You use low-chemical products on your floors, in your sink and in the wash—but what are you putting on your face? Francesca Price investigates natural skincare products, and discovers that New Zealand innovation is leading the world
Natural beauty products are the fastest-growing market in the cosmetics industry, globally worth $380 million a year. But how natural is ‘natural’? And more importantly, do natural products actually work? At 40, Francesca Price wants more than toxin-free, nice-smelling products—she wants results!
To many women, walking into a department store and being greeted by the bright colours and divine smells of cosmetic counters is the grown-up equivalent of being a child at the gates of Disneyland. Everywhere you turn, shiny, beckoning bottles vie for your loyalty. It’s easy to slip into the fantasy that if we indulge in all these goodies we’ll discover the secret of eternal youth and beauty. Faced with the rather mundane reality of getting older and, in the eyes of most, less attractive, it’s a fantasy that many of us consider worth buying into.
I am as big a sucker as anyone. For many years, I approached buying skincare with an almost religious fervour. I tried whatever products were hailed as the latest and the greatest, and spent thousands of dollars on various creams, lotions, serums and scrubs. It was only in the last five years—arguably, when I needed all the help I could get—that I started to question the cocktail of chemicals I was slathering on my face. Increasingly, the potential risks of ingredients like parabens, sodium lauryl sulphate and propylene glycol seemed a high price to pay for pure vanity.
So, like many women, I started to seek out alternatives. Natural skincare is the fastest-growing sector of the beauty industry, and clever corporate planners have seen to it that plenty of brands are declaring themselves natural—from big overseas brands like Dr Hauschka, Jurlique and Aveeno, to our own homegrown Living Nature, Trilogy and Snowberry. But without a chemistry major, it’s difficult to know exactly what’s in those bottles.
An ingredient like ‘caprylic triglyceride’ sounds sinister, but is nothing more than coconut oil. Lanolin comes from wool, so it’s natural—but it can be laden with so many chemicals that your face might get a toxic drenching just like the sheep it came from.
Then there’s the all-important efficacy issue. After years of being brainwashed into thinking my skincare needed various ingredients—retinol, glycolic acid, peptides—for it to work, I now find it hard to convince myself otherwise. There’s still the nagging doubt that ‘natural’ products just aren’t up to the job. Ironically (okay, stupidly), I’m happy to subject my floors, clothes and toilets to more natural products, but my face? I still need some convincing.
A good woman for the job is herbalist and formulations specialist Kate Robertson. She has worked as a consultant to a number of cosmetic manufacturers, advising them on which ingredients—natural or otherwise—to use in their products. She also makes bespoke moisturisers, which sound so lush I arrange to see her immediately.
We meet at Kate’s Mt Eden consulting rooms, which have a faintly Harry Potter-esque feel to them, with large jars of herbs and oils stacked high on whitewashed shelves. Kate is 44 but looks a good ten years younger, which is enough to make me trust whatever she says.
In just a few minutes Kate bursts my department store bubble. Most of the world’s major skincare ranges, she explains, are now owned by just two companies: L’Oréal and Estée Lauder. Whether we see ourselves as funky Mac customers or pledge our allegiance to the tree-hugging Origins label, all our money goes into the same pot. Estée Lauder owns both of these brands, alongside other ‘natural’ brands like Aveda. Meanwhile, L’Oréal—the biggest cosmetics company in the world, partowned by Nestlé—has ‘natural’ brands The Body Shop, Kiehl’s and Biotherm as part of its empire. Even sweet little Burt’s Bees, with its childlike bright yellow packaging and down-home origins, is now owned by multinational manufacturer Clorox.
Of course, this doesn’t mean the products don’t work, or that they’re not natural. Companies like to have something for everybody, and when they pay big money to acquire independent natural brands—along with their loyal, chemical-averse customers—they’re not usually silly enough to start pumping the products full of unnatural compounds. Even so, what bottles say on the front aren’t always backed up by what’s on the back. There’s only one way to check a product’s cred, and it’s in the small print.
How natural is natural?
The most important element of any cream is not its brand name but its ingredients list. If you know how to interpret it, the ingredients list will tell you how natural a product really is—and whether it will work. Many products claim to contain “naturally derived” extracts, but the number of chemicals in their ingredients list can run to double figures.
New Zealand company Living Nature is one of only a few skincare manufacturers to use 100 percent natural ingredients. I visit its Auckland office, and am shown a rather alarming video from the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit US research organisation that has spent years lobbying the government to remove the chemicals from personal care products. During tests in 2008 on the umbilical cord blood of ten babies, it found nearly 300 chemicals, including BPA (see good.net.nz/bpa), perchlorate, fire retardants, lead, mercury and PCBs. All these chemicals have been shown to have a serious impact on human health.
Living Nature is quick to point out the greenwashing that occurs elsewhere in the industry: other ‘natural’ brands that don’t declare the exact nature of their ingredients, through to brands like The Body Shop, which trades on a natural image but makes products that often contain chemicals.
The biggest problem any natural cosmetics manufacturer faces is how to preserve its products. Despite millions of R&D dollars spent by manufacturers worldwide, Living Nature remains the only one that preserves its products without the use of a synthetic ingredient or alcohol. “And no one knows how they do it,” says Kate, leaning over the table conspiratorially.
Biodynamic German company Dr Hauschka—along with several other brands—uses natural alcohol to preserve its products, although this risks drying the skin. Many other companies have switched from using paraben-based preservatives (see good.net.nz/parabens) to another ingredient, phenoxyethanol. It isn’t natural either, but for now most see it as a better alternative—although a spokesperson for Living Nature takes pains to point out that phenoxyethanol is a suspected neurotoxin, and that its use in cosmetics is prohibited in Japan.
Finding a truly natural, commercially available preservative remains the holy grail of the natural beauty industry, explains Kate, and whoever conquers and commercialises it stands to make a mint. The science behind Living Nature’s formulations is so coveted the company is rumoured to have turned down takeover bids from major global manufacturers desperate to get their hands on the preservative-free formulas. Living Nature isn’t sharing its big secret, but openly admits it’s based on uniquely New Zealand plant and flower extracts, including manuka honey, totara and manuka oils.
It’s ingredients like these that have seen New Zealand become a world leader in the natural skincare market. Local brands Trilogy, Evolu and Antipodes are in demand all over the globe, and new arrival Snowberry is already stocked at Harvey Nichols in London—a cosmetics honey pot to women of a certain age.
Soraya Hendesi, the founder of Snowberry, says she never grew out of her childhood fascination with mixing together plants and flowers, and as an adult became obsessed with making a face cream that was as effective as it was natural and safe. But Snowberry products are a far cry from the old-fashioned lotions and potions once associated with natural skincare.
Five years of scientific R&D and countless investment dollars have gone into developing formulae intended to compete with the big brands on efficacy. The company uses peptides—synthetic proteins that stimulate the skin to produce collagen—which are also used by many of the big manufacturers, with the difference that the rest of the ingredients (bar the preservative) are natural.
That takes me back to my original question: can natural skincare products actually do the job?
My new skincare guru Kate believes they can, providing the ingredients are of high quality and used at an effective concentration. But whether you smoke, how often you drink and how well you sleep are just as important as the products you use, she says. I confess my fears that a lifetime of sun worship has ruined my skin forever. Kate encouragingly explains that sun isn’t the worst of it: “I would say that the single biggest factor that ages people is stress”.
Her advice, as you’d expect, is to look after myself from the inside too (see page 45): drink two litres of water a day, eat lots of colourful fruits and vegetables, and turn myself upside down regularly. What? Apparently, this encourages the blood flow to your head and acts like an instant facelift. (Unless you’re very good at yoga, you may need the help of a board placed at a 45° angle.)
Living Nature’s answer to the question of whether natural skincare works—and it’s the same one I get from Dr Hauschka—is that the aging process is a natural phenomenon and it cannot be stopped. However: “By looking after your skin both from the inside and the outside, you can delay the early signs of aging in your 30s and 40s.” Their creams are not designed to remove wrinkles—impossible, they say—but to hydrate the skin, plumping wrinkles out, as well as improving the skin’s resilience to environmental factors like sun, wind and pollution.
As much as it irks me, I know this is probably as close to the truth as I’m going to get. The idea of a ‘miracle in a jar’ is no more than an advertiser’s invention.
A few days after my bespoke consultation, Kate’s creams arrive. They feel and smell as good as anything I’ve bought before, and their dinky little jars fulfil my aesthetic desires. They contain many of the algae extracts that companies like Estée Lauder claim are the key to their anti-aging formulas—at a fraction of the price. Do they work? I suspect they will—as well as anything else on the market, at least. The difference is, they won’t be risking my health in the process. Now, that’s a better fantasy to buy into.
Francesca Price

