as she interviews Jo Chidley, a circular economy expert, chemist, herbal botanist, and co-founder of Beauty Kitchen, the highest scoring B Corp in the UK beauty industry. This episode shows just how the power of the collective – manufacturers, retailers and consumers – can drive a truly circular economy in packaging.

If you are a regular listener to Green Beauty Conversations, you will have heard Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier and guests tackle numerous aspects of sustainable beauty. Circular, biodegradable, waterless, carbon and climate neutral, net zero and a gamut of other issues has come under the spotlight in our podcast conversations. Tackling the issues by examining the various certification schemes and looking at case studies one by one may, however, lead us to forget the bigger picture - and overlook some uncomfortable truths. Today's global cosmetics' industry is inherently unsustainable if it continues with its age-old model of economic growth. Business as usual with the production of billions of units of consumer products each year that still mostly end up in landfill, enter waterways and pollute the oceans is not an option if we wish to halt the planet's degradation and reverse climate change. In this green beauty opinion, Lorraine, who is also a Chartered Environmentalist and biologist, dares to talk about the elephant in the room - the need for the half-a-trillion US$ beauty industry to take drastic measures to change its behaviour. Infinite growth with finite resources has to end. Lorraine puts forward her four-pillar blueprint for a sustainable beauty industry that may come at a price to business as usual, but is critical if we are to address the crises humankind has inflicted on the planet. Listen in for some hard talk on the big issues and be inspired to act now, whether indie or large-scale beauty business, to take responsibility for, and to play your part in building a sustainable future for the industry and the planet.

Natural, sustainable beauty is a phrase used liberally in the beauty industry. Today, we are used to beauty brands, mainstream and indie, touting the naturalness of their formulations and their sustainability credentials, but can we be critical of their products, words and actions if we are in the dark about what the terms mean? Do the brands themselves truly know what they are committing to when using these words? Consumers may be far more unclear about where the differences lie between natural and sustainable than insiders in the beauty industry. Among the many beauty industry terms we have covered on Green Beauty Conversations, natural and sustainable still stand out as being particularly misused despite their familiarity. They are interchanged in error, misunderstood at best or harnessed to mask green-washing at worst. The terms seem so deceptively simple that it is entirely possible to not think through the complexities that underpin them. Given the continued lack of clarity about natural and sustainable, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier and colleague Ana Green, the School's Education Manager, devote an entire episode to the origins, definitions and practical application of these words in the beauty sphere. Listen in to make sense of natural and sustainable beauty and as a result, feel empowered as beauty formulators, founders and consumers to demand clarity from anyone in the beauty industry throwing these terms into their own conversations.

Would you buy lab-grown skincare? While this might seem futuristic, biotech cosmetic ingredients are here now, and going to become more commonplace on our beauty shelves – and sooner than you think. In this Green Beauty Opinion, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier follows up on key takeouts from her interview with Dr Barbara Paldus, the founder of biotech company Codex Beauty Labs. In that episode, we heard how lab-grown ingredients derived efficiently and sustainably from single plant cells rather than from vast fields of crops will become the new normal in cosmetics. But, are we as consumers and natural formulators ready to embrace lab-grown ingredients? The scene seems set for biotech beauty to be the next naturals vs synthetics’ battleground. But, as always, the issues are nuanced. Lorraine proposes we approach biotech beauty with informed debate and open minds. There is likely to be a hybrid model in the cosmetics industry as plants have given us a sense of calm, grounding and well-being for millennia and are inherent in our cultures, rituals and rites. And for now, biotech cannot efficiently lab grow every ingredient. Lorraine’s challenges us to be receptive to the radical solutions required to sustain the industry and the planet and to look into the research from suppliers of biotech ingredients. How would we react if our favourite plants were threatened by climate change? The advent of biotech beauty brings with it searching questions, but ones we need to think of answers to now, not in decades to come.

The natural and organic cosmetics world loves sourcing the purest, sustainable plant-based ingredients that are ethically picked, plucked, farmed and harvested, and processed with as little artifice as possible. On this podcast, we have covered a raft of natural ingredient sourcing and formulation concepts from wild-harvesting and biodynamic farming to blue, waterless and upcycled beauty. All of these topics, we have assessed through the lens of sustainability. It is worth reiterating and remembering this as we tackle the topic of this episode of Green Beauty Conversations - biotech beauty. The next most potent, active botanical is possibly being engineered from plant stem cells using biotech right now, as a breakthrough natural cosmetic ingredient. But does the sound of lab-grown plant actives in your cosmetics excite you or worry you? Is it too futuristic or something you'd adopt willingly right now? How receptive would you be to using biotech-based ingredients if your ideal of natural organic cosmetic ingredients is their farming or wild harvesting from forests and fields? The truth is that biotech beauty is happening now, and is gaining momentum - in part, as an answer to some of the key sustainability issues surrounding the farming of crops as cosmetic ingredients.  To give us insights into the world of biotech beauty, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier, herself a biologist and chartered environmentalist, talks to Dr Barbara Paldus of Codex Beauty, a firm pioneering biotech cosmetic formulation. Listen in to this eye-opener on biotech which, given current climate change predictions, could be the new normal for sourcing natural, and even organic, cosmetic ingredients sooner than you think.