LONDON — After 16 years, Stella McCartney is taking another step in beauty with the launch of a clean skincare line called Stella, created in close collaboration with her minority partners LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
True to McCartney’s minimalist mantra, the brand launches with just three products: a cleanser, a serum, and a cream.
The new line is an ambitious project that wants to tick as many ecological boxes as possible, with the least amount of products and ingredients.
“I am not that person who wants to buy a million products for different areas of my face. I don’t want all those things in my life,” McCartney said.
“I want less, and I want it to work. I want it to be honest and complement my way of thinking and living life. Obviously I wanted to make the cleanest skincare we could do in luxury, the purest of the pure,” she added.
Over the past three years, McCartney and a dedicated team at LVMH have worked on formulations and packaging, with the products’ fresh, herbaceous scent developed by perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. Clove leaf, pine resin and minty eucalyptus are the main notes.
McCartney’s vision for the products was tied to a childhood spent outdoors in Scotland, on his family’s farm on the Kintyre Peninsula in western Scotland.
LVMH has established a dedicated maison to house the collaboration. The maison sits within the group’s luxury beauty division and aims to address the challenges inherent in creating an ultra-clean eco-friendly collection.
“We want to raise the bar for sustainability in beauty,” said Stephane Delva, director of New Beauty Projects at LVMH Perfumes & Cosmetics.
Everything is cruelty-free, certified vegan, and regulated.
The ingredients come from Northern Europe and are made from recycled food waste such as squalene, a by-product of the olive oil industry; and cherry blossom extract, which is meant to work as an antioxidant. Skincare also includes organic sea fennel, said to be rich in saturated and unsaturated fatty acids, and phytosterols to smooth fine lines and wrinkles.
The packaging is a mix of disposable and durable. The products come in soft, baby food-style recyclable pouches that are made from scrap wood and fit inside recycled glass bottles and jars.
When the bags are used up, they can be disposed of, while the jars (which come with airtight pumps made from recycled plastic) live and don’t get dirty.
The cream, including the glass jar, costs $105, while the refill costs $85. The cleanser is $60, and the refill is priced at $45. The eserum is $140, and the refill is $110.
The brand has banned ingredients where the production or extraction process was considered polluting. It has also decided to ship, rather than fly, products to the US, meaning the collection’s carbon footprint has been reduced by more than a third. The brand has also eliminated any need for cotton pads or single-dose samples.
The new line will be direct to consumer and will launch this month at stellamccartneybeauty.com
McCartney will support the NGO Wetlands International, donating one percent of net sales of Stella skin care. The money will go towards peatlands, the world’s largest carbon pool covering around 23 per cent of Scotland’s land mass.
She said that at LVMH there is a genuine passion for the future of the luxury industry,” adding that her beauty team at LVMH is pushing boundaries she never thought possible.
“They had been eager to find new shapes, new solutions,” said the designer, who also serves as special sustainability adviser to LVMH founder and director Bernard Arnault and members of the group’s executive committee.
This isn’t McCartney’s first career in skincare, and she was eager to get back in the game after her first collection, Care, which launched in 2006 with YSL Beauté, was put on hold.
At the time, McCartney pioneered what is now known as clean beauty and the first luxury fashion brand to take the organic route to skincare. Care had a cult following among consumers looking for natural alternatives beyond brands like The Body Shop, Lush and Neal’s Yard Remedies.
Source: wwd.com