EP213. Exploring regenerative beauty with LUSH

Imagine a beauty industry that wants to leave the world a better place. And imagine if all the big cosmetics corporations in the world genuinely had that as their overarching philosophy and mission, leaving the world a better place. How different would our world look? How different would the very concept of beauty be? How different would our formulations look and feel? How different would our waist problem be? How different would we look? It's a world that I can sort of imagine in a utopian textbook, but let's face it, it's pretty far removed from reality. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be the world that we aim for, though. And today on the podcast, I'm joined by someone who is constantly campaigning to achieve that very world, supported by a beauty brand that is fully signed up to that world change. It's a brand you've very likely heard of before, and I'm thrilled to tell you that today I'm joined by Ruth Andrade, Earth Care Strategy Lead at lush. You need to hear this interview because it will show you what's possible when your vision and your mission drive everything you do. So make sure you plug in and tune out the world for a little while and listen to this whole episode because I promise you, you'll feel super inspired by the end of it. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make or sell your green beauty formulations. In my weekly episodes, I explore the sustain ability of the beauty industry and encourage you to join me in changing the industry for the better. 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 tens of thousands of students in over 190 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'm joined by Ruth Andrade, Earth Care Strategy Lead at lush. Born in the bioregion of the Brazilian Atlantic moist forests, Ruth grew up in a concrete jungle, witnessing firsthand the destruction of the natural environment. This prompted an early interest in environmental issues for her, nurturing a deep love for the rainforest and fueling great passion for driving change. Ruth considers herself a systems activist, identifying key nodal interventions in systems to support the transition to regenerative cultures she has been co creating Lush's environmental strategy since 2004 and supports the business to leave the world Lusher than we found it. Ruth has a Master's in Advanced Environmental and Energy Studies. She's also a trustee and the co founder of realiance, a collective of practitioners bringing regenerative design to the humanitarian and development sectors. And she's also a co creator of Regenerosity, an initiative with a mission to flow resources to grassroots regenerative projects. And you will of course be familiar with Lush, a beauty company with a campaigning heart, which since its establishment in 1995, has been driven by innovation and its ethics. Today, Lush operates in 52 countries around the world with over 850 shops, 38 websites, shipping worldwide and a global network of native apps, broadcasting channels, digital communities in over 30 languages. Hi, Ruth, how are you doing today?

Hi, I'm good. I'm actually feeling really inspired today.

Oh, well, that's good. I love that. That's a great start to the podcast. Well, let's get in. Let's get stuck into introductions first. Can you please tell me a little bit about yourself and introduce what you do and tell me about your role at Lush and everything. Let's get started with that.

Yeah. So I'm. My name is Ruth Andrade and I'm originally from Brazil, but I've been living in Europe for a long time, on and off, and working for Lush now for nearly 20 years, also on and off. So sometimes I leave, go do something else, start something else. And then I ended up coming back as this is, you know, what I call my place of power. And I started at lush back in 2004 actually as a sales assistant back in the day where, you know, anyone in the business that had an interest in environmental issues was thrown into an environmental position. So I quickly became Lush's first environment officer, starting a little bit of that work in 2005 and then really taking it on full time in 2007. And then since then I've been involved with, I've seen my role really there to like inspire, activate and develop people and the business, to think more, say more regeneratively, or as we say, like to leave the world Lusher than we found it. And then how do we embed that throughout the business? So it's not just like a silo team sitting on the side, but it's really deeply embedded in the organization. And I think my role has evolved. I also worked a little bit with the philanthropic part of Lush and I think now my role is evolving again. Into working, also working more closely with brands and working more closely with developing leadership.

Amazing. What an incredible track record and how lovely that you keep coming back to them over and over. Let's talk a little bit about regeneration. You said leaving the world lusher than you found it. What does regeneration actually mean? That is a huge topic. I know, but we got to frame it a little bit before we go into a bit more detail.

