Green Beauty Conversations by Formula Botanica – Details, episodes & analysis

Are you tired of being bombarded by unrealistic beauty industry standards and wondering if all your beauty products are truly necessary? If so, this episode is for you.

In this week's opinion piece, Lorraine Dallmeier, Chartered Environmentalist, Biologist and CEO of Formula Botanica tackles the age-old question: is beauty merely vanity, or is it genuinely important?

Join Lorraine as she delves deep into the industry's impact on our self-image and explores why we continue to use cosmetics.

Free Resources

Free formulation course | Green Beauty Conversations Podcast | Blog | YouTube

Socials: Formula Botanica on Instagram | Lorraine Dallmeier on Instagram

In this episode of Green Beauty Conversations, Lorraine Dallmeier, CEO of Formula Botanica, welcomes Erika Geraerts, founder of Fluff Casual Cosmetics, to explore the concept of intentional beauty and its transformative potential within the beauty industry.

Erika Geraerts has redefined what it means to be a beauty brand with Fluff Casual Cosmetics. By focusing on minimal, refillable products and meaningful consumer engagement, Erika challenges the traditional norms of the beauty industry.

Join Lorraine and Erika as they discuss the challenges facing the beauty industry and how Fluff's countercultural approach aims to create a more mindful and ethical beauty landscape.

Free Resources

Free formulation course | Green Beauty Conversations Podcast | Blog | YouTube

Socials: Formula Botanica on Instagram | Lorraine Dallmeier on Instagram

Research is starting to suggest that skin ageing isn’t simply a case of cosmetic wear and tear, but might instead be driving whole-body ageing.

Green Beauty Conversations host Lorraine Dallmeier, CEO of Formula Botanica, explores this mind-blowing research in this latest episode. She'll be asking you whether you are prepared to flip everything you’ve understood about the skin so far on its head.

Listen in to find out:

• How the ageing of the skin works
• How wrinkles might be contributing to whole-body ageing
• What preventative measures you can take to help
• How the beauty industry might reposition itself as this research becomes clearer.

Listen now to understand new research on how wrinkles impact your ageing process and the factors you can control.

In the episode, Lorraine refers to a 2023 article in New Scientist titled “The radical new theory that wrinkles actually cause ageing”. Read the article in full at this link (paywall).

FREE FORMULATION RESOURCES

 Free formulation course | Green Beauty Conversations Podcast | Blog | YouTube

 Socials: Formula Botanica on Instagram | Lorraine Dallmeier on Instagram

Never has the barrier to entry to becoming a skincare formulator and starting your own beauty business been so low. Yet, with all the social media hype and hustle, we can get distracted by news of the indie beauty brand personalities who raise millions in funding and then sell their businesses to mainstream brands, and decide it’s all too overwhelming to think about.

It is easy to lose sight of what formulating your own natural, organic skincare is all about – from learning a new, empowering skill to changing your life in ways that don’t necessarily mean becoming a superstar beauty entrepreneur.

In this opinion short, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier talks about how indie beauty can empower you if you take the leap to learn to formulate. She urges us to go at our own pace and on our own terms without the pressure of comparisonitis.

Don't wait for permission to start; just give it a go. Be the person you are meant to be. Create a natural beauty business that you shape and own and discover just how positive a life-changing experience it can be. 

When you come across indie beauty founders on social media, you may feel overwhelmed. Their branding, websites and social channels seem so visually together and focused, while you may still be at the stage of wondering how to formulate, let alone build a business with a clear mission.

What is it really like to start your own skincare brand? Until you speak to an indie beauty entrepreneur who has truly changed their life and you see it happen before your very eyes, being an indie founder can seem an impossible journey.

If these thoughts have run through your mind, then listen to Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier interview Naz Bashir, founder of Solo Skin London.  Naz's story is one of someone who started small, thinking of formulating for her own skincare issues only. 

From DIY hobbyist to trained organic formulator and indie brand  founder with awards to her name, Naz Bashir talks about how her Formula Botanica courses changed her life.

In learning to formulate professionally, Naz grew in confidence as a formulator and realised she was not alone with her skin issues. A business was far from her thoughts at the outset, but it is now her life's mission and very much a revenue stream for Naz and her family.

We promise you that this episode will leave you feeling totally inspired about joining the community of natural, organic formulators. Just see where learning to formulate can take you too.

In this Green Beauty Opinion, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier shares the stories behind a poll she ran on refillable beauty.

When asked whether they would go out of their way to clean, return and refill beauty packaging, some 75% of respondents said a resounding yes. While this is an encouraging sign, Lorraine paints a realistic picture of what is actually involved in realising a future where refillable beauty is the norm, not the exception.

Some respondents commented that they simply didn't have time to go out of their way to make those refill trips. Others said beauty products were a luxury for them and they wanted shiny new packaging to complete their consumer experience. One said that reuse and refill was better suited to household cleaning products than beauty.

However, Lorraine remains ever the optimist that refillable and reusable beauty packaging will prevail for the planet's sake. She challenges us to change our beauty consumer habits and help make refills the norm.

