So, Helen, you've been a lifetime working on this.
What does self-preserving mean?
Well, it means clever formulation,
clever development of the products,
clever manufacture of the products.
It's biomimicry, though, isn't it?
Biomimicry, possibly. When you take an aspect of honey...
Bees can't eat honey, they can only eat nectar.
A nectar is too watery to store over winter.
So they evolved, the honeybee evolved to be able to last
over winter with a full... Because, say, all the wasps will
die out, all the solitary bees, they all die.
Just queens survive.
But not with the honeybees,
they all survive.
But in order to survive, they had to
work out how to change nectar to honey.
And they did that by reducing the
water level to a certain level.
But they can't actually eat honey,
they can only eat nectar.
So they then have to go out in the winter and get
water, come back, dilute it, and then they can eat it.
And I think that's what you've
done with these creams, isn't it?
Yes, that's exactly right.
That's the clever formulation bit, where
you take the water down,
take the water down.
So self-preserving Dream Cream, for example, that took
90 different exercises to get the water just right,
to help the product preserve itself, but to enable
the product to still function well on the skin.
It's quite interesting to, you know, take the water out.
Take the water out, what do you replace it with?
But also, having to take out the fruits and
vegetables to a level that the product can sustain,
actually shows you how powerful preservatives are.
So if you think the preserved form of Skin Drink
has 8% of fresh avocado, that's your lovely formula.
Well, the self-preserved formula, or you could
say my formula, can only sustain 0.1%
of fresh avocado, and we use half the
minimal amounts of preservative that's legislated for.
So that's how powerful they are.
So the self-preserving forms, they're different, because we've
had to compensate for that reduction in water by
using other things, but then that's enabled us to
perhaps use more butters, more vegetable oils.
I must admit, I'm quite proud
to work with you doing it.
Yeah, I think it is a lifetime's
work and I think it's brilliant. Yeah.
My personal opinion, even though we're friends.
One of the questions might be, why doesn't the
rest of the industry do it?
And because, you know, for someone like me, there has
to be another product champion supporting the work.
Because it means a lot to retail these
sorts of products, the information to the customer.
And if there isn't somebody behind someone like
me, which is you, the work can't exist.
But also you need your own shops, because in a
conventional environment, it would go into a warehouse, that would
then go into the back of the shop.
And we have a policy of that isn't allowed.
One of the reasons other cosmetic companies
can't do these things is because they
don't have their own manufacturing.
They get the manufacture by a contract manufacturer,
probably in another country far away, China or
Singapore or somewhere like that, and then that
has to be shipped over.
So that has to last forever.
And anyway, they aren't
controlling their own manufacturing.
But we've made the effort to
have all our own factories, haven't we?
We have, yeah, and we love that.
So I could be really quite removed
from that process, and I'm not.
And I really like that.
So the main differences between the self-preserved products
and the conventional products that they'd already had is
just the fact that there's a bit less water?
No, they have to be different in structure.
Kind of replace that water content with other things.
So it might be more glycerin,
it might be more vegetable oil.
It's striking that fine balance.
And also the self-preserving forms can't
quite support as much fruit and vegetable.
So something like Vanishing Cream is quite tricky to
do because it's for skin that is quite troubled,
just tends to be a little bit oily.
And so you want to be able to get a
fine, easily absorbed sort of texture going without being able
to put quite a large water content in.
That's very difficult.
But that's where the steaming came in.
You're able to introduce live steam into that, which
is also sterile water, which helps, and it just
introduces that little bit more moisture into the whole
thing and it just balances it out.
So that's the main difference, is that
the self-preserving creams, they're more concentrated.
I think that's a good way of looking at it.
So you can probably use less.
And if so, for example, you pat your self-preserving
moisturiser onto damp skin, you've then got a little bit
of moisture there already, and that sort of helps.
There is evidence that modern cosmetics have reduced
the amount of variety of microflora on the
skin, and that's not a good thing.
On our skin, we have about a million
organisms of various sorts per square centimetre.
So in Western civilization, our microflora
is much less diverse then in...
Will this be linked in with people getting
more allergies and things like that?
Yes, very much so.
In societies, perhaps in Papua and New Guinea,
their skin's microflora is much more diverse.
And there's this little theory about old friends where
the microorganisms that we are exposed to as hunter-gatherers
we're not exposed to them anymore, or any microbes from
the soil, we're not exposed to those.
So our microflora isn't as robust and able to
protect us as it used to be.
Why would you want to use a preserved
product if you can find a really good
unpreserved product that suits your skin?