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It’s no secret that the $81 billion global beauty industry has a dark side, as exposed in the recent HBO Max documentary “Not So Pretty.” The skin is the largest organ in our body, and what happens to it affects our health just as much as the foods, supplements, and medications we take.
But unlike food and drugs, the FDA provides minimal oversight for cosmetics, banning the use of just 11 ingredients compared to some 1,400 banned in Europe. A tougher Safe Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Act was introduced in Congress in 2019, but failed to move forward.
The consumer is left with little direction when shopping for beauty products. Unlike food, where we’ve learned to shop the perimeter aisles of grocery stores and look for organic food labels, shopping for beauty is a confusing hodgepodge of ingredients that only a chemist can understand.
For the layman, choosing a safe, clean, natural beauty product mostly comes down to what it doesn’t contain, as opposed to what it does contain. Sephora and Ulta have a list of about 50 banned ingredients in their clean beauty offerings, while Beauty Counter’s “Never List” includes 1,800 ingredients.
“It’s very complex because there’s no regulation of what’s natural and what’s not,” said Larissa Jensen, vice president of beauty at The NPD Group.
“Basically, when you talk about ‘clean beauty,’ that means it’s free of certain ingredients. When we look at brands, we separate them into ‘natural’ and ‘clinical’. In prestige beauty, ‘natural’ was the biggest category for a while, then in 2020 it switched to ‘clinical’ brands and is still number one today,” he continued.
It has created a nature or science dichotomy for the beauty customer because as good as ‘natural’ beauty feels, it may not be the most effective.
“If you want to make a real difference to your skin, you’re going to have to go chemical,” admitted Dana Wood, a beauty industry veteran who worked for L’Oréal and covered beauty for WWD, Condé Nast and now report independently. “A lot of natural beauty brands sound like there are a bunch of twigs, berries and flowers floating around in the products. Who wants that?
The mission of chemical engineer Lena Phillippou Korres, co-founder and chief innovation officer of Greece-based KORRES Natural Products, is to put more good stuff into beauty formulations, including natural ingredients with names people recognize but also meet rigorous scientific standards.
Lena Korres, KORRES Natural Products
© Margarita Nikitaki 2018
The company drew inspiration from ancient science, homeopathic medicine and bioculture to develop the KORRES six-step full-circle process that extracts nature’s most powerful ingredients and formulates them into modern beauty products. Meanwhile, the company helps protect and sustain Greece’s unique flora and farming community and responsibly recycles product packaging.
Through his research, Korres has identified the nine most powerful natural ingredients from Greece that work in beauty: Greek Yogurt, Apothecary Wild Rose, Pomegranate, Black Pine, White Pine, Golden Krocus, Olympus Tea, Greek Olive and Santorini grape. She takes them to her lab where she and her team formulate them into products that provide a scientifically proven performance advantage.
“When you formulate with natural ingredients, it’s ten times more difficult than when you formulate with chemicals,” explains Korres. “Chemicals are predictable and stable while natural ingredients are alive. They depend on the weather, sunlight and everything in the environment and are highly interactive with each other. We understand that and bring our deep understanding and respect for nature and those ingredients to our products.”
KORRES began when Giorgos Korres started working at the oldest herbal homeopathic pharmacy in Greece while studying at the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Athens. He took over the pharmacy in 1992 and launched KORRES Natural Products with his then-wife Lena in 1996. They are no longer married, they still consider each other family.
“Homeopathic medicine was born in ancient Greece. The principle of homeopathy is not just to treat the symptoms but to treat the underlying cause of a disease,” shared Korres.
Unlike modern pharmacology, which can weaken the natural immune system, homeopathy works differently. “The principle of homeopathy is to help the body and build the immune system with natural ingredients,” he continues.
When it comes to natural ingredients, KORRES home in Greece offers a plethora to choose from. “Greece is a biodiversity paradise because of our climate, our soil, the abundance of sunshine and the variety of landscapes from the sea to the mountains. Their wide variety produces some of the most powerful natural ingredients on the planet,” he assured.
For example, the Santorini grape, one of the oldest grape varieties in the world, is grown only on the island of Santorini and is a key ingredient in a new skin care line from KORRES. The Santorini grape is so robust that it grows virtually untended and is mainly watered by sea mist that rises from the ocean at night.
“Sea water is full of minerals, a thousand times better than any water we could give it. Due to the extreme conditions in which it grows, the Santorini grape is packed with polyphenols, antioxidants, and minerals. And we use the byproduct of the winemaking process to formulate our line,” he said.
KORRES operates 13 stores in Europe and three in Asia and, until recently, was only available in the US through its website and at select stores, notably Sephora and Ulta. However, it has just opened a store in the Nolita neighborhood of New York to share its history and the Greek origins of the products in the American market. The store also has a mini recycling lab where customers can return empty packages for processing.
“Spreading the story about our brand, our great ingredients and product quality is very important because consumers need help getting good information about ‘natural beauty.’ The only navigation they really have is trust in their brand,” Korres said.
To do this, the company is vertically integrated and is involved from start to finish in the entire process. “We work with more than a thousand farm families that grow our organic ingredients,” he explained.
“So we know where they come from, how they are grown and harvested, then we bring these pure ingredients into our lab to extract the active molecules from inside the plants to make sure they stay active and don’t die in the process.
“From there, we formulate the products, package them sustainably, and then recycle them. I think this full circle, end-to-end process is critical to building trust with our clients,” he concluded.
Source: www.forbes.com