EP121. Biotech beauty, the controversial new frontier

When I first started in the natural beauty sector, everyone around me was terrified of lab synthesized ingredients. In fact, the chemophobia or fear of chemicals that existed at the beginning of the 2010s has heavily influenced the way that skincare has changed over the last decade and has led to a wide scale embrace of plant based cosmetic ingredients. As a result, beauty brands big and small now consider being natural one of the most important standards to achieve in their formulations. The rise in clean, green and organic skincare has seen the language around beauty change entirely in the last 10 years. Finding the most exotic active ingredient with the highest potency seems to have become somewhat of a race, with brands continuously touting that they have now discovered the plant with the highest antioxidant potential. But as the climate and ecological crises now require far more significant action from the beauty industry, some companies are returning back to the lab to use biotechnology in their formulations. In fact, when I recently visited the International Cosmetic Ingredients Trade show in cosmetics, global biotechnology featured heavily as a potential solution to make beauty more sustainable. But what is it? How does it work? Can it still be natural? Well, today I'm joined by an expert in biotech who's going to walk us through exactly what it all is and how it applies to beauty. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make and sell your natural beauty formulations. We tackle topics that will make you think and encourage debate about green beauty with your friends, followers or customers. I'm your host Lorraine Dallmeyer. I'm a chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. We have thousands and thousands of students in over 180 countries around the world who study with us to become organic beauty formulators and entrepreneurs. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course and if you want to be the first person to know what's happening in green beauty, make sure you subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app. So in today's episode I am joined by Dr. Barb Paldas who is a scientist, investor, serial entrepreneur and and the CEO of Codex Beauty Labs, a bioscience led beauty company that is setting a new standard in organic luxury skincare. Codex Beauty Labs was conceived to deliver affordable, high efficacy skincare that supports the microbiome and delivers the healthiest of skin without sacrificing sustainability from formulation to packaging. Bob has created a line that puts the plant power back in your hands with the clinical results to back it up. Hi, Bob, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Good. Thank you so much for having me on.

Oh, I am thrilled to have you here because this is a topic I've wanted to explore for a really, really long time and I know that you know a lot about this. So I think for our listeners, let's start right at the beginning and ask the question, what is biotech beauty?

So biotech beauty are beauty formulations and in our case dermo cosmetics. So they have a very specific dermatological purpose, say for a condition like acne or eczema or psoriasis that uses biotechnology made ingredients, which is kind of a circular answer because then the question is, well, what is biotechnology? Biotechnology is when we harness cells, whether those are plant cells in our case, or animal cells in the case of vaccines that manufacture. So they're like little factories that produce your product of interest, whether that's an, an enzyme or a peptide or protein. But basically the cells are put, you can think of it as a blender and the blender keeps them suspended and it keeps them at a temperature like the human body. And you feed them and you give them oxygen and they grow and you get billions and billions and billions of them. And each little cell is making the ingredient that you need. And then at the end, well, there's two ways of harvesting. They either put it out, you know, they, it comes out of their little membrane and then you can separate them from the liquid, which has your ingr interest or in a sadder case, you kill them because you basically. Or they're, they're kind of the product itself. So they're pretty much what makes everything. You don't have to grow plants. You don't need very much liquid or water or media. So it's a very energy efficient way of making ingredients and it's also very sustainable for that reason.

Wow. I mean, it's amazing what we're doing in all of the behind the scenes labs across the world. And I guess one of the questions that some of our listeners might have and that I have as well is how are those biotech created ingredients different to the ones that you might harvest in the wild?

