welcome to the expert talks by kalkine tv stage here and today's guest is miss tina
hedges founder of lolly beauty and to give you some background lolly beauty is the world's first
zero waste superfood organic beauty brand they are on a mission to stir things up
to make a conscious change beyond pure and these sustainable products are made with living organic
loving ingredients so tina is a brand alchemist with rich experience serving worldwide brand
management roles at l'oreal the estee lauder companies and lvmh so tina spent the last few
years at startups as well so we're bound to gain some great insights from her today
bringing you live are excited to have with us ms tina hedges founder of lolly beauty welcome to
the show tina hi it's so lovely to be here thank you for having me thank you again for joining us
i'm so keen to get started and would you please share your insights on the significance of zero
waste clean beauty for the environment and the human body absolutely so i spent like a decade
and a half in big beauty companies you know all the names you mentioned them and i had a
crisis of consciousness meets a crisis of health where all of a sudden i woke up and i realized
i had been participating in the dirty business of beauty sending out into the universe mostly
single-use plastic jars bottles um you know tubes and those are filled with mostly water because the
number one ingredient in your beauty products is aqua which is water just plain water and then they
add all sorts of synthetic chemicals to give it a color a texture or fragrance and convince you to
buy 15 products and none of that makes any sense when your body is being laden with petrochemicals
carcinogens endocrine disorders a whole host of bad for you ingredients and the planet
is running out of water and on top of that there's going to be more plastic in the ocean than fish
so i decided we needed to clean up the dirty business beauty ah beautiful and you've summed
that up for us in a way that we can understand what you're doing because i know it's a lot of
work you've made it sound easy but i'm sure it's a lot of work and packaging that's what we love
about the beauty products we want it to look nice sitting up on our stands there in the bathroom
but it's a bit of a waste i must admit so would you please elaborate on some of the key
ingredients you use in your products you touched on it a bit especially the aqua but could you
elaborate for us absolutely so the way we're zero waste is it starts with the upcycle from organic
food supply so we find really powerful ingredients that are being discarded in the food supply chain
for example one of our ingredients is upcycled plum oil it comes from a very rare plum in france
and we found that it's more powerful than argan or marula for skin and hair so we repurpose that
ingredient that would have normally been burned away so it's the kernel of the plum
so when you make pitted prunes or prune juice that gets discarded but we repurpose it into
this incredible multi-purpose oil for your skin your hair your lips that's one way we
use ingredients um in a news or a waste manner and then we formulate without water everything
we do is food grade um we're made safe cruelty free vegan non-gmo and then on top of that we
package in a fully zero waste manner so we use food-grade refillable glass and we actually grow
mushrooms for our outer box it's one hundred percent warm food that is amazing to hear and
i think he said cruelty free as well i mean that's probably one of the first issues that came to the
headlines about the cosmetics industry about the testing on animals and now we're just looking a
little bit further into it and seeing that the way the environment's going and and how
climate change is accelerating at such a rapid pace that we need to really start doing something
and i'm so happy to hear that companies like yours are at the forefront and leading
the charge so most of us know that synthetic beauty products are merely a commercial
propaganda and sometimes they're advertising these amazing results and do they actually happen well
you know the proof is in the pudding i suppose still many of us rely on such products despite
their high prices and in your opinion how can buyers become more self-aware and conscious of
the products they're buying for their skin and not get misled by corporate marketing in some cases
that's such a great question and um i was just um thinking about this as one of the tick tock trends
you know ask a question or share something from a beauty company that you've been at or for me it's
a beauty company but um the idea of the results so when i was in marketing at these big companies and
when we wanted to test a product we would tell the consumers that we were going to do the testing on
don't use any moisturizer for two weeks because then of course whatever you put on
we're going to be able to show instant hydration right or instant moisturization and it's going to
be the 95 percentile so you know there's ways to play with those numbers and to convince you
the product is super efficacious i'm not saying they're not efficacious but the numbers can be
misleading and there's ways to slant them um on the other side you have the whole movement
