SKINCARE GURU:For natural beauty guru LIz Earle, skincareproducts are a lot like food, the key is choosing the best ingredients
LIZ EARLE IS known as a no-nonsense beauty guru. She is green but not hysterically so – her popular range of skincare products uses mainly but not exclusively natural botanical ingredients, and she is not against using small amounts of preservatives where necessary. Her company is run on ethical lines – recyclable packaging, a commitment to treating customers and suppliers with respect, and a headquarters in an eco-friendly building on the tranquil Isle of Wight – but she points out that “natural” doesn’t always mean harmless, citing arsenic and cyanide as examples of naturally occurring substances.
Now in her mid-forties, Earle is beautiful in a completely natural way, with the kind of skin that in plain daylight looks like it has been lit by a cinematographer. In fact her husband, photographer and film-maker Patrick Drummond, is snapping away as we speak, taking pictures for her blog. “Just a few at the beginning,” she says, “then you must go away.” They are a laid-back, good-humoured pair. Asked by a British paper how she would define her personal fashion style, she replied, “approachable”, and that is how she comes across in person. She and Drummond and their four children live on an organic farm in the West Country, and Earle’s business too grew in an organic way.
Earle’s background was in journalism and she was health and beauty editor for several magazines and presented a number of TV shows before turning to writing books. She has written more than 30, and writing is still her favourite occupation. She has a new book due out soon, again focusing on the skin and its care. “I’m never happier than when I’m in a room full of academics and I can pick their brains, or I’m in a library,” she says.
Having studied and written about botanical ingredients and skincare for more than a decade, in 1995, Earle, along with an old friend, Kim Buckland, who was involved in the manufacture and marketing of cosmetics, decided to launch the Liz Earle Naturally Active skincare range. The pair began with a tiny range of products, which they distributed by mail order from Earle’s house in London.
"We started doing mail order at a time when it was not very fashionable," Earle explains. "But because we were so tiny we didn't have the opportunity to get into hundreds of outlets, so selling by mail order was perfect. We didn't advertise – Voguedid a tiny, two-line piece on us with a phone number included. At that time the phone was in my spare bedroom in London and we would come in in the morning and open the post and listen to the answering machine and my brother, who was a music student at the time, would help us stuff the products into jiffy bags and post them out.
“At that stage we couldn’t afford proper packaging. We had these plain white jars with stick-on labels. What was interesting then was that we would get an order from someone at No 10 Acacia Avenue and then a week later we’d have an order from number 12 Acacia Avenue and then a few weeks after that orders from No 16 and No 23. Women were actually telling each other about the products. And I still think that is the best way, that communication between women, and the sharing of information and recommendations. And funnily enough, mail order is still the biggest part of our business.”
The following year they began promoting the mid-priced range on the shopping channel QVC and by 2001 they had opened their flagship shop, Union, on the Isle of Wight, where Buckland lives. In 2006 they opened a second outlet, in London. The company now employs more than 300 people and more than three million units of their signature Cleanse and Polish have been sold in 82 countries.
Earle still seems faintly surprised by the scale of their success. “Cleanse and Polish won three awards last week. In one week!” she marvels. “If you had told me when we were starting out that that could happen, I would never have believed it. Because there are so many huge companies in the industry we very much felt like a minnow among whales – or sharks in some cases.
“Maybe professional business people see the end game but for us we were very much of the moment and just doing something that we felt instictively was right for us.”
Awarded an MBE for services to the beauty industry, she is not averse to speaking her mind about its excesses. She recently railed in print against the “outrageous pricing” of some products and the practice of “playing on people’s insecurities” about ageing, arguing that many of the so-called “super creams” are a waste of money.
Equally, she refuses to toe a green beauty line. Despite her commitment to using natural, botanical ingredients, she advocates the use in cosmetics of parabens, which in recent times have been condemned as possibly being carcinogenic: “Parabens are not very important for us. We still use small amounts in about three of our products, but they are not important to our range or something we need to wave a big flag about. But I became concerned about the whole thing and decided to put it under the microscope so to speak and the conclusion I’ve come to is that a paraben is a totally safe ingredient and one that we should be embracing.