So first of all, if you think about a plant, you might only use a specific part of the plant like the leaf or a petal. So then think of, think of for example, a rose. If you're only using the petal, you're throwing away the leaves of the plant itself, you're throwing away the stem, you're throwing away the roots. And so you're wasting an incredible amount of the plant. Plus you're using nutrients from the soil. And then if there is any pollution in the area, whether that's in the soil or in the rain or in the air, even that plant is going to absorb some of that pollution. And so you may have a risk of having an impure ingredient. And in some cases, like comfrey, if you pick the wrong part of the plant, there may even be chemicals. And they're, you know, they're basically chemical ingredients, molecules that may be dangerous. So by doing it in biotechnology, you're isolating only the cell from the plant that makes what you need for your formulation. And so it's pure because there's no pollution in a bioreactor, and it's very concentrated. Because now you have nothing but that one cell that you're using, right? You don't have any stems, you don't have any roots. You don't have anything else that could basically contaminate it. And all you're doing is making the one thing you need. You're reproducing it a billion times. And think of it this way, you can make in a little mixer, you know, like you make smoothies in. You can make the same amount of ingredient as a field of plants. So you're saving all that land that can then be used for agriculture because ultimately, right, the human population is growing and we need to eat. And eating's a little bit more important than cosmetics. So preserving that land for agriculture. And people are starting to make even food in biotechnology, right? Like impossible food. I don't know if you had their hamburger, their sausage, or just eggs. All those are using bioprocesses.

It's incredible what we're doing, I suppose, playing devil's advocate. Some of the people listening might be thinking, when I formulate, I want the whole plant. And I know that a lot of herbalists in particular, they often talk about that whole plant matter. And they know that when they extract, for instance, a hydrosol or an oil, you know, looking more at the sort of foundation ingredients of our formulations, those will contain a lot more chemical compounds. So in the case of biotechnology, at the moment, we're really looking at those isolates and extracts. Is that correct?

That's correct. So we're looking at specific things that that cell produces. But a cell produces more than just one thing, right? So that's the other thing to keep in remembering. I mean, yes, you may in some cases want the root and the stem and the leaf, but you can actually make each of those In a bioprocess, too. So you can in fact, rebuild an entire plant in a bioreactor if you want to. It's just more complicated and expensive. And then I would challenge the people who are using the whole stem mass cell extract, because that's actually exactly where we started with plants, for example, like Calendula, looking at way more of the plant than just the one cell. And then we looked at efficacy testing. So we tested for the specific function we wanted of that plant, and we found that the stem cell was more potent. So we got far more effect from a smaller concentration. And I'm talking like 10% versus 1%. So 10 to 1. And if we looked at. So for all of our ingredients. Ingredients, we look at the gene expression of the skin cells. So we basically challenge skin cells with something like, you know, UV radiation or peroxide. And then we look at what calms them down, what causes them to express certain genes. And the stem cell beat the extract, the oil, the almond oil extract, like 30 to 1. So it's more potent. It's more potent.

Wow, that's fascinating. I mean, it's incredible what, as I've said already, it's just incredible to learn what's going on because obviously this could potentially be the future in cosmetics and may well possibly be. So now, I know a lot of people, when they hear about things that are grown in a lab and things that are that made through reactions, they often have this inherent response where they think, oh, it's synthetic. I don't want it anywhere near me.

But it's not synthetic, it's the plant. Right.

I know. Nonetheless, I mean, I saw someone on social media the other day basically saying, I found out that the citric acid I've been buying has been grown by black mold in a lab. And I will never buy it again because I only want citric acid that's come from lemons. So there are still people out there who have this connotation around the idea of it's been grown in a lab, therefore it is synthetic. So I guess what would you say to those people who are feeling that way?

I would say in 20 years, when the planet is overpopulated and you're starving, think back to the day you didn't want to buy biotechnology. Not everybody's going to be convinced. Right. And a certain percentage of the planet still thinks the earth is flat, so.

Right, yes. Okay, well, I can see where we're going here. I like it.

And we have debates on everything. And I would say the only thing I would say to the industry is, you need to educate people. You need to make them understand that if you're reproducing a plant cell, it is still the same plant cell. And then you get the whole group of people who are like, well, no, it's genetically modified. To those people. I don't really have an answer in the sense of just like, you know, if I don't want to eat beef because I feel bad for cows, I'm not going to eat beef. You know, if I want to be a vegan, I'm going to be a vegan. It's a personal choice. It's a philosophical choice. And as long as natural plant ingredients are still available, people will have that choice. If someday, again on our planet, we have to make harder choices about our own survival as a species, that choice may be taken away and then those people may not be using any products at all. But that day's coming. I know I don't want to sound negative, but that day is definitely coming unless we change our behavior. And you're kind of tapping into my climate activist part of my personality here.

