Holly Case

Beauty from the Inside Out

It is a cliché that true beauty comes from the inside.  While a sparkling personality can certainly add to one’s overall attractiveness, the truth is that health plays a far greater role in outer beauty than either attitude or even cosmetics.           

We already know that physical health, including diet, impacts our overall appearance. Surely each of us has known people with sallow or dull skin, which is often caused by a lack of a healthy diet, failure to take supplements or take good care of their health in general. But on the flip side, those who have healthy lifestyles often seem to glow from within.

Good health cannot be faked, but it can certainly be helped along. Researchers are finding that the same supplements that benefit our health in other ways are also beneficial for beauty. In fact, Mintel reports that food and beauty will become even more intertwined, based on their monitoring and predictions for 2009 product launches. Sales of this new category, called “nutricosmetics,” are still a small percentage of the market, but sales are growing and have reached a global total of $1.5 bn. 

Probiotics are one of the hottest new trends in food applications, and they are proving useful in beauty products as well. According to Mintel, probiotics are the top beauty trend for 2009.  The benefits of probiotics are widespread, and we can expect to see many products containing this supplement, with plenty of opportunity for additional future product launches.

While we usually think of beauty and skin care products as referring to those applied externally, there are new developments in the works for supplemented products to be consumed internally as well. Datamonitor reports that this new category is poised to go after the lucrative prestige beauty consumer segment.           

 Even though candy bars are usually considered an enemy of good skin, Masterfoods is challenging this perception with the Dove Beautiful milk chocolate bar, fortified with skin-friendly nutrients such as vitamins C and E, along with biotin, zinc and cocoa flavanols. And in the UK, Beauty Spring Water contains its ingredient Praventin, which is high in lactoferrin, believed to help skin.  Nestle also introduced Glowelle, a “beauty juice” that contains vitamins, phytonutrients, botanical and fruit extracts. But the truly unique thing about Glowelle is that it is being sold along conventional cosmetics at upscale Neiman Marcus, rather than on supermarket shelves. These developments mark a growing awareness of the overlapping roles of food, supplements and beauty products. However, there is still a lot of work to be done in reaching out to weary and cash-strapped US consumers. The concept of edible beauty products has already caught on with European and Japanese consumers, where the products are sold in the pharmacy. However, a US pharmacy does not play the same role in shaping consumer behaviours as in Europe and Japan, and the category has struggled to find its niche here.  It may be true that beauty begins from within, but more US consumers still need to be convinced. With effective marketing, we can create healthier and more beautiful consumers – and sales.

Beauty Product Standards At Last

Many have called for organic standards to be applied to health and beauty products for a long time, particularly because HBA products were curiously exempt from the USDA Organic rules as applied to food. This is the year that all that is changing, however, beginning with the NSF standards in May 2008 and the EU standards a month later. Now that NPA organic standards are being enacted and the new seal will begin appearing on products in stores by Thanksgiving 2008, it will be a solution to some problems, but will create others or offer little relief to some of the companies that need it the most.

          There’s no question that consumers rely on organic certification labels, such as the USDA Organic food label, to guide them in making purchasing decisions.  In the absence of any such regulation, some unscrupulous companies marketed HBA products as “natural” and “organic” when they were anything but; the terms were thrown around casually with little justification. Some manufacturers were hoping to fool consumers, who might not notice the products contained synthetic ingredients like parabens and propylene glycol.

          The new certification seal is long overdue, with a majority of consumers already believing that standards were in place, when in fact they were not.  According to a recent Yankelovich survey, 78 percent of American women believed that personal care products were already regulated, and an overwhelming 97 percent thought that they should be.

          The new organic certification standards may help veteran industry stalwarts, such as Aubrey Organics, distinguish themselves from competitors who are riding the organic bandwagon while loading up their products with parabens.  In fact, Aubrey is one of the first companies to receive the new seal, likely because their products were already meeting standards similar to the strict requirements. There is no question that the new certification seal will reward the efforts of companies meeting the high standards that consumers expect, and hopefully encourage others to do the same.

          However, as we saw with the USDA Organic seal for food, once the largest players started to join the game, they immediately began lobbying to weaken standards and skirting the regulations. As an example, we probably remember the boycott of Horizon Organic (owned by dairy giant Dean Foods) due to their violation of organic standards. It is not unrealistic to expect that once multinational HBA companies sign on, they too could throw their considerable muscle toward weakening standards, which could result in less-pure products.

          Cost is another factor that may make the new certification standards difficult for smaller HBA companies to implement. Pursuing certification is costly, and many small manufacturers cannot afford to undertake the process, even though their products meet high standards. This still leaves consumers in a position of caveat emptor, in which the product without a seal might actually be more pure than the competing one that does bear the seal.

             The new certification seal for HBA products has the potential to be a great guiding tool for consumers, but it remains to be seen how the realities of the new standards will settle out. Expect there to be a conversation among all sides about which unnatural ingredients should be allowed and when exceptions need to be granted. This is an important, long overdue first step, but the issue should not be considered settled.

Food, Not Lawns

Food prices are only continuing to go up. While most of us are used to going to a grocery store to stock up on food, a small but growing number of people is turning to growing their own food. While gardening as a hobby is nothing new, what is different about this is that some are recognizing the significant gardening space available under their lawns.

The Food Not Lawns movement not only promotes converting yards into usable garden space. The movement also aims to promote peace through community efforts and shared resources. While "peace" is sometimes an abstract concept and one that feels difficult to enact when our country is engaged in a very long war, there's no question that coming together as a community brings about positive changes on a local level. 

In her fabulous book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, author Barbara Kingsolver wrote, "The cost-benefit ratios of neighborliness are as old as our species, and probably inescapable in the end." Considering the fact that oil is a finite resource and industrial food is likely to become more expensive to produce and transport, being able to produce at least some of our own food on a local and community level is a valuable pursuit indeed.