Washington - There are so many next-big-things in beauty right now, it’s hard to predict what will be next.
But Koko Hayashi hopes it will be persimmon extract, which she describes as having astonishing powers over body odour in her Mirai Clinical Deodorising Soap with Persimmon.
Hayashi’s tiny skincare company is just one of countless indie beauty brands trying to break into the US market, but her body bar comes with an epic saga of pre-industrial soap-making techniques and the wisdom of long-ago geishas.
These days, the artisanal process is as much the selling point as the product itself - and Hayashi is accustomed to spending a lot of time explaining why her soap costs about R300 a bar.
“It is crafted at an old family-owned soap mill, spearheaded by a man known as ‘Mr Soap’”, who, Hayashi says, knows by “some special formula in his brain” how to adjust his recipes to account for fluctuations of wind and temperature. The liquid ingredients are mixed in a gentle, time-consuming fashion to avoid damaging the delicate ingredients, and if some young whippersnapper agitates the soap too vigorously, Mr Soap yells.
“Persimmon is very sensitive,” Hayashi says over Skype from her home town of Sapporo, Japan.
“After the soap cools, it is cut and dried and soaked and hand-polished, then dried and soaked and hand-polished again, without the benefit of an industrial process. With machines, it would take a few days, but we put it outside and, considering humidity, temperature, wind, usually it takes three months for drying”.
This is the labour-intensive, heavily pedigreed, exotica-spiked world of artisanal beauty.
The artisan movement long ago blew through the world of food on a wind of old-timey brand names and wordy labelling. The Mast Brothers, makers of R160 or so craft chocolate bars, paid such obeisance to Victorian-era methods that they were said to ship their beans from the Dominican Republic to Brooklyn via a wind-powered schooner.
The explosion of farmers’ markets, backyard beekeeping and crocheted Etsy baby collars attests to a hunger - largely among a privileged set - for handcrafted authenticity, simple supply chains and the glory of the way things used to be, or might still be, in some far-off corner of the world.
Now, the beauty market, too, has been inundated by companies that talk of their beginnings in kitchens, handcrafting small-batch face serums out of things such as carrot seed oil.
The brands may be small-scale and homespun, but artisanal beauty is fast becoming a big business, with more dedicated websites and retail outlets cropping up - such as San Francisco-based Credo Beauty, which features brands like Graydon Clinical Luxury, started by a yoga teacher/macrobiotic chef who makes skin-care products out of “cold-pressed broccoli seed oil”, or Follain, which has a location in the District’s Union Market and a founder who once apprenticed on an organic lavender farm in France.
Last year, New York City hosted its first Indie Beauty Expo, which one marketing agency described as a “sold-out media and buyer frenzy”.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s new Goop skin-care products boast ingredients with highly specific names - “poet’s daffodil” and “sweet iris”, for instance, in her R1 440 or so Luminous Melting Cleanser - to emphasise their individuality (like yours, dear consumer).
“People are looking for an increased identity with the products, a personal relationship,” says Eleanor Dwyer, a beauty researcher for the market analysis firm Euromonitor. “There’s an idea that the products you use symbolise you.”
Hair and skin products have always thrived on what one might call “magic elixir” ingredients, and Mirai’s persimmon seems to be a perfect one for this moment. The taut, dainty, orange fruit is still sufficiently exotic to US consumers; plus, Asian beauty trends and the ancient-geisha-wisdom meme are big right now. (A few years ago, there was a buzz about the pricey Geisha Facial, at New York’s Shizuka spa, combining fine-milled nightingale poop with Japanese rice bran to lighten the complexion.)
This year, Hayashi got her soap, body wash, serum and spritzer into some of those Oscars celebrity gift bags. So far, Mirai Clinical is sold mostly online, but Hayashi hopes to place it in retail locations soon. “I feel like I have a mission to introduce this Japanese greatness to the world,” she says.
The artisanal beauty trend has been fuelled by a growing interest in natural ingredients, as Whole Foods shoppers who buy grass-fed beef consider what they’re putting on their T-zones, and environmentalists warn about the dangers of parabens and phthalates.
Within skin-care, “natural organic ingredients are among the fastest-growing segments in the marketplace”, says Karen Grant, NPD Group’s beauty analyst. A growing number of consumers care deeply about transparency, sustainability and fair trade, so companies that source carefully, recycle and give back to communities where they harvest are often rewarded for it.
Most brands don’t have Paltrow, though, so they must rely on compelling brand stories to distinguish themselves. The result is a bevy of origin tales as familiar as Greek mythology.
These stories all seem to start with protagonists seeking to craft greatness from nature; the’re described as “plant-whisperers” or are said to be devoted to “wild-crafted” ingredients or a “farm-to-face” mission.
The founder might be a professional apiarist who discovered the secret to good skin in the honey she was harvesting, or perhaps a globe-trotting pharmacognosist who has studied the curative powers of extracts taken from South Africa’s kigelia and baobab plants.