And that's absolutely fine. I'm with you on that one, Barb. Actually, and we've done quite a lot on this on the podcast. Podcast already, because you're quite right. We do need to change as a beauty industry as a whole. And that also includes de growth. It includes more circularity. A lot of those concepts are incredibly important. So then, moving on from the people who are formulating, what about the consumers? How have they responded so far to biotechnology and beauty?

Honestly, a consumer usually wants a product that's affordable and a product that works. And I would say the product that works is probably the biggest criterion of the consumer. We're still working through some formulation improvements on smell. Lactobacillus, which is in our preservative system, is not the nicest smelling. Right. It smells like ferment. So we're now figuring out how to not make it smell so bad. But overall, I would say people have reacted very positively. And with biotechnology, again, if you can bring down. As we've scaled things into larger volumes, we've been able to bring prices down. And so again, to me, it's a little bit like a Silicon Valley chip philosophy, right? If you remember, memory chips got cheaper and cheaper every year and you had more and more memory in your computer. And so for us, it's basically, if we can make more and more of these biotech ingredients, the overall price comes down because they scale really well in manufacturing. Like if you have a little 5 liter mixer, it's a lot more expensive than a 200 liter mixer and it's almost the same cost to produce and you produce a lot more of that material. So to us, that's basically scalability where we can then make everything more affordable to the customer. And so with the great clinical performance that we have, it's a win, win, win.

I love it. So tell me more about your brand. What do you make and how much of it is based on biotechnology?

So not all of it is based on biotechnology because it's not yet available. Things for example, like our Lactobacillus ferment, the ferment of coconut with Lactobacillus that we use in our preservative system, our propane dial, which is a ferment of corn, all of those are made today using biotechnology. And certain other ingredients, like the, in our 2.0 of our BEA line, are going to be plant stem cell extracts. So those are basically made from plant stem cells that squeeze as opposed to taking a plant and macerating it in oil. We are trying to move to having more and more, I would say today it's probably a lot of, you know, well, first of all, our moisturizers and things like that, and this is true for the entire industry, about 60% of that product is water. You know, that's basically purified water. Down the road, we'd love to see if there's waterless solutions because that's moving a lot of water around. Again, it's not energetically efficient for the planet. And people get upset when they realize aqua, which is the, you know, first element on an inkey list. And everybody's cosmetic, it's over 50% water. So they're basically buying highly purified water out of the other, say 40 to 50%, 5 to 10% is definitely biotech in all the products except for our anhydrous oils. And then because the oils are 98% organic extracts, the rest for our products, I would say 20% is probably biotech out of the 40 to 50%. So about somewhere between 4, half, about half of it are biotech ingredients. And now we're trying to improve that and increase that. But some of our bases are almond oil. Almond oil is almond oil. So until you manufacture almond oil with biotechnology, which that I don't see in the near term, you know, we're going to be at about the halfway mark.

So how did you get into biotech and how did you decide to infuse it into your beauty brand?

I actually came from biotech. So in my previous life I ran a company called Finesse Solutions that I founded in 2005 and I sold in 2017. And we made equipment for manufacturing biotechnology products. Now we were in the medical space, so we made equipment for vaccines. Actually if you either have a Pfizer job or a Johnson and Johnson jab, it was made in our equipment that we provided back in 2014, 15, 16. And then we basically started automating these bioreactors, modifying the bioreactors, making them single use so that sterilization from batch to batch wasn't a problem. Because there was a big question, if you have this huge stainless steel bioreactor, have you really cleaned it? Is there going to be any cross contamination? So the industry moved to a single use version of it where it was an irradiated plastic liner on the stainless steel and you would basically then incinerate it. So they were actually, they got really good at recycling plastic. And after that we started automating more and more, including the purification processes facilities. And before we sold it, we were actually building facilities to make cancer therapeutics. So I spent good 12 years in the industry, know a few people here and there. And so when it came time to doing beauty, I had actually had customers, for example, like DSM who or Merck who were my customers for my equipment. And so I knew the groups in cosmetics and so it was kind of a natural transition to keep working with those groups for ingredients.

That's amazing. Well, it's fantastic to hear how you took your your life before beauty and infused it into your brand. Interestingly, have you seen other beauty brands really embrace biotechnology yet? Because I did quite a bit of research on this before we jumped on this podcast and I couldn't find that many. So I was wondering what your.