Imagine shopping in two years from now for anything from your favourite nut milk to face cleanser and struggling to see products on the shelves housed in plastic packaging.

Futuristic perhaps, but it may arrive in a store near you sooner than you think if pioneering entrepreneur Jo Chidley, the founder of sustainable, natural personal care brand Beauty Kitchen, has her way. Jo’s latest venture ReRe, an amibitious return, refill, repeat scheme, is tackling the seemingly impossible by championing a far-reaching reuse revolution.

Jo and co-founder Stuart Chidley set up ReRe not only to implement cradle-to-cradle design into Beauty Kitchen’s own products, but also as the world’s first closed-loop solution for packaging through its ground-breaking Re programme and refill stations.

Already counting some of the UK’s biggest retailers like Asda, Marks & Spencer and Holland & Barrett as participating partners, ReRe is on a mission to change the way brands create packaging and bottle goods, how retailers sell almost anything, and how consumers shop.

Join Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier as she interviews Jo Chidley, a circular economy expert, chemist, herbal botanist, and co-founder of Beauty Kitchen, the highest scoring B Corp in the UK beauty industry. This episode shows just how the power of the collective – manufacturers, retailers and consumers – can drive a truly circular economy in packaging.

If you are a regular listener to Green Beauty Conversations, you will have heard Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier and guests tackle numerous aspects of sustainable beauty. Circular, biodegradable, waterless, carbon and climate neutral, net zero and a gamut of other issues has come under the spotlight in our podcast conversations.

Tackling the issues by examining the various certification schemes and looking at case studies one by one may, however, lead us to forget the bigger picture - and overlook some uncomfortable truths.

Today's global cosmetics' industry is inherently unsustainable if it continues with its age-old model of economic growth. Business as usual with the production of billions of units of consumer products each year that still mostly end up in landfill, enter waterways and pollute the oceans is not an option if we wish to halt the planet's degradation and reverse climate change.

In this green beauty opinion, Lorraine, who is also a Chartered Environmentalist and biologist, dares to talk about the elephant in the room - the need for the half-a-trillion US$ beauty industry to take drastic measures to change its behaviour. Infinite growth with finite resources has to end.

Lorraine puts forward her four-pillar blueprint for a sustainable beauty industry that may come at a price to business as usual, but is critical if we are to address the crises humankind has inflicted on the planet.

Listen in for some hard talk on the big issues and be inspired to act now, whether indie or large-scale beauty business, to take responsibility for, and to play your part in building a sustainable future for the industry and the planet.

FREE FORMULATION RESOURCES

Free formulation course | Green Beauty Conversations Podcast | Blog | YouTube

Socials: Formula Botanica on Instagram | Lorraine Dallmeier on Instagram

Natural, sustainable beauty is a phrase used liberally in the beauty industry. Today, we are used to beauty brands, mainstream and indie, touting the naturalness of their formulations and their sustainability credentials, but can we be critical of their products, words and actions if we are in the dark about what the terms mean? Do the brands themselves truly know what they are committing to when using these words?

Consumers may be far more unclear about where the differences lie between natural and sustainable than insiders in the beauty industry.

Among the many beauty industry terms we have covered on Green Beauty Conversations, natural and sustainable still stand out as being particularly misused despite their familiarity. They are interchanged in error, misunderstood at best or harnessed to mask green-washing at worst.

The terms seem so deceptively simple that it is entirely possible to not think through the complexities that underpin them.

Given the continued lack of clarity about natural and sustainable, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier and colleague Ana Green, the School's Education Manager, devote an entire episode to the origins, definitions and practical application of these words in the beauty sphere.

Listen in to make sense of natural and sustainable beauty and as a result, feel empowered as beauty formulators, founders and consumers to demand clarity from anyone in the beauty industry throwing these terms into their own conversations.

Would you buy lab-grown skincare? While this might seem futuristic, biotech cosmetic ingredients are here now, and going to become more commonplace on our beauty shelves – and sooner than you think.

In this Green Beauty Opinion, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier follows up on key takeouts from her interview with Dr Barbara Paldus, the founder of biotech company Codex Beauty Labs. In that episode, we heard how lab-grown ingredients derived efficiently and sustainably from single plant cells rather than from vast fields of crops will become the new normal in cosmetics.

But, are we as consumers and natural formulators ready to embrace lab-grown ingredients?

The scene seems set for biotech beauty to be the next naturals vs synthetics’ battleground. But, as always, the issues are nuanced.

Lorraine proposes we approach biotech beauty with informed debate and open minds. There is likely to be a hybrid model in the cosmetics industry as plants have given us a sense of calm, grounding and well-being for millennia and are inherent in our cultures, rituals and rites. And for now, biotech cannot efficiently lab grow every ingredient.

Lorraine’s challenges us to be receptive to the radical solutions required to sustain the industry and the planet and to look into the research from suppliers of biotech ingredients. How would we react if our favourite plants were threatened by climate change?

The advent of biotech beauty brings with it searching questions, but ones we need to think of answers to now, not in decades to come.