Lanolin a hit in beauty products
Lanolin produced from New Zealand wool is sought after for use in a major cosmetic company’s lipstick.
The country’s only wool scouring company, Woolworks, produces wool grease as a byproduct of the scouring process. This versatile substance is then sold to processing companies overseas, which extract lanolin from the grease and sell it for use in highend cosmetics.
Woolworks chief executive Nigel Hales said a top French cosmetics company, he would not name for commercial reasons, scooped up all the lanolin produced from New Zealand wool to make its lipsticks. That was because the high quality of the wool grease, the disease-free status of the sheep and the cruelty-free way they were raised, he said.
Wool grease is a smelly greenish-yellow wax-like substance, which contains two particularly valuable substances: cholesterol and lanolin.
Tailor Skincare chief executive Sara Quilter said lanolin was widely used as an alternative to mineral oils and synthetic ingredients like silicone in cosmetics, particularly in lip products and creams aimed at keeping skin hydrated.
‘‘If you think about using Vaseline on your skin, what it does and what mineral oils do, is provide a barrier,’’ Quilter said. ‘‘It stops water from escaping from the skin. Lanolin does that too.
‘‘The thing that separates lanolin from the synthetic mineral oil based products is the presence of a nutritional content, fatty acids, which provide a nutrient benefit to the skin. It nourishes the skin,’’ she said.
Hales said Woolworks produced about 20,000 tonnes of wool grease each year, which was sold to processors who on-sold the refined products to be used in various formulations, he said.
Sold for about $3.50 a kilogram, more than the cost of wool, roughly one-third of the wool grease is used for lanolin. The rest is used to extract cholesterol for use in pharmaceuticals and supplements like Vitamin D3.
Quilter has a background in cosmetic chemistry and said natural alternatives for cosmetic formulations had become big business.
Due to scientific advances and greater consumer awareness about the potential harm of ingredients that had been common in cosmetics, such as parabens, there had been an explosion of naturally-derived products and brands in the past decade, she said.
The beauty industry had traditionally been secretive about its formulations, but as consumers demanded more transparency this changed, she said.
‘‘Consumers can Google anything now and can find out about ingredients and their potential harmful effects,’’ she said.
The customer shift towards natural products was not slowing, and big players were increasingly getting in on the act, she said.
‘‘If you look, for example, at Garnier, 10 years ago its products were touted as botanicals but its formulations didn’t have many natural ingredients and the botanical might have been 1 per cent of the formulation.
‘‘Today it has a natural range in the supermarket.
‘‘I’ve looked at the formulation and it is naturally derived,’’ Quilter said.
That brands were doing this meant there was a financial benefit, despite naturally-derived ingredients costing at least three times as much, and having a shorter shelf-life.
Economies of scale, and the increased competition were all contributing to the trend, she said.
In the current market, brands increasingly had to show they used natural ingredients, were cruelty-free, sustainable and did what they claimed.
The demand for New Zealand lanolin was probably because of their diet and the country’s goodquality solids, which would help to produce a high-quality lanolin, from which consumers also got a nutritional benefit, Quilter said.
Hale said lanolin had always been a valuable by-product, as the revenue from it was used to offset costs in other parts of the business.
‘‘It has a whole lot of attributes: higher cholesterol, it’s pure, it’s disease-free, it’s from sheep that aren’t mulesed [a practice where the skin around the dags is removed to avoid fly strike],’’ he said.
In the 1980s, wool grease could not be given away but Hales said there was now more opportunity than Woolworks could handle. Income from wool grease was sitting at about 25 per cent of total revenue.