Yeah. It's also very hard to have a. I think a concise definition or even an agreed definition of regeneration. And you're going to see a million definitions just by Googling what is regeneration. I think from where I come from and the people I have studied with and the books that I've read, it's always increasing capacity and evolving capacity to create more life, to create more diversity, more complexity, and to make sure that we are a resilient planet, that life is resilient on this planet because we help to create ecological capacity, the planet can sustain more complex and diverse life. And this evolving capacity for systems to really express their essence can then be interpreted into organizations, into people, into education, into how we think about health, into how we think about agriculture. But it's always this idea of, how do I create a space where life can really show up in its entirety, in its wonder, in its glorious complexity that has evolved in the last 3.8 billion years? So for an organization, I can't say LUSH is a regenerative organization, but we would like to make sure, if you ask the question, is the world better because LUSH exists? That the answer would be yes. Is nature better because LUSH exists? That we could say yes. I think we're still a little bit far from being able to say that, but that's the goal. It's make ourselves relevant to evolution, basically.

I think all organizations are still a little way off that. What got LUSH to the stage that you decided you wanted that as your ultimate objective? How did you get to that thought process?

Lush was founded by environmental activists. So Mark and Mo Constantine, who are, you know, one of the founders of a group of founders of lush. They were really involved in road activism in the uk. There's this, you know, a history of a lot of, like, modern social activism came from that movement. They are also very keen bird watchers, so spend a lot of time in nature, like, really a lot of time. Also seeing the decline in bird populations in the UK and the effects of farming and pesticides and all of that. So I think having that ethos from the beginning of LUSH really helped. And then we evolved the thinking. And I think we evolved the thinking by getting closer to the issue. So campaigning and bringing campaigners to talk about it, doing a lot of charitable giving, but also in a lot of dialogue with the grassroots groups and the movements that we were connected to by engaging with people that were already practicing permaculture or agroecology in the supply chain and really learning what they were doing from them and being inspired by them. So I think that kind of bottom up or grassroots education really helped us evolve this thinking.

Yes. Yeah. So in relation to beauty, is regeneration then mainly around farming, around the supply chain, agriculture, or is it a bigger picture than that?

Yeah. Today I was putting a comment into one of our internal chat groups about the concept of beauty. We can approach beauty in the way that's being approached now, by having an untenable definition of what beauty should be like and what people should look like that social media is just helping to reinforce. And then all cosmetics companies are trying to create products and services to keep reinforcing that sense of beauty. Despite all the work with body positivity, still, you know, you need to have flawless skin and you need to have amazing hair and all of that. And I was thinking, what does it look like to have a brand that is evolving people's capacity to feel beautiful? Because that's completely different is how do we then work with, you know, maybe people need to sleep more and drink water and look at their mental health and use bathing as a mental health strategy. And we have like a meditation app for the bath. Right. So how do we really keep and making sure that people identify and recognize themselves through the images that are on our websites, that we're promoting body positivity, that none of our creams say that it's an anti wrinkle cream. You know, that we move beyond like an ageism that is embedded in our culture. And I think for me this is like a regenerative way of looking at beauty is how do we really grow people capacity to feel beautiful from the inside out rather than by doing a ten step. Yeah. Skincare routine every morning.

Yeah, I totally get it. And actually this is music to my ears. I've recorded so many podcast episodes on this very topic. So I love that you've just said that. So talk to me a little bit more about the issues that Lush comes up against where regeneration comes into the actual creation of the products. I mean, obviously I totally hear what you're saying about the overarching philosophy. What about the supply chain?

To be honest, this is where we've putting most of the work in what could be termed regeneration. And again, I'm going to repeat a million times, we're so far from being a regeneration business, but in the supply chain we've been working with agriculture and permaculture and regenerative agriculture, biodiversity friendly agriculture, since 2009. So lots of learnings and lots of practical applications of some of those concepts. There are a few strategies that we have implemented that I think have been really successful. One is to really look at soil health and agriculture and how are we buying ingredients that are supporting increasing soil health and water retention, but also doing that in partnership with communities. There is another track of work that I think is so important, which is how are we buying purchasing ingredients in ways that support biodiversity? And it's either because we're doing them in partnership with conservation organizations or we're working with, for example, the so called non timber forest products, which, you know, the cosmetics industry is really primed to make use of those ingredients. And this really supports a standing forest. You know, it's the difference between eating beef or eating Brazil nuts. The Brazil nut tree would only be alive as long as it's surrounded by forests. So if you cut down the forest and they leave the Brazil nut trees, in a few years or a decade, that tree will die because you don't have the supportive ecosystem. So how are we supporting products, non timber forest products that are supporting forest communities to continue to preserve the forest or communities living around the forest? Another strategy that is super important is how are we supporting communities on the buffer zones or on the edges of really important habitats? Find livelihoods, meaningful livelihoods in ways that don't encroach on the forest or that involve poaching or deforestation or degradation of the forest. And I think we have like tons of examples of all of those three strategies. Yeah, I'm happy to give you loads of examples.

