Tribal council: Beauty products that make a green difference

Until Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt arrived in 2006 for the birth of their daughter, Namibia was a country that was known more for its diamond trade and war-torn past than celebrity birthing. Although Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt is, undoubtedly, its most famous émigré, the African nation exports something equally precious: marula trees. The trees' bark, leaves and nuts are a rich source of vitamins and minerals and have been farmed for centuries by native Bushmen and Bantu. Now, beauty companies like The Body Shop are joining them. In 2000, the firm formed an agreement with a band of Namibian women who collect and process marula nuts to extract an oil that's used in many of its products, including lipsticks, body scrubs and moisturizers. While The Body Shop gets another exotic new ingredient, Namibian women gain a livelihood. "[They're given] a hand up rather than a hand out," says Sherry Lay, vice-president of product development for The Body Shop.

That's the theory anyway, and it's one that is being embraced by a growing number of beauty brands. Though we once revered the high-tech paradigm of beauty -- complete with white-coated scientists who held all the answers to the mysteries of aging-lately, there has been a parallel trend toward a more natural approach. From the Amazon to Australia, manufacturers are turning over every leaf (literally) in search of botanical ingredients. And in exchange, small, often-impoverished indigenous communities are afforded a means of earning a living.


"The environmental movement-the desire to do right by the planet-is definitely driving the trend for more natural ingredients in beauty products," says Lynn Mazzella, vice-president of global product development for Origins. But with this concern for the health of the planet comes a greater concern for the welfare of its people. "We've become fearful of chemicals and toxins," says Mazzella. "We're turning to nature for safer answers."

Supporting a green cause
There's no question that consumers are registering their support for a green consciousness at the cash register. Worldwide, the cosmetics and toiletries industry is a $296-billion business, and analysts at Euromonitor International believe that an increased demand for natural products is behind the growth. Consider that American consumers spent $4.9 billion on natural and organic personal care in 2005, and U.S. sales are expected to rise to $11 billion in 2009. Far from being the stuff of Birkenstock-wearing, granola-crunching bohemians, "natural" is becoming a label we all want to wear, thanks to high-end purveyors like Estée Lauder, Jurlique and Stella McCartney.

"Consumers believe that nature is exotic and holds the key to safer, better beauty," says Jamie Ross, creative director for The Doneger Group, a New York-based trend-forecasting company. "As a result, beauty companies will do just about anything to be the first with a new natural ingredient, and they'll go to great lengths to source it out. You'll see teams of medical personnel [from the research and development departments of beauty companies] hooking up with local doctors to try to source the plants that the culture has used for ages."

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If today's consumers can tap into the beauty secrets of indigenous communities, they have ethnobotanists to thank for it. Ethnobotanists are trained to study the medi-cinal properties of plants and work collaboratively with locals (whether tribal elders or native doctors) and scientists employed by beauty manufacturers. Their goal is to harness botanical healing powers without sacrificing the performance we've come to expect from synthetic ingredi-ents. "[They research] cultures to source indigenous plants and remedies and bring them in-house to see if they're viable in a formulation," says Mazzella. "For example, there's a plant called Rhodiola [used in Origins' Youthtopia Skin Firming Lotion] that grows in polar climates. Our ethnobotanists studied it to learn how it adapts and survives in such harsh climates and how we can harness that adaptive plant power in skin care."

Ensuring sustainability
Once plants like Rhodiola are brought into the lab and their efficacy is validated, manufacturers set out to secure vast quantities through local suppliers. And that's where the danger comes in: Although companies like Origins and The Body Shop have entire departments devoted to ensuring the sustainability of farming practices, lack of policing deep in the rainforests and oceans may prove to be an inconvenient truth. As the appetite for natural ingredients skyrockets, it's not hard to foresee a day when unscrupulous farmers will strip fertile lands and bio-pirates will pillage the seas. Over the past dec-ade, for example, Indian sandalwood has been so overfarmed that it's now considered endangered, and the government of India has issued stiff penalties to curb
its exportation.

Caution will protect not only profits but also natural habitats and the people who inhabit them, says Denis Simioni, founder and president of Ojon, a Canadian line of hair- and body-care products that uses oil from the Ojon trees of Central America. "With this sort of partnership comes responsibility," adds Lay. "Our products contain scarce ingredients that are only collected
during peak harvesting periods to limit their availability," says Simioni. "Sometimes the supply isn't able to meet consumer demand, so certain products won't be available until the next harvest. We control annual harvests to help protect the natural resource." Protecting the income of indigenous peoples is another priority. "We try to choose ingredients that can be used in a lot of products," says Lay. "That way, if the demand for one product wanes, the entire community's income isn't jeopardized."

Some companies, such as Toronto-based Isomers Laboratories, have other methods for dealing with ingredient scarcities. "We can take something from nature [and] isolate its effective properties," says co-founder Manuella Marcheggiani. "Then we can mass-produce it in quantities that nature might not have allowed for." But trying to outperform Mother Nature with lab-synthesized ingredients doesn't always succeed. "We tried to recreate goji berries-an antioxidant-rich plant-in the lab, but they worked better in their natural form," says Marcheggiani.

So far, there's little risk that the craze for natural in-gredients will outstrip the planet's biodiversity. According to Ross, ethnobotanists have barely put a dent in the plant world, and countries like Brazil-whose cosmetics and toiletries sector grew by more than 16.5 percent in 2005-are reaping the economic benefits. Besides the Amazon rainforest, ethnobotanists have been spotted in rural China, the Australian outback and Africa. The latter is one area where The Body Shop has been harvesting in-gredients for its Moringa Bath and Body line. Along with organic honey from Zambia and cocoa butter from Ghana, the products include oil from the moringa tree, whose vivid-green leaves contain more iron than spinach and more vitamin C than oranges. The tree is also abundant in nations where employment isn't. If the Moringa Bath and Body line is a metaphor for the future of beauty, that future looks bright green.

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