SKIN CARE LINE SOURCED FROM NILE VALLEY
Several years ago, S.F. entrepreneur Leila Janah was visiting a rural market in Uganda for her nonprofit Sama. While working with the local women on her digital jobs initiatives, she was struck by the beauty of their skin, even under the region’s harsh environmental conditions. Soon after, she tried their beauty secret: the nilotica shea nut, or Vitellaria nilotica to be precise.
“When I tried it, my jaw dropped. Never before had my travel-ravaged skin looked or felt so smooth and plump,” Janah says of this rare nut that grows in the Nile River Valley.
Today, her skin care line, LXMI (a phonetic play on Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of beauty and prosperity), is built around Nilotica Reserve. Harvested from 20-year-old trees, the butter contains 25 percent more essential fatty acid than the traditional shea nut (shea butter). The brand’s Pure Nilotica Melt ($62) is composed of one organic ingredient: the nilotica nut. It’s an intensive moisturizing treatment, full of vitamins A and E, that starts out as a slightly gritty balm, and then melts into a luxe oil. According to Janah, it can be used as a sleep mask or on particularly parched patches of skin such as cheeks, eye contours and lips. A little goes a long way, and the 1- ounce jar comes with a copper-topped spatula-like applicator and harvest number that corresponds with the wage the harvester was paid.
Though the benefits of nilotica aren’t new, access to it has been compromised due to the instability of the region. Because Janah was already working in the area — creat-
ing jobs for people at the bottom of the pyramid that are most in need of income — she knew how to navigate those obstacles.
“At LXMI, we’ve built our supply chain carefully via nonprofit collectives of women, and we believe that fairwage, dignified work is more powerful than charity,” she says. “Each of our producers earns at least three times the local average wage, and these living wages help chip away at some of the world’s most serious problems, from childhood malnutrition to human trafficking.”
Last fall, LXMI and Janah became part of Sephora’s
inaugural group of female-led start-ups. Sephora Accelerate incubator program is like a boot camp for beauty brands that have a social-impact component.
“As an entrepreneur in the tech field, I had few cosmetic contacts prior to Accelerate. Now I have a mentor, trusted merchants and fellow founders to look to for guidance,” she says. More recently, the brand was funded for the first time for an undisclosed amount by Unilever Ventures, the private equity arm of the British conglomerate that owns Dove and Vaseline, among other personal-care brands.