Northern California’s clean beauty and wellness movement has gone farm-to-face.
Holistic living is synonymous with Northern California. We grow our own food, shop at farmers markets and do yoga in parks. And at a time when many of us are seeking paths to wellness within the walls of our own homes, it makes sense to consider what we put on our skin.
In the past decade, a new crop of womenled Northern California independent beauty brands has blazed a trail in natural skin care, harnessing the power of local and organic plants to make earth-friendly serums, balms, mists and more that deliver effective skin care while carving space for “me time.”
“It’s part of the Bay Area lifestyle: clean eating, clean living, clean beauty,” says Jeannie Jarnot, founder of Beauty Heroes, a Novato-based clean beauty website that carries more than 100 healthy skin, hair and makeup lines, including nine made here in Northern California.
Couple that with Bay Area innovation and you have a breeding ground for beauty industry game changers, like Petaluma-based Laurel, a pioneer in the “slow beauty” movement, and Honua, a Santa Rosa company that uses indigenous Hawaiian botanicals in its products.
It started in the late 1980s, with Benedetta in Petaluma, followed by Berkeley-based Marie Veronique in 2002 and San Rafael’s Juice Beauty, which launched in 2005. Today, some 15-plus clean beauty brands call Northern California home, from Napa Valley’s Vintner’s Daughter and Concord’s Innersense to San Francisco’s Bathing Culture.
These companies go beyond commercial clean beauty definitions — what Sephora
might label as clean, for instance — which exclude ingredients that are toxic to humans and banned in other countries. Everything they craft is biodegradable and many go beyond green, partnering with organizations on environmental initiatives and other ways to give back to their communities.
The wellness experience lies in both the ritual and self-care and in connecting with nature through aromatic essential oils and other powerful, ethically sourced natural ingredients.
“Customers tell me that their skin care ritual is part of their mental health right now,” says Jarnot, whose standards are among the strictest in the industry. She opened the Beauty Heroes brick-and-mortar shop in Novato in 2019.
Here, we dive into three smallbatch Bay Area brands, learn about their leaders and dish on our favorite products.
Free + True, Concord
Licensed aesthetician Tami Blake came to plant-based skin care by way of sugaring, the ancient method of gentle, nontoxic hair removal. After opening Walnut Creek’s True Sugaring & Skincare in 2013, she went back to school and “fell in love with the intersection of botanicals and hightech ingredients, like vitamin C.”
In 2019, Blake launched Free + True with a vision: To create eight organic, natural products that would be in her dream facial. Today, she does her own formulations in her North Concord lab with organic herbs and botanicals. Eighty percent are sourced locally, mostly from farms in Sonoma County.
“When the plants come in freshly cut, they are very vibrant,” she says. “We lay them out to dry, then infuse them in oils to draw out the medicinal properties.”
The organic honey in the Raw + Wild Illuminating Honey Mask ($56) comes from hives in Antioch and Morgan Hill.
What we tried: Ramblin Rose Soothing Hydrating Serum ($68) with rose and neroli flower waters and hyaluronic acid made our latewinter skin feel dewy; Mama Pacha ($58), a moisture infusion cream with arctic peptides and mango seed butter, locked in suppleness; freeandtrueskincare.com
Laurel, Petaluma
You could say Laurel Shaffer had a nose for clean beauty. In 2010, she applied her training as a certified sommelier to build a beauty brand based on biodynamic farming and microregional sourcing, firsts in the industry at the time.
“Being a sommelier not only trained my nose to be able to detect things like when the ingredient was harvested and how it was processed, but it also taught me what questions to ask of our farmers and how to have stronger relationships with them,” Shaffer says.
Today Shaffer, a trained herbalist, sources more than 50% of her ingredients, including the almonds in her Almond Rose Exfoliant ($60), from within a 100-mile radius of the Laurel Beauty Barn. Many are grown, seeded and harvested exclusively for Laurel.
What we tried: Hydrating Elixir ($56), a misting serum packed with 26 beneficial ingredients, including polyphenols, resveratrol and vitamin C, refreshed our tired skin throughout the day. California Body Oil ($90), an aromatic ode to the Golden State, moisturized our driest areas; www. laurelskin.com
Earth Tu Face, San Rafael and Concord
Like others born on the cusp between Generation X and the millennials, Sarah Buscho grew up around pharmacy and department store products — but her skin tolerated none of them. “I had to make my own products because my skin has always been sensitive and gives lots of feedback,” Buscho says, laughing.
After studying at the Berkeley Herbal Center, she put her DIY skills to use, launching Earth Tu Face in 2012 with a face wash, two serums and a face balm. “Plants are so precious, and they’re the best for us, so why use things that our livers have to deal with?”
While the company’s apothecary is in Concord, the small garden that grows the calendula, lavender and heritage roses for Earth Tu Face’s masks is a former Chez Panisse plot for salad greens and melons.
Sustainability is always on Buscho’s mind. No endangered plants go into her formulations, and she recently phased out the seashell-encased Vanilla Peppermint Lip Balm because “vanilla is an ingredient greatly impacted by climate change.”
What we tried: The concentrated Face Balm ($68), a water-free blend of plant oils and immortelle (curry plant), is nourishing and great for irritated skin. Also loved the aloe and palmarosa Face Wash ($52), which is naturally lathering and cleans without stripping skin. You can get it with a metal cap instead of a plastic pump to better support the planet; earthtuface.com