Exclusively British Skincare Ingredients…..why?!
Evening all and welcome back to my general musings and thoughts on all things natural skincare, sustainable (ish!) living and enjoying the British countryside!
Today i’m going to be touching on why I only use ingredients that are grown and made in the British countryside.
The majority of us have heard of ‘food miles’ and I think especially during the various lockdowns we turned to local food which tended to be more readily available and reliable. We perhaps became more conscious of the supply chain, and where our food comes from (this is also being felt with the shortage of products from the Ukraine at the moment) and altogether had an increased awareness of what is grown locally and the impact this has for example on the local economy and the environment.
However, if I said ‘beauty miles’ i’m sure very few of you would be familiar with this term (unless you have been reading my SM posts…thank you!), what it means or even how it applies to the beauty products in your cupboards. Do you know what the main ingredients in your go to skincare products are? Let alone how or where they are grown? Put simply, ‘beauty miles’ are the amount of miles the products have had to travel to get to you. Unlike food miles however, it is soooo complicated to work out; each beauty product will contain multiple ingredients, all of which have come from far flung corners of the world, some are created in labs, others are derived from natural ingredients but have gone through many many processes to get to the end result. Honestly, mind blowing. In a simple lip balm containing coconut oil and shea butter, the ‘beauty miles’ could be well in to the 10,000s and that is a rough and probably under, estimate. But have a go - go and look at the ingredients on the last beauty/skincare product you used - can you estimate how many beauty miles that product has? Or, as a start, can you find out where those ingredients are grown/made?
A bit complicated and maybe a bit boring to be honest…but if you’re interested, have a look, and also have a listen to this podcast, it’s really informative! https://formulabotanica.com/podcast-beauty-miles/
All of the above leads me on to why I only use British skincare ingredients in Hedgewild products…
As a family we are trying to cut down on our carbon footprint (yes we’re the weirdos with the silent milk float type car, I utterly refuse to turn the heating on unless the children are blue, and the tumble drier is more there as a shelf rather than anything else…you get the idea!). So when it came to formulating my first balm (Baby….see previous blog!), I started to think about where the individual ingredients came from and the impact this had on my carbon footprint. There are lots of sexy, well known ingredients out there that are commonly used in natural skincare, coconut oil, argan oil, dead sea salt, rose essential oil, vegan wax alternative (candelilla wax) but none of these are grown in Britain….Not even close, they travel 1000’s of miles to get here. I wanted ingredients that I could literally go and see growing (shout out to the wonderful people at Norfolk Essential Oils ), that I could question the farmer on how the ingredients were grown and processed, was it grown sustainably? Was it grown in a pollinator friendly way?
At this point I started googling frantically, to see whether skincare ingredients grown in Britain even existed. Fortunately, with hours and hours of research and phone calls, I found several amazing, small, sustainable suppliers who are growing novel crops and oils (such as borage, camelina, evening primrose, lavender, peppermint) in a way that is environmentally sensitive. Not only that but comparatively, they were on my doorstep meaning my carbon footprint was as low as it could be making these products.
In addition to this I am a lifelong lover and supporter of the British countryside. I grew up rolling about in muck heaps, listening to the songs of blackbirds and robins and the weeeee of swifts (NOTHING says summer like the weeeee of swifts to me :D ), and creating ‘snail farms’ (??!). This love of the countryside has travelled with me through life, and it really is my happy place. I wanted to celebrate and encompass the British countryside in to my products and I felt that by only using British ingredients, I could do this.
Not only this but the skincare ingredients we make here are actually AMAZING. No, they’re not as well known or popular as for example coconut oil, but, lets take wheat germ oil (used in our Mummy Balm) for example, this absolute hero crop is grown up and down Britain commercially. It has a vitamin E content of about 20.32mg/tbsp whereas coconut oil, often used in pregnancy balms has just 0.01mg/tbsp. Vitamin E is a powerful antioxidant and helps prevent and reduce the appearance of scars and stretchmarks. So, you can see, the figures for this UK grown ingredient speak for themselves!
So with all this in mind, Hedgewild products only contain British grown ingredients. Not just one ingredient…ALL the oils, waxes and botanicals are grown right here in Britain.
What’s your go to British product? Personally, apart from Hedgewild obviously, I love a British wool sock!!
