A HISTORICALLY ROOTED COLLECTION OF ENVIRONMENTALLY FOCUSED ARTISAN SKINCARE, COSMETICS, AND BOTANICAL PERFUMES
What is Slow Beauty?
Slow Beauty is focused on the ritual of the beauty regimen and the consideration of every aspect of the products that you choose to make a part of this routine. For so long our beauty products have been labeled “clean” as long as what’s inside the packaging has some natural ingredients. We think that beauty isn’t truly clean if when you’re done, what’s left is polluting the environment and destroying natural habitats. Our approach is to care for people and the planet, which means that we focus on our artisans and growers, our ingredients, and on our packaging footprint. Our Slow Beauty collection is an environmentally focused line of artful skincare, cosmetics, and botanical perfumes. More than that, it’s a different way of looking at consumption and beauty – it’s the antithesis of beauty “hauls” and a medicine cabinet packed full of half used bottles. Our ethos is “love for our mother” – everything we do is informed by wanting to create less waste during a time of crisis for the planet.
Our Ingredients
Slow Beauty truly comes from the earth – we mine history for plants, flowers, and botanicals that have been used for thousands of years to heal and scent the skin. We work with formulators, farmers, herbalists, and perfumers that know the land around them and forage and farm it with care and a goal to preserve and enrich the land, rather than just plunder it for a quick gain. We then tell a story about why we’ve chosen our ingredients and how and where they are made – a women owned and operated collective in Morocco that presses fresh, golden argan oil, a small family farm in the Andes Mountains that makes gardenia oil through the ancient art of enfleurage, lilacs and peonies freshly grown and painstakingly made into precious ounces of oil right here in upstate NY, and sweet, high elevation damiana hand distilled in Baja – each effective ingredient has a unique backstory and is cruelty free, sustainably sourced and foraged, and free of any synthetic preservatives, chemicals, and microplastics.
The Bottles
Each bottle has been hand blown by a glass artisan, using their hands and mouth to shape each individual molten piece of glass into a unique vessel that’s unlike any other. We work with talented glass blowers across North America to create these exquisite, colorful bottles that often only come in limited editions. Each bottle is sealed with wax and cork, the way ancient people sealed their oil and wine jugs for storage and travel. Our refill bottles are minimally packaged and made from aluminum, an easily and infinitely recyclable material, with necks wide enough to make cleaning the bottle out for recycling possible.
Our Network
Slow Beauty was born out of curiosity - when we started Kindred Black we wanted to meet makers of all kinds championing sustainable manufacturing and artistry. Over the years we’ve built our network of glass blowers, farmers, herbalists, perfumers, and environmentally focused artisans by paying a fair wage that they set, and not trying to turn them into factories. It can be frustrating to get just a few ounces of lilac or cliffrose oil at a time, but if the conditions that year mean that making more would harm the integrity of the plants, that’s all we get. One person at a flame can’t make thousands of bottles at a time, but a machine could never duplicate the look and feel of something that is handmade. We try to think through the lens of the Slow Beauty ethos with every interaction that we have.
We Love a Backstory
Great history buffs, Slow Beauty is rooted in folklore and many of our products start with a story. It’s said that the famously enticing Cleopatra bathed in rose water to keep her skin soft and supple, that Aristotle thought mint so potently aphrodisiac that he warned Alexander the Great not to let his soldiers near it while on Crusade, and that Immortelle was once dried as an offering to the Greek gods. These backstories and fables are our inspiration for creating powerful skincare, made from the same ingredients that people have been using for thousands of years.
The Packaging
We spend more to make sure that all of our packaging is in line with our mission. Our materials are plastic free and we use recycled boxes, recycled tissue paper, recycled kraft and shipping paper, water activated paper tape, and our custom wrapping papers are made with 100% PCW and are printed near our office with vegetable and soy inks. To replace plastic bubble wrap we use the most amazing and effective paper padding called Green Wrap, an alternative to plastic landfill that is biodegradable, compostable, SFI-certified, and fully recyclable. Our outer cartons are made by a family-run workshop in France with a lighter weight, uncoated paper that is FSC certified and acid, heavy metal, and elemental chlorine free. We wanted the unboxing experience to be as special as what’s in the box and our challenge was to create something beautiful that didn’t create a lot of excess waste.
Love for our mother
This one line informs everything that we do, in our personal lives as well as with our business. What’s right for the planet is a factor in every decision that we make and our goal is to have the lightest footprint that we can possibly have while running a business.