of the natural beauty and people saying well does it really work do natural ingredients really work
and my answer to that always is does arsenic work because it's natural um you can find very
you know most of pharma is based off of natural ingredients and then they get synthesized so
natural and clean does work and for your skin what you need to look at is you know are you sensitive
you know what is your routine how can you simplify less is more um and really fine products don't
not overnight unless you're doing a laser or a dermatological treatment nothing is overwhelming
it just isn't you know your skin takes time to get damaged it takes time to repair so um have faith
and you know be diligent but just make better choices and i love that you said less is more
if that's something that i'm learning myself you know what it really is you
don't um we're seeing such an increase in consumers having eczema psoriasis dermatitis
red flaky irritated skin sensitivities when you look at the amount of products they're layering
the high level of acid treatments they're doing because that's like you know play your own beauty
chemist and layer on five different products and then the korean trend of telling you you need to
triple wash and then you need to do 10 steps after that you know that's look back um through history
you know really the beauty industry started in the times of cleopatra and what did she do she bathed
in goat milk and she anointed her body with oil and then the beauty industry decided they would
you know in industrialization figure out how to synthesize and put oil and water together
and create emulsions and that's basically convincing you to buy a lot of different products
i love that products being used in modern techniques in the world that is amazing that your
brand is bringing this to us for us to enjoy and your organization stands strictly against human
trafficking the concept of human trafficking is not new in the beauty industry unfortunately would
you please comment upon these changes you've observed in the industry regarding this in the
last couple of years please absolutely so that's a less um we talk about you know trafficking in
other industries and it's gotten more awareness in apparel um and other industries such as that but
in beauty no one talks about it and i for me when i started lolly in 2018 it was super important to
me that we don't build our happiness on someone else's unhappiness so really looking at our entire
supply chain and making sure that there was no trafficking involved in anything we do and one of
the ingredients that's very even the big companies and and they're trying to do the right thing so
i want to give them a shout out um you know when they source micah and mike does in almost all of
the makeup you wear and some skin care it is very very hard to ensure that micah is child
labor-free micah is mined in india and africa and um really you know you can have children as young
as four or five-year years going down into the mines um and mining for it so it's a really big
problem um for us it's very very important to know exactly where our ingredients are coming
from we source every single ingredient ourselves and we monitor the supply chain and we're members
of freedom and made in a free world to help us monitor that supply chain that's so good to hear
esg policies are becoming so much more important for companies these days and it's great to hear
that you're championing championing the same so this has been such a fantastic discussion i'm sad
that we have to start winding up but lastly what are your objectives for lolly building for 2022
so we want to continue to innovate we're really proud of you know the packaging we launched last
year so you know totally eliminating um tree paper pulp type cardboard boxes you know stripping that
away growing mushrooms using upcycled hemp for outer wraps and also launching an innovation
where we actually can show that we're 99 effective for 24 hours filling all sorts
of bacteria with one of our treatment products so the next crunch here for me is really going after
the space that's considered like clinical so clinical results with clean formulations
and really doing um you know a line geared towards problems like skin conditions that we mentioned
previously because i want everyone no matter what their skin type to have access to clean
safe healthy good for you and good for the planet products absolutely and thank you so much for
joining us today and sharing your passion for what you do and your knowledge for the industry
i mean you're definitely bound to engage a lot of customers this way and how can we connect with
you um or our customers connect with your website and products so our website is lollybeauty.com and
instagram is at lolly.beauty and check out this at lolly.beauty fantastic thanks again
i hope you enjoyed the rest of your day thank you hi and if you've just joined us we had a
very interesting discussion ms tina hedge is the founder of lolly beauty and for the full interview
please head to the youtube channel kalkine media and keep watching kalkine for more of the live
expert talks and market updates till the next episode stay prized and invest wise with kalkine