Call it the local lotion revolution. Chances are that when you open your medicine cabinet, a bunch of the skincare products staring back at you come from companies based within an hour’s drive. The Bay Area is now the mecca for a new type of beauty industry: locally sourced, carefully crafted, and with a list of ingredients you can actually understand and feel good about slathering on your skin.
Bay Area beauty entrepreneurs have a long tradition of brewing creams and potions in their kitchens and backyards, but today’s players are competing in the international marketplace with a level of sophistication rarely seen before. The latest addition is Nude, an upscale natural skincare line created by Bryan Meehan, an Irish eco-entrepreneur, with Ali Hewson, wife of U2 frontman Bono and head of the socially responsible clothing company Edun (an anagram for nude). After launching the line in London in 2007, Meehan recently moved his family to Belvedere and set up shop in a 2,000-square-foot office in San Francisco’s financial district, in part to be closer to the North American headquarters of beauty powerhouse Sephora, his largest distributor. Nude is also sold at Barneys New York and at Whole Foods.
Meehan came up with the Nude concept after noticing that female customers at his Fresh & Wild grocery stores in the U.K. were bypassing the beauty aisle, instead opting for department-store brands loaded with the kinds of chemicals they avoided in their food. They didn’t trust that natural skincare would deliver on its antiaging claims. Meehan’s approach was to develop a beautifully packaged luxury skincare line with top-notch natural ingredients and “the high performance you’d expect from a Crème de la Mer.”
With Nude’s arrival, the Bay Area has solidified its reputation as the epicenter of the organic and natural beauty movement, currently estimated by Nutrition Business Journal to be worth more than $7.9 bil-lion in the United States alone. Almost 30 brands are based here, ranging from Oakland’s $20 million-a-year 100% Pure line to Yes to Inc., formerly of Tel Aviv, whose Yes to Carrots products are sold at Target. “It definitely feels like a magnet,” says Meehan, who chose the Bay Area because of its reputation for innovation, its association with health and well-being, and its obsession with food and nature. The ripples are being felt as far away as New York and Paris.
The Bay Area’s roots in the natural skincare movement go back to at least 1970, when sisters-in-law Peggy Short and Jane Saunders were selling handmade soaps and perfumes out of a garage-bazaar in Berkeley. The bath and body industry hadn’t even been invented yet, says Manda Heron, Short’s daughter and CEO of Body Time, as the business is now known (it sold its original name, the Body Shop, to the iconic U.K.-based company in 1987). “There was really just Jergens lotion in grocery marts and perfumes and makeup in the department stores,” Heron says.
In those days, natural food stores—the obvious outlet for such products—didn’t carry many, either (beauty was considered too bourgeois). “They were primarily interested in selling granola and yogurt,” recalls Dennis T. Sepp, an organic chemist who founded the hair- and skincare company ShiKai in his Santa Barbara garage in 1971 and moved it to Santa Rosa a year later.
The vast growth of the natural beauty industry—and the Bay Area’s emergence as a beauty center—came as Americans began to ask about their skincare products what they had already asked about their food: Where does it come from? How is it made? What are the ingredients, and are they safe? Around here, of course, people have been asking these questions for decades. “This has always been an area of conscious individuals and early adapters who are willing to take chances and want to be trailblazers,” says Zem Joaquin, who evaluates skincare products for her San Francisco–based website ecofabulous.com.
The food connection is huge. Many Bay Area skincare companies have a locavore-like emphasis on ingredients, artisanal craftsmanship, and sustainable packaging. At Marie Veronique Organics, whose diminutive Berkeley lab is just steps from the busy Fourth Street shopping area, products are made in a kitchen using Pyrex measuring cups, whisks, and four KitchenAid blenders. Clients sometimes call founder Marie Veronique Nadeau—a former high school chemistry teacher—the “Alice Waters of skincare.”
A number of local entrepreneurs actually started in the food business. McEvoy Ranch, for example, crossed over last summer, using its renowned Petaluma-grown organic olive oil in a line of skincare products called 80 Acres. Susan Ken-ward was a James Beard–award-winning cookbook author before starting a line of olive- and grapeseed-oil-based skincare called Olivina in Napa in 2002 (she added a Meyer lemon collection last year). Pioneering natural perfumer Mandy Aftel of Berkeley, who recently added skincare and bath products to her line, has worked with Michael Mina and chefs at the French Laundry. Reinforcing the culinary link, Petaluma-based Benedetta is the only skincare company with its own space in the food-oriented Ferry Building Marketplace in San Francisco. Founder Julia Faller, an aesthetician, describes the line as “food for the skin.” Meanwhile, Juice Beauty CEO Karen Behnke claims you could “literally eat” her San Rafael–based company’s new line of organic products “if you wanted to.” (They have been certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.)
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