This brilliant box of beauty fun was created by natural and botanic active ingredient developer, Provital (and sent to me by their UK distributor, Azelis UK), for their business customers to have a bit of insight into creating their own personal products. Ingredient suppliers and distributors are the heart of the beauty industry by keeping everything growing and moving and yet they’re the component we never even think about when we are buying our lotions and potions.
Provital creates trend reports for brands to guide their ingredient and formulation buying and from this we get the latest and greatest ingredients in our skin care. So, to focus on a continuing trend – their highlighted ‘Sens-Connection’ is all about textures. Think about the words we see on beauty products: mousse, water cream, melting, whipped and so on – these all give us a sense of the texture of the product. But, the developers have to come up with the ingredients that can be, or at least complement, whippy or melty in order to meet expectation and that’s where the suppliers step in.
The box is designed for men’s skin care but nonetheless I whisked up a cool little cleansing and exfoliating gel using cucumber gel, passionfruit extract and exfoliant and very nice it is too – I can tell they have men in mind for this because it’s a cool cucumber gel cleanser rather than a lavish balm and that, in a nutshell, shows you the difference between the two categories. Men are perceived to like things fresh, fast and efficient, whereas us ladies (according to manufacturers) prefer indulgence, thick cleansing textures and a high sensory effect. I loved getting hands on with the ingredients – the Passionfruit extract, in this neat form, is really sticky, but once in the cucumber gel, it’s not at all.
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New ingredients you might want to look out for (and I have had this box since last year and only just – shamefully – got around to writing it up) are:
Densinaria – a haircare active derived from seaweed and claims to reduce split end breakage by 58% while increasing damage resistance.
Circanblue – a new active working with the circadian rhythms to ensure skin looks like it had a good night’s sleep (CHANEL has just introduced their new skin product based on exactly circadian rhythms – SUBLIMAGE L’Extrait de Nuit at £600 a bottle!).
Altheostem – lab grown stem cells Althaea Rosea to target senescent cells. These can be known as ‘zombie’ cells because they’re cells that age and stop dividing but they don’t actually die. They just hang around cluttering up your skin (and body).
Seeing the ‘back end’ of beauty formulations is so interesting – it’s a such a huge machine that we barely acknowledge. If you want to have a look at the presentation of the box it’s on YouTube HERE – I loved watching it because the two women presenting it are pure gold in many ways 😊. The box is based around Breaking Bad!
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