In this episode, podcast host and Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier talks to indie beauty founder and graduate Leslie Reichgelt of Bella Botanicals, a natural and organic skincare brand based in the USA. Leslie shares her story on how she has built a successful beauty brand from the ground up, and talks of the highs and lows that she has experienced along the way. Leslie’s honest, practical and personal story shows how it is entirely possible to create a sustainable and successful natural beauty business from your own home, and dispels the myth that the market is too crowded for "yet another beauty brand". Listen in for the pep talk you need to follow in Leslie's footsteps. To learn more about this episode, all of the links that were mentioned and anything else, please visit the show notes on the Formula Botanica website.

In a world brimming with beauty products and services, have you ever wondered what happens to them once they’ve served their purpose? As we immerse ourselves in skincare, haircare and makeup, it’s easy to forget that beautifying often comes at a cost to our planet. The beauty industry, with its myriad companies, products, and services, has inadvertently – or perhaps also blatantly – contributed to the mounting waste crisis that plagues our planet. In this opinion episode of Green Beauty Conversations, host and Formula Botanica CEO Lorraine Dallmeier – also a Chartered Environmentalist and biologist – presents a new and pressing concept for all of us in the beauty industry to think about and make centre stage: “end-of-life beauty planning.” Listen in to learn why we should buy, manufacture, and formulate cosmetics with their end in mind. To learn more about this episode, all of the links that were mentioned and anything else, please visit the show notes on the Formula Botanica website.

The next time you go for a regular hair cut, take a moment to think about what happens to the waste hair you’ve just left behind. If you had a hair colour or highlights, then your visit has a larger waste footprint as it will have generated left-over colourant, aluminium foils, and empty plastic bottles. There are over a million hair salons of all sizes in the USA alone creating waste like this, and a similar story happens the world over and across the beauty industry in nail bars, spas, barber shops and esthetician salons. But, one person’s waste is another’s solution. In this guest episode, we hear from Shane Price, an eco-preneur with a background in molecular biology and biochem, whose visit to a barber's over a decade ago gave him the motivation to come up with solutions to the environmental impacts of the beauty industry. Listen in as Formula Botanica CEO and host Lorraine Dallmeier discovers some astonishing ways Shane’s initiative with  Green Circle Salons is saving waste, one salon visit at a time. To learn more about this episode, all of the links that were mentioned and anything else, please visit the show notes on the Formula Botanica website.

Just when you thought the beauty industry had exhausted its lexicon, along comes “cleanical”. At first glance, cleanical seems innocent enough and quite easy to decipher; it’s a mash-up of “clean” and “clinical,” and aims to describe formulations that are both clean beauty formulations and clinically proven. What’s the harm in using it on labels, social media, or in the beauty media? For a start, cleanical should be seen as controversial as it has no scientific basis. To explain why, Lorraine Dallmeier, the host of Green Beauty Conversations and CEO of Formula Botanica, unpacks the term and presents her view on the use of “cleanical” in the beauty industry. In this episode, she argues why this buzzword should be abolished from our vocabulary and how it is yet another term that perpetuates misconceptions about clean beauty. To learn more about this episode, all of the links that were mentioned and anything else, please visit the show notes on the Formula Botanica website.

Clean beauty has been espoused for almost three decades and in that time there has been no real clarity on what "clean" really means in the beauty landscape. Initially tied to the Southern Californian wellness movement of the early ’90s, the broad interpretation of clean has only become wider and more confusing. However, now there is a new beauty movement afoot that is challenging clean. Strictly speaking, “clean beauty” remains a marketing term that would require evidence-based proof to substantiate the claims some beauty brands use it for. In this episode, Formula Botanica CEO and podcast host Lorraine Dallmeier is joined by colleague School Education Manager Ana Green to discuss this hotly-debated term. Listen in to make your mind up about the future of clean beauty.  To learn more about this episode, all of the links that were mentioned and anything else, please visit the show notes on the Formula Botanica website.