There are not that many. No. Ameris, obviously with biossance jumps to mind with their squalane that they produce in using biotechnology, but no, there aren't that many yet. I would say in Korea though they use peptides that are all manufactured using biotechnology. For example in Japan as well from for example rice. And those are very effectively used by companies like Shiseido. I don't think they just talk about it as much over in Asia, but the companies there are definitely doing state of the art research on anti aging and those anti aging compounds which are more complex molecules are definitely made using bioprocessing.

So what do you think is holding back a lot of beauty brands from starting to embrace biotechnology A lot more.

I think some of it is education. Again, understanding the differences in potency. Some of it may be their philosophy, right? Like if they're the people who want to go pick the plant, if they're the people who want to work with local harvesters, then their philosophy. And again, we started out there when we originally bought bia. BIA Organics, the founder was very dedicated to supporting Irish farmers and Irish organic farming and doing everything naturally. And I think some of those people have a fear of technology, especially in biotechnology. And some of it is also, the ingredients may not be as available, but it's a, it's a combination. I think. I think in 10 years it'll be a very different landscape.

I'm sure you're right. I was going to ask about the ingredients, actually. I mean, if I was a form, if I'm a formulator and I'm running a beauty brand and many of the people listening today are in that position, where would I go and find biotech ingredients to include in my formulations?

So there are now databases like Novi that you can go and search and you can type in, for example, biotechnology, you can go to trade shows and honestly, you can search the Internet. I mean, you can from, from the comfort of your own desk or chair or couch or bed. You type in stem cell, stem cell, plant, plant stem cell. And you'll find a whole list of providers of plant stem cells.

So one question I had about was about certification. So we know that Cosmos is now certified biotech ingredients under their natural label. Moving forward, I guess the question I have is, can biotech ingredients ever be organic?

Well, they are organic by definition, right? Well, the question is, how do you define organic? Organic in many cases is defined as not using pesticides. Right? Not using chemicals in the production of the plant. So in biotechnology you never use pesticides. You don't need to. It's grown in a contained vessel, so there is no insect or parasite that can attack the cell. In fact, the environment in which these stem cells are grown is beyond any degree of purity you'll find in a field. Therefore, if the originator cell, if the original cell comes from an organic plant, all you're doing is making billions of copies of that cell that started out as organic. And all the cells are identical. So therefore all of its. You can think of it as twin cells are organic as well. And so I would say that biotechnology is even organic standard because the purity of the product is going to be far greater because there is zero risk of pesticides, of acid rain, of any heavy metals in the soil that might have been there prior. That will get into the plant and into the cells of the plant that's growing in that environment.

It'll be really interesting to see if any certification bodies eventually certify some of these extracts as organic. And I'm sure that they're in a difficult position at the moment from having to approach it from. From a completely different way of thinking as well.

Exactly. And some of it is also political. Right. You end up with lobbies of farmers who are afraid of this technology for their livelihood. And so they're going to be lobbying that it's not organic. But in my opinion, it's actually, there should be a separate category, which is biotechnology, and people should be educated about the quality, the purity, the concentration of those ingredients and the capability, the efficacy of those ingredients. We have the same issue with Cosmos on irradiation. If you think of dry goods in France, for example, all milk is irradiated, Right. And it can. It doesn't have to be refrigerated. So that's not Cosmos organic. Even if it comes from an organic farm, because it's irradiated, it's no longer considered organic. Or in fact, Cosmos natural with certain powders or certain. Say you want to use strawberry powder, or you want to use rosehip powder in a product like a bath salt, for example, the moment you irradiate it, you're no longer allowed to have a Cosmos reading. And yet, if you look at the pharmaceutical industry and safety, if you don't irradiate it, you cannot guarantee you're not going to have parasites or molds or yeasts for shelf life. And so that's been our ongoing gripe and discussion with Cosmos because they're. They're foregoing consumer safety. So we love Cosmos. Everything we do, we try to get Cosmos certified, usually natural now because of the technologies involved. But if, if any of your listeners could help us in convincing Cosmos to allow, whether it's beta radiation or gamma radiation of powders, I think overall, for our industry and consumer safety, that would be a huge step forward.