“And the reason for that, in a nutshell, is that parabens are naturally occuring – we eat large amounts of them every day. If you are eating fruit and veg, then you are eating parabens. Blueberries, for example, have lots of parabens in them, which is why they last longer in the fridge than, say, strawberries. And even though the parabens in beauty products are generally synthetic, molecule for molecule they are identical to naturally occuring parabens. Looked at under a miscroscope you would not be able to tell them apart. And in beauty products they are used in such tiny quantities – usually parts to a million.”
What is appealing about Earle is her huge enthusiasm for her enterprise – it is obviously about more than business for her. She travels frequently to research and source ingredients and was one of the first people, for example, to promote the use of argan oil, found in Morocco.
Drummond often travels with her. Recently they went to Isparta in Turkey to photograph the rose harvest. “It was just amazing!” she says. “There were all these pickers picking these amazing pink blooms. We figured out that 100,000 flower heads went into one kilo bottle of the essential oil. And every single one of those 100,000 is hand picked and transported in big hessian sacks and then raked over the floor of a huge drying house – all you can see is this massive pink carpet. Then they are scooped up and put into the hoppers and steam distilled. And it’s incredible because they are all big strapping Turkish lads who are doing this and they are surrounded by this mass of pink flowers and this amazing smell. It’s a bit incongruous.”
For Earle, the trip was an opportunity to research a possible source of ingredients. She and Buckland have strong relationships with their suppliers, and employ an ethnobotanist who researches sustainable, ethically traded ingredients from sources that support local eco-systems. The company’s argan oil, for example, is bought from a Berber women’s co-operative in Morocco.
“We like going back to the farmgate; we like opportunities like that where we can work directly with growers. Because it’s like food, there is a lot of concentration now on traceability and where the ingredients come from. And actually there’s a lot of synergy between food and skincare, because it’s all about ingredients. It’s not the packaging – it’s what’s in there that does it. Nothing clever or fancy. If you have great ingredients, you have a great tasting dish. And it’s the same with skincare. Skimp on lots of things, but try not to skimp on your ingredients – that’s the bottom line.”
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Liz Earle's beauty tips
- There are two issues when it comes to beauty: time and money. The reality is that we don't have enough of either. So you want things that are quick and easy, that really work and that are an affordable luxury.
I think even in cash-strapped times we will still want to take care of our skin, because it's something tangible you can do – you really see the benefits. So even if you are not going out to dinner as much or you can't buy the frocks or the shoes or the bags – and I mean how important is a new handbag really? I think we have to get out of that whole cycle of over-consumption.
- I like things that do double duty or treble duty, things that work as hard as I do as a multi-tasker. So use a cream-based cleanser that doubles up as an eye-makeup remover, and use a cloth because you are getting the exfoliation benefit. Then you won't have any need for dermabrasion or peels or any of those more extreme treatments that can irritate the skin. Just a simple buffing cloth will take away those dead cells. And cloths, especially muslin, can be used again and again and last for ages. So they work out really cheap and are very eco-friendly.
- Study ingredients carefully and make sure that what you are buying is the best value. A balm is a good idea because you can use it for lots of things. I use it as a nail treatment – it helps your nails grow long and strong – and then you can use it on your eyebrows or on dry patches or as a lip gloss.
- Plant oils offer great value. I often make a sugar and oil scrub. I use equal amounts of sugar and a light olive oil – not expensive extra-virgin because that's too rich and smells too strong. Take two tablespoons of light olive oil or grapeseed oil and two tablespoons of sugar and mix them and use it as a scrub for hands and even for the body. Scrub it in and then rinse it off and it takes away all the dead skin cells and leaves your skin really soft – though it makes the shower slippery. It's so cheap but it makes your skin feel like you've had a really expensive salon treatment.
- If you want to strip your beauty routine right down, the thing to remember is that the skin needs two things: it needs to be clean and it needs to be moisturised. Other things are
lovely – face masks and body treatments and all the rest – but they are not essential.