Elizabeth Barbalich
A healthy liver loves to show off, resulting in skin that radiates good health! I begin every morning with a supercharged vegetable juice, made from fresh raw produce, including spinach, lemon, beetroot and parsley. For external skin beauty, the best investment has to be a high-performance antioxidant-based cleanser, to keep the skin free of bacteria and blocked pores.
founder of Antipodes (antipodesnature.com)

Catherine de Groot
For an immediate fix for tired, puffy eyes I recommend the age-old method of laying sliced cucumber over the eye contour area. To help combat signs of ageing around the eyes, look for skincare with vitamins A, B5 and E, rosehip oil and green tea. But let the product do the work, not your fingers, or you’re likely to stretch the skin, creating more problems than you’ll solve!
Trilogy co-founder (trilogyproducts.com)

Kati Kasza
My simple morning routine—walk the dog, drink fair trade coffee, eat home-made bread—sets me up for being consistently good to myself through the day. The same principle applies to skincare. By not overcomplicating a skincare routine, and using ingredients that balance the skin’s natural mechanisms, we end up with healthy complexions and look our best at any age.
founder of evolu (www.evolu.co.nz)

Jody Bews-Hair
Get outdoors and get into nature! I’ve just got back on a bike after eight years, and riding around the Kerikeri countryside gets the blood flowing and the spirits soaring. The skin responds to stress, and nature is an incredible de-stresser. When you get home, put on a face mask so you can’t move for 20 minutes—enforced relaxation with great skin results.
Living Nature (livingnature.com)

Soraya Hendsei
To me, beauty has only a little to do with physical perfection. It is much more that joie de vivre I so often see in children, and those among us who have mastered the art of living selflessly and joyfully. It is akin to wisdom. It must be earned. But when we attain it, it is evident to all. Smile often—the lines will all be in the right place.
founder of Snowberry (snowberrybeauty.com)

Sarah Cowan
My number one beauty tip is my commitment to natural products—natural skincare products on the outside and natural whole foods for the inside. This, combined with a positive mind and taking time out to recharge, leaves me feeling great and that translates into looking great.
managing director of The Herb Farm (herbfarm.co.nz)