Yeah, absolutely. It's the same with Clays, and we teach our students this as well at Formula Botanica, which obviously makes your mask safer, but it means that you may have to forego organic certification. So I guess the question I have for you then is, what do you think the future is of biotech in beauty? Where do you think this could go?

So I think biotechnology as it delves more into cosmetics. So right now, again, when I left biotechnology five years ago, the cosmetics industry was seen kind of as a tiny little market. And I know for someone coming from cosmetics, that seems hard to believe, but when you compare that to the billions of vaccines that are produced every year, the billions of cancer therapeutics and other types of therapeutics, and now gene and cell therapy that are coming along, it seems to the industry, at least from a dollar's perspective, like a small backwater. I would say as more and more biotech ingredients are used by the industry, it will become more relevant to the manufacturers of those ingredients. And that will lead to newer ingredients, new functionalities, better costs, and more adoption. So I think, you know, if we can get over this next, I guess, hump of adoption, then I think we'll see an acceleration in biotechnology. And certainly from a sustainability perspective, it is very hard to beat a biotech manufactured product from a carbon footprint, water and energy usage perspective.

So just latching on to what you said there about functionalities. Obviously we've been talking about a lot of actives, but isolates the ones that high performance effect. Now, interestingly, over the last few months, in particular with the war breaking out in the Ukraine, we've seen complexities in obtaining certain functional ingredients. We know that. I mean, there have been issues around sunflower oil, there have been issues around palm oil. So looking at those functional ingredients, do you think biotechnology could ever create those emulsifiers, surfactants, et cetera, that we, that we so desperately need in our formulations?

So they could certainly produce the raw materials out of which those ingredients are made. And so again, if you look at the raw ingredients, those are plant matter, right? Those are plant extracts. And so I think for oils right now, it's a cost issue in the sense that it is very cost effective to grow sunflowers and then to press basically the seeds into sunflower oil. So that from a cost perspective would. There would have to be a motivator, a financial motivator, like a revisit, real and complete lack of that ingredient. Because right now a lot of biotech ingredients are kind of in the 800 to $1200 a kilogram. So for something like an oil that's not feasible financially, it's like two orders of magnitude off from where it needs to be. But then again, you know, if there's many years of drought, so to speak, in terms of supply, then the price will go up. And at some point, it's kind of like with the Canadian tar sands for manufacturing petroleum, right? If the cost of oil goes above $100, then the tar sands are actually affordable. If the cost, if the Barrel, you know, price is $40, then it's not. So it's just a matter of supply and demand. But I do think it will come.

It'll be interesting to watch what happens, particularly as I said, with all these supply chain issues that we're starting to see have a knock on effect throughout the beauty industry. And I will be fascinated to watch how some of the big players respond and how some of the ingredient manufacturers respond in the coming months. So I suppose one of the final questions I want to ask you touches on sustainability and you've already mentioned already that you think biotechnology or that you know, biotechnology is more sustainable. So I wanted to ask, have any assessments, any life cycle assessments been undertaken on the difference between the footprint of biotech ingredients and maybe conventionally grown and harvested ingredients?

Those life cycle calculations have not been published. I would hope that someone, for example, like an Amiris is doing them. We're certainly going to now be doing them now that we're actually going more and more towards the biotechnology side. We've been right now focusing all of our sustainability calculations on our packaging, so specifically on using bioplastics and how those affect carbon footprint. Ideally, we'd like to really move away from plastics in the next five years, find new ways of delivering beauty products without all that packaging. It kills me that as an industry we produce 120 billion pieces of plastic every year. And again, with the human population growing, that's going to only grow. But I think the calculations need to be done. So I think you've just motivated me to spend part of my summer even just looking at one ingredient. Again, from an energy perspective, the reason we focused on packaging is it probably is a much bigger contributor. If you look at like a 50 milliliter product, or let's take 100 milliliter product, 60% of that's water. So the water's the water. Ideally, you want the water to be sourced close to your manufacturing site or for the manufacturing site to produce the water. Some of our manufacturing sites actually have springs, water springs right next to them. And then you have that leaves you with 40 milliliters of things versus a package. And if you look at kind of the overall energetics of that package, the packaging is more, two to three times more than the actual ingredients. Unless you're transporting those ingredients from vast distances, which some of us do. Right. Like they come from India, they come from Africa, they come from Asia, and we manufacture in Europe or North America. So I think that would be a very interesting calculation. And I think you've Just challenged me to do it.