So goes the story behind the British brand Dr Jackson’s, which launched a few years ago but packages products in amber apothecary bottles that look straight out of a Victorian lithograph.
Artisanal beauty products are often built around at least one obscure ingredient, the procurement of which is “really difficult”. There’s no distance these brands won’t travel, such as a body scrub with “white sand particles from the shores of Bora Bora”, or a “gel treatment serum” made from “the stem cells of Australian kakadu plums”.
They might need to go back in time to craft skin products made with “donkey milk - known as a beauty elixir since the ancient ages”.
There’s an emphasis on the rare find from nature, almost but not quite lost to mankind - “the stem cells of a rare Swiss apple”, or the fruit from a tree previously known only to peoples of the Amazon, drawing on what Dwyer calls “that trope of the insightful magical native”.
That rare ingredient must be gathered with care, ideally by local villagers, processed in a lab under the most stringent standards, and then placed into a product whose label declares its transparency of its process, its freedom from potentially dangerous chemicals, its fair trade and cruelty-free status, its philanthropic efforts, and the all-around goodness of its intentions.
Consider the sea buckthorn berry. Ten years ago, no one had heard of it. Nowadays, well, lots of people still haven’t heard of it, but that’s only because they haven’t been watching The Dr Oz Show. (A healthy number of magical elixir trends feature a plug from Dr Oz.) A Salt Lake City brand called Sibu, now in 2 500 retail locations, bases its entire existence on this tiny fruit - which, Dwyer says, could well be “the next argan oil”. (Everybody wants to be the next argan oil.)
The story of this fruit has, in turn, been crafted with great care by Sibu on its website: One day, the entrepreneur Bruce McMullin went to India, where he “crossed paths with an Ayurvedic specialist” who “mentioned a powerful holy fruit, the Sea Buckthorn berry” that McMullin decided to bring to the West. (This sour, orange fruit grows wild across Europe and Asia, but Sibu says its variety boasts the greatest amount of omega-7 because it grows high in the Himalayas.)
The berries are “hand-harvested the traditional way”, with villagers hitting the shrubbery with sticks in the dark, for “it is crucial that these berries are collected in the pre-dawn hours to protect them from the relentless UV rays and lock in the greatest nutritive value”.
The berries are quickly pureed and refrigerated in “state-of-the-art facilities,” and sent across the ocean in refrigerated shipping containers “for formulation, blending, purification and testing”. Sibu’s brand ambassador, Wendi Coombs, says the company is Peta-certified, cruelty-free, vegan and in the process of becoming fair-trade-certified.
She says McMullin and his wife are active philanthropists for causes in the Himalayas and Africa. And she says the narrative of the sea buckthorn berry’s discovery is integral to its existence.
“Without that story, there would be no Sibu,” Coombs says. “It all goes really back to Bruce McMullin and his passion for this little berry.”
Randy Schueller and Perry Romanowski are cosmetic chemists who run the Beauty Brains, a website that happily debunks many claims of beauty manufacturers large and small - noting when a touted ingredient in a moisturiser is included in an infinitesimal amount, or when the quinoa protein in a conditioner won’t do much because it’s rinsed away. They’ve seen a lot of trends.
Some suffer from marketing limitations - snail mucin, emu oil made from the fatty tissue of the flightless bird - while others at least “sound sexy”, Schueller says, and are destined to be featured in big print on labels, whether or not they “have any bearing on the functionality of the product”.
Schueller says that trends often emerge from the marketing departments of big companies (‘pomegranate is a hot colour, let’s put pomegranate extract in our shampoo’), or because suppliers offer a good deal on a raw material.
“The difficulty with personal care products is that the technology hasn’t changed much in the last 30 or 40 years, and so everybody has access pretty much to the same technology,” Romanowski says. He says if you can get rare ingredients “and they have a good story, it can give you an edge -even if they don’t work better.”
So which factors determine which magical elixirs emerge next? Look to the food world.
Grant, of NPD Group, says there’s often a lag of a few years between when foods trend on kitchen tables and when they make it to medicine cabinets. Recent ingredients to make the jump include probiotics, cocoa, turmeric and quinoa. Also, coconut oil, which Annie Jackson, Credo Beauty’s vice-president for merchandising and planning, describes as the “avocado toast” of the beauty world. Consult experts about artisanal beauty, and you’ll get a bevy of next-big-things such as prickly pear seed oil.Sea kelp could rise again, Dwyer suggests - perhaps with the help of a compelling founder and a group of villagers schooled in centuries-old kelp-harvesting ways.
“The ocean is mystical, and it’s home to fish. Even though it’s slimy, it’s sort of a more relatable ingredient than snail mucus.”
Consumers might not want to be demystified, says Romanowski.
The perfect ingredient doesn’t just moisturise or smell good or look pretty; it tells a good story.
Washington Post