Ups & Downs of Natural Skin Care
Creating natural skin care products can potentially be more of difficult than formulating conventional offerings. Challenges can arise in formulation, shelf life, cost and even overcoming consumers’ perceptions on how their skin/hair care products should work and perform.
“One challenge, as a skin, body and hair care company, is preserving our products in a way that make them safe and effective for the consumer,” said Kim Schroeder, product specialist for Earth Essentials. “This involves choosing mild and non-toxic preservatives to protect our products from potentially dangerous microbial growth (molds, yeast, bacteria and rancidity). We choose preservatives that have low potential for skin sensitivity or reactions.”
Roseann Fernandez, senior brand manager at Noah’s Naturals, said finding quality ingredients isn’t always the easiest task. “One challenge we've experienced is sourcing true natural and certified organic ingredients, which provide exceptional performance, without increasing the cost to the customer,” she said. “Another challenge we've faced is consumers' perceptions of what it means to perform well. For example, take shampoo. If we remove the harmful ingredient, sodium laurel sulfate, we create a product that does not lather, which, in reality, is good for the hair because the product doesn't strip vital moisture and nutrients from the hair follicle, but unfortunately consumers have been trained to believe that shampoo is not ‘cleaning’ the hair unless it lathers.”
“The true challenge for us was to find natural ingredients that served the same function as all the synthetics we removed—moisturizing, preserving, lathering, toning—but to do that in a way that left the consumer with a positive touch, feel and aroma,” Sachdev said. “Cleaning up a line of products is easy. Cleaning it and still leaving the customer with a magnificent sensory experience is a much more nuanced, delicate art. Your formulation team has to be enormously gifted to bring those two vastly different worlds together.”
The demand for skin care products that use plant-based botanicals, essentials oils and other natural ingredients are on the rise. Consumers are tiring of the negative press and alleged side effect of conventional products. Give the consumer what she wants—a natural approach to skin care.