Well, I look forward to reading it because I'm sure that would make quite a splash. And I attend a lot of trade shows. I mean, we're now starting to do more things in person again, which is nice thanks to those vaccines in part. And I'm seeing a lot of people talk about biotech there. So it obviously is the next big thing in beauty. And it's a good thing because as you say, you know, much reduced footprint. Would you say, in summary, that biotechnology is more sustainable than those conventionally harvested ingredients then?

Oh, I think we know that already. I think somebody just needs to put it on paper and finish the calculation. But if you look at the amount of human labor, if you look at the amount of water, the efficiency of the growth of the plant, if you look at, for example, a typical plant, we use probably maybe 10% of it, 10% of the plant matter, and the rest of the plant matter is thrown away and then decomposes and goes back to contributing carbon dioxide and methane and other gases, other climate gases. So I think already from just the utilization of the plant itself, not including then the maceration, the oil, the extraction process, you know, whether that's CO2 extraction or maceration, you know that CO2 extraction is not cheap energetically either, from an electricity perspective. And so, yeah, I think if you already look at it just overall, like. Like we're doing kind of on a piece of paper, back of the envelope, if you're throwing away 90% of the plant or even the extract, you know, you get out of it, you're still throwing whatever you're extracting from away. So it's probably more like you're throwing away 95% of the plant rather than just growing the cells you use, where you're throwing nothing away. I think already there we kind of get a perspective of the wastefulness of this organic approach. And then from the energy perspective, you have to harvest the plant, you have to take it over to the facility where you're extracting it. Those are not necessarily located in the same place. So now you have the truck fee, right? You have the petroleum that's used by the truck. You have all the people who have to unload it, offload it. You usually can't process the plant right away. So it has to be stored. Sometimes it has to be under environmentally controlled conditions. It has to be cleaned. You have to make sure you don't have bugs or parasites on it. So. And you start thinking about it. Whereas in biotechnology, you take. You have a master's cell bank, which is, you know, a little vial of your cells that's stored in a very low temperature fridge. Okay, so the fridge takes energy, but it's not a big fridge. You basically thaw it, you put it in the bioreactor and you add your medium, you stir it, and about two weeks later, two to three weeks later, from this little mixer, you know, Maybe it's a 200 liter mixer, tops. You have a concentration of cells that is probably like, I don't know, 10, 20 football fields. Again, I'd have to do the exact calculation. Basically, I think, for example, if you take the country of Ireland, I'm going to do this calculation and you look at, for example, the amount of calendula they produce. It would be fascinating to see. I bet you could manufacture the same amount of active in a room that's 100 by 100ft.

Wow, that's insane.

So let me put it like that. Yeah, yeah. But I think, I think you're right. We need to do the calculation because that is a really, that would be a really interesting presentation, I think, for everybody to hear and to just tabulate it. This is something that, you know, I'll talk to. We work with a carbon footprint society, so I'm going to talk to them about it. They would be a great partner. We work with them in the UK to do that with us.

That will make a huge splash throughout the industry, no doubt. And I can't wait to watch you further take the industry by storm with biotech. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Barb. If people want to learn more about you and about your business, where should they go?

We have a website, www.codexbeauty.com and we're going to start publishing more and more. We've been doing a lot of writing and by September we should have all kinds of white papers and descriptions of various things explaining things, including defining what biotechnology is and why it's sustainable. And we look forward to visitors.

Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking to.

You today and thank you again for the opportunity to be on your podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. How do you feel about biotechnology and your formulations now that you've heard this? Excited, apprehensive, inspired. I would love to hear your thoughts. So please do come and leave us a comment on our social channels as both the Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you. Thank you for joining Barb and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I really hope you enjoyed it. It. If you did, please do leave us a five star review so that other people can enjoy these conversations too. Make sure you subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is, and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Visit our website at formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course Today there.