Epicenter
Juice Beauty backer spreads message of clean cosmetics
Gwyneth Paltrow comes clean about beauty.
On a rainy Friday afternoon in February, San Francisco influencers clopped into Juice Beauty’s headquarters in San Rafael in their sky-high heels. Using their phones as mirrors, they fixed their dramatic makeup with their pinkies while awaiting their chance to talk makeup with Juice Beauty makeup creative director, actor and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow.
While green beauty didn’t attract most of these fashion-focused influencers, Paltrow’s star power did — which was the point. “Many of these influencers that are here today — they aren’t thinking about clean beauty,” said Juice Beauty founder Karen Behnke. “Gwyneth brings to us the ability to spread awareness to a wider audience. She truly believes and cares.”
So much so that in February of 2015, Paltrow signed on as creative director of the company’s makeup line and invested in the company. Since that time, Paltrow has been very active in the development process. “I was very hands on,” said Paltrow as she sipped herbal tea in the loft of Juice headquarters, while below the influencers sipped Champagne and took selfies. “To Juice’s credit, there was so much back and forth — I was so hard on the formulas. I wanted my Hollywood makeup artists to be able to use the makeup interchangeably with their top products.”
This was the most important factor for Paltrow — that the Juice makeup would perform as well as conventional makeup brands. “I think my issue with natural and organic beauty has always been that it didn’t stand up next to other brands I used and loved,” she said.
“Natural makeup was just nowhere near the conventional brands, and so before I agreed to do this, I said I would only do it if everybody was committed to getting the makeup to the point where it can stand shelf-to-shelf next to professional makeup. And that’s exactly what we did.”
Paltrow and Juice Beauty introduced the Phyto-Pigments collection early last year, a makeup line including everything from longwearing lip colors, eyeliner and mascara to concealer, foundation and highlighter. This month, Juice launched its Light-Diffusing Dust, a tinted powder described on its website as “formulated with certified organic ingredients and plantderived pigments, kaolin, argan, and rice powder to diffuse light, camouflage imperfections and absorb excess oil.”
“It turns out that when you are not using synthetic ingredients, plastics
and artificial dyes, it’s much harder to get the formulas right,” said Paltrow about the lengthy development process. “The slip and feel they are supposed to have — it’s a complicated process.”
Mimicking that smoothing and blurring “slip and feel” found in conventional beauty products like moisturizer, foundation and primer are typically created with silicone-based dimethicone and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), perhaps better known as Teflon and found on nonstick pans.
“People expect that ‘slip’ in their beauty products, and we found a way to mimic it successfully with coconut alkanes and grapeseed, but it has been a tough process,” said Behnke. “Twenty years ago, I was at a pet store and the kid behind the counter said, ‘Make sure you don’t fry your eggs in Teflon around the birds. The off-gassing will kill them.’ But it’s OK for my kids? That was the first time I started looking at Teflon for what it is. No wonder the conventional creams feel so beautifully slippery — they are using Teflon!”
In addition to replacing harmful ingredients, Behnke says Juice Beauty differentiates itself by manufacturing small batches to ensure freshness and efficacy. “When we talk about radically transforming the beauty industry, we do it through using only certified organic ingredients and ‘just in time manufacturing,’ which means we are
always online with our manufacturers. If we sell 500,000 of a product in a year, we won’t manufacture them all in one lot. We will do it, say, 50,000 units at a time. It’s a lot more expensive and more labor intensive to manage, but therein lies the difference.”
Paltrow hopes that education will eventually open the eyes of consumers still buying conventional beauty. “My friends say to me, ‘I don’t want to learn which chemicals are safe or not.’ They can’t differentiate, and they don’t want to make a list.
“Education is the only way. Nobody understands why their daughters are going through puberty at 9 years old, why they can’t get pregnant, why they can’t lose weight. It’s because our hormones are disturbed; the balance is off. I think the beauty industry needs to be accountable for pulling the wool over the eyes of American women who don’t realize they are putting harmful chemicals into their bodies.”
Whether American women realize the potential harm in conventional beauty, there seems to be a growing market for brands like Juice Beauty. “We are going into 10 Bloomingdale’s locations. We are in Sephora Canada and Holt Renfrew in Canada,” said Behnke. “We are actively taking shelf space from the traditional brands.”
“The beauty industry needs to be accountable for pulling the wool over the eyes of American women who don’t realize they are putting harmful chemicals into their bodies.” — Gwyneth Paltrow, Juice Beauty creative director