Words by Smiley Team
“It would’ve been mad not to have got involved,” says Jo Chidley, founder of Beauty Kitchen, speaking about recently attending COP26 in her hometown in Glasgow.
“We tick a lot of minority boxes – we’re a high-scoring B-corp company, a female-led business, and we work within beauty with a circular business model. Coming out of COP really gives you motivation to reach those global targets – it gives me extra energy.”
Jo is on a mission to create the most sustainable beauty products in the world. She’s a sustainability expert, chemist, and herbal botanist, too, and has been in the sustainable beauty field since the company launched in 2014. “When we started in 2014, we had strong sustainable messages – and nobody was interested,” explains Jo. “So, we had to stop talking about it.
“At the time, people were only just really starting to understand organic beauty, vegan beauty, natural beauty, but the customer just wasn’t ready for sustainability.”
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Both retailers and the direct consumers were more interested in the efficacy of the products, says Jo, rather than the overall sustainability of them. Does the product work? “That really takes the lead,” says Jo. “And once you’ve got that, how natural and sustainable your products are is the secondary message people are interested in.”
But sustainability has always been strong within Beauty Kitchen – “we were way ahead of anyone else,” says Jo, “but I knew change was afoot”. So, when did people’s mindset start to shift?
“The ultimate change was the Blue Planet moment,” she says. “As soon as it aired, the amount of attention focused on plastic, single-use, and waste was huge – people started looking for alternatives.”
The company trials and tests lots of different ways of doing things to try and be more sustainable – and one of these trials let to their ‘Re’ scheme, which allows customers to send their packaging back to them, where they wash and reuse it in the next batch. It's a better option than recycling.
The reusable packaging can be used by any brand – Beauty Kitchen was first, of course, but Unilever were second and Elemis is the third. The packaging is then made unique for each individual brand using their labels. “It has to be available to anyone in our industry,” says Jo. “Whether that’s big or independent brands.”
“We wanted to use Beauty Kitchen as the demonstrator brand. We’ve been through all of those steps, so we can talk straight from the heart when we talk to other brands and say, 'we know the challenges, here are the products you should change into reusable packaging first, for example'.”
Holland & Barrett is the first national retailer to accept returns on this scheme, and they’re working behind the scenes with other retailers too, so it can be available to everyone. “The return points we have will grow over the next 12 months,” adds Jo. “We’ve already got strong ties and pilots with Asda, as well as smaller retailers like Co-Op.”
The scheme itself has the potential to save more than 100 million bottles from landfill in just three years – and those are just conservative estimates.
But of course, the products themselves are sustainable themselves. “The formulation is almost the easy part,” says Jo. “I wanted to create a formula for products that was carbon positive, as well as being truly effective.
In the company’s Seahorse Plankton skincare, for example, Jo says the micro algae within those products are the “lungs of the Earth”. They absorb CO2, give out oxygen, and recycle the air that we breathe. “They’re high in protein building blocks and these are excellent for skin as it ages,” adds Jo. “We use ingredients that have a very high renewable and regeneration factor, rather than using stuff that comes from a finite resource."
By 2025, Jo wants the company to be completely carbon neutral. “We’ve been carbon positive, but we want to be truly carbon neutral where we don’t have any need for any carbon offsets.”
The other agenda for them is to make the industry more sustainable through reusable packaging and see if they can get as many brands as possible to have reusable packaging, taking the pressure off the consumer to make the right choice.
You can buy Beauty Kitchen products online, as well as in high street stores such as Boots, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett, Asos, and Feel Unique. Find out more about Beauty Kitchen on its website.
