The Beauty Industry is an Outdoor Industry
We see it every day, tens if not hundreds of times a day (depending on what type of media you are consuming), a beauty product photographed or filmed in nature or with natural elements around it. Is the product portraying that it is natural, healthy, green, organic? Is it portraying that it is good for you? It is time to reframe the beauty industry. Beauty isn’t just beauty. Beauty is connected to wellness, connected to our environment, connected to nature. Excluding the food industry, beauty/wellness taps into nature more than any other industry. Most imagery associated with beauty brands have visuals of nature in marketing materials or ad campaigns. Brands are trying to show their connection to nature and more so now than ever before. When the beauty brand, Mother Dirt, touted the impact of putting good bacteria back on our skin, it kicked off a “dirty beauty” movement. The skins natural biome became a beacon for new discussion around how we have over-stripped our skin for years and how balance and bacteria is needed for healthy skin. We need to get back to the land, the soil.
Our skin, and largest organ, is directly impacted by our environment. This means our indoor and outdoor air quality, temperatures and how we move through our days.
Beauty is continuously inspired by the colors and shades found in nature, the patterns, the scents, locations, the ethereal sky, earth, fire, water. We use the outdoors and natures gifts to create and also evoke memories in fragrances. Makeup colors and palettes resemble places and spaces from around the globe. Our skincare routines and makeup colors change with the seasons and climates.
We use wildlife imagery on packaging. We use nature imagery to evoke wellbeing, health, inspiration, aspiration, in deep connection and harmony with the earth. Cleopatra used minerals and stone to use as the first form of makeup. For thousands of years we have used nature as ingredients for salves, ointments, and treatments for healing, for sleeping. We harvest plants, trees, algae, fungi, as “key ingredients”.
Spas have always incorporated healing waters and treatments with products to help rejuvenate the skin and body and to calm the mind. Mud baths to help heal the skin. Sounds of nature have been an integral part of the spa to relax guests throughout their experience. Biophilia has become a bigger part of the retail landscape, incorporating key features to allow guests to feel comforted by natural elements indoors and a lot less fluorescent lighting.
The global beauty industry market is valued at $511 billion in 2021 . It is also one of the largest producers of waste in the environment. If we put nature at the core of the beauty industry, we will be able to understand better how we are making an impact on this planet. Sustainability isn’t the answer, we are long past that. We have a moral obligation to create with purpose and pride to protect and be stewards of the environment in which the industry is based upon. Regenerative models are where we need to think going forward, circularity. It isn’t enough to ask customers to recycle, we need to make better products that don’t harm the environment from the beginning.
Learning more about nature and our planet helps us understand how things are made more efficiently. More beauty founders learning about biomimicry can help the industry grow and evolve in a healthy positive way. More people will think regenerative and circular and becoming hyper local. In 2018, the US was considered the most valuable beauty and personal care market in the world, generating approximately 89.5 billion US dollars in revenue that year. (https://www.statista.com/topics/1008/cosmetics-industry/) . This is about having deeper conversations, more critical thinking. We have to look closer into how we extract from the earth and how we can learn more from biotechnolgy firms like the team at https://www.ginkgobioworks.com.
We cannot protect that which we do not know, understand, or love. The beauty industry should get more people outside and to get to know the land better. Become better acquainted with our own backyards and learn how we are so intrinsically connected to it. Without nature we suffer, just like Richard Louv coined years ago, nature deficit disorder. Once we learn about all of the species that exist right outside our window, we become stewards of the land, we begin to learn more and want to continue to learn more. We begin to discover and see the world around us differently. When we put nature first, we see beauty so much more clearly. We can all become nature champions.
