GROWING BEAUTIFUL
After a fruitless attempt to tame her garden, Kathleen Baird-murray celebrates the green-fingered entrepreneurs creating their own organic skincare products
Organic skincare products
My Shropshire garden used to be a potato patch; until it became five fruit trees and then expanded into beds of hydrangeas, peonies and roses; untamed quince and honeysuckle; foxgloves, poppies – plus weeds. A short flirtation with some vegetables aside, it never became anything more productive than that.
Increasingly though, I pick up the pots on my dressing table and marvel at where the contents come from. Who are these founders that, like me, enjoyed the plants in their gardens and surrounding fields, but unlike me, had the vision and tenacity to till the soil, grow the echinacea, tend to the bees and make the ingredients?
I’m not averse to laboratory-made ingredients that, drawing on nature themselves in most cases, claim to knock years off. But nothing beats the smell of a slightly musty bloom, or the slightly tacky consistency of a honey potion; the oil from the prickly pear plant that slips into the skin easily and renders it so elastic.
Maybe that’s why my garden will stay the way it is – unproductive but pretty. Prickly pears? Bees? Fields of roses? Sounds like hard work.
FARM GIRLS
For the eponymous brand founders
Tata Harper, Annee de Mamiel and Amanda Lacey, the rural landscape has been an inspiration for their creations. ‘I was brought up on my mum’s farm in Kent,’ says Lacey, ‘and it has been a major influence. I love the clean air, being in the countryside, having my sister’s studio next door [her sister owns knitwear brand Shepherd England]. My Cleansing Pomade, £75, was inspired by marigold flowers grown in the area, from which calendula oil is derived, a key ingredient.’
De Mamiel doesn’t produce her own ingredients, but finds the rhythm of life in the country crucial. ‘I live beside an organic working farm and connection with nature is at the heart of what we do. I look at the chickens roaming, and the space and outlook gives me room to create.’ Harper’s Vermont farm is the dream – as well as housing over 70 animals and cultivating skincare ingredients including calendula and lavender, it serves as offices for her staff, who work out of a converted dairy.
THE PLANTATION GROWERS
Sometimes, it’s not enough to know where your flowers come from – you have to own the land on which they grow. Christian Dior planted fields of lavender, violet, jasmine and Grasse roses in the 1950s at the Château de la Colle Noire, and the Dior perfumer François Demachy is replanting May roses there, the stars of the Miss Dior fragrance. Chanel’s face oil, Huile de Jasmin,
£97, comes from jasmine hand-picked in Grasse the same day it blossoms.
At Jurlique’s farm in the Adelaide Hills of south Australia, organic roses are plucked and their petals used for its Rose Hand Cream. It’s deeply hydrating and uplifting – plus the scent is so irresistible, you will want to keep applying it.
GOODWILL FARMERS
There’s something about these products that makes your heartstrings ping. It’s all the goodwill you are absorbing.
Katharine L’heureux, founder of the ethical business Kahina Giving Beauty (based on fair wages and jobs for Berber women) grew up on a vineyard in the Napa Valley – and her Face Cream, £95, is created with red grapes.
Shrankhla Holecek’s relatives supplied organic oils to brands like Tom Ford and Estée Lauder for years, before creating their own range of skincare, Uma. I‘m obsessed with Uma’s Total Rejuvenation Night Face
Oil, £115, designed to be moisturising and softening. Holecek’s family history in central India means that they have close ties to the communities who work for them, and operate a health clinic, academic scholarships and good pay.
For Farmacy’s founders Mark Veeder and Robert Beyfuss, ‘giving back’ means providing jobs to local people in their area of New York. Farmacy‘s Echinacea Greenenvy crops are rich in cichoric acid, a natural antioxidant that stops enzymes from breaking down collagen. I’m a fan of the Honey Potion Renewing Antioxidant Hydration Mask, £51.
‘THE RURAL LANDSCAPE HAS BEEN AN INSPIRATION’
THE QUALITY CONTROLLERS
If you don‘t own the farm, you can build relationships with those who do. For the past 15 years, the Chantecaille family has gone to the rose de Mai fields in Grasse for the rose harvest in May, while MV Organic Skincare founder, Sharon Mcglinchey, has got to know her organic plant suppliers by visiting their farms across Australia. Her Gentle Cream Cleanser, £35.50, is gently exfoliating and so beautifully scented that it has a cult following.
Elizabeth Gaynes, the founder of Strangelove NYC fragrances, was so determined to source her perfume ingredients ethically, she set up the company Gaiaone, converting plantations of palm oil over to producing perfume ingredients. Those include lucrative crops of oud for the fragrance and flavours industry – and the star of her perfume trilogy, Melt My Heart, Dead Of Night and Silence The Sea. Far better for the environment, it‘s a win-win situation.