I would love to hear more. I mean, it sounds like a huge undertaking for an organization such as Lush. I mean, you've got stores all over the world. I've been buying from Lush for years. And how, how on earth do you even start with that? The supply chain must be vast. So yeah, I'd love to hear some examples.

We have over a thousand suppliers and. Yeah, wow. And I think Lush has done something really interesting as well. Like we've decentralized manufacturing. So we have manufacturing in six countries, in Canada, in the uk, in Germany, in Japan, Croatia and Australia. And that means that the big consumer markets have their own manufacturing plan. So the Products arrive fresh in the stores and. And then you have the comple. Complexities of each manufacturing site having slightly different supply chains because we're also trying to buy local. So North America has more North American suppliers, in the UK we have more European suppliers, and then there's all the global supply chain. So I think. I think the way we started, which is also that has evolved, is by finding groups that already had network of farmers. So let's say there was a permaculture center in Ghana, for example, the Ghana Permaculture Institute. And we work with them on Moringa oil and they could activate a network network of farmers that they had already trained that could provide Moringa oil. That was like 2010, you know, that was a long time ago. We have direct partnership with indigenous communities. We also developed a really interesting strategy. We use a lot of salt. So for the hair as like volumizing for the hair as a scrub for the skin, sometimes to give texture to the product. And salt pens are amazing bird havens, right? So lots of. If you go to an organization like BirdLife International, there is a mosaic of lots of little small conservation organizations. They had lots of salt pens involved in bird conservation. So all of our salt in the UK and in the US and I think now globally comes from salt pens involved in bird conservation. So it's like identifying those opportunities where you're getting raw material. But there are also other gains for nature by that kind of transactional relationship that there is more to it that also supports the more than human. I think we did a special focus on wildlife and biodiversity, and we have many ingredients that in one way or another are supporting the moon bear in Japan through our honey. Or we have another beautiful honey source that we. And this is the reason why we haven't become vegan. It's like the honey sources are supporting so much impressive work. We use a honey from Zambia where they're training old poachers to become beekeepers. And then we buy, you know, the honey. We have another honey from Ethiopia, forest honey from Ethiopia in the traditional ways, up the trees with the beehives. Up the trees that is still, you know, traditionally collected. We have things like tonka beans that we used to make tonka absolutes that we're buying directly from indigenous communities in Venezuela and in Brazil. And again, it's livelihoods for them to continue to support the forest. So, yeah, I think the cosmetics industry even, even better place than the food industry to really build on those partnerships because the end product can be a little bit more expensive. And we can use materials that wouldn't necessarily be used for food, even though, you know, honey and salt can be used for food as well.

Yeah, absolutely incredible. I love, I love the intricacy. It must have taken years to develop those relationships. Are you seeing that the rest of the beauty industry is starting to follow Lush's lead in this? Is this inspir other elements of the beauty industry?

Yeah, and I think before, as the body shop was already doing this. You know, it's really sad what has happened now, but they, they also paved way for community trade. Natura from Brazil has also been doing that for a very long time. And now I think what we're seeing is more suppliers that are being set up with that precise aim, like forest wines, for example, from Indonesia. And they are, I think they are making this a little bit easier for brands and also cosmetic manufacturers to tap into those ingredients, because now you have those intermediaries that are. So you don't have any more to go and develop those direct community relationships. There is enough of, like a fair trade movement of suppliers that are making that more available. You know, I'm part of quite a few of these organizations like the Amazon Investors Coalition, that are really trying to support businesses coming out of the Amazon as a way to support the 25 million people that live in the Amazon, in the Brazilian Amazon. So, you know, the forests are not devolved like the wild is not devolved of communities and people surrounding insights. So these trade partnerships are very important. And I keep telling them, like the Amazon Investors Coalition. I think the trick here, and I can see that difficulty at Lush, is sometimes we cannot even pronounce the name of the ingredients, let alone know how to formulate with them. So I think there is a real opportunity for anyone from the industry listening to this podcast to work with product formulators in the big cosmetic manufacturers and to really educate product formulators in how do you use Patawa oil or, you know, how do you use Elipe butter? How do you really bring the essence of the forest and the essence of the wetlands and the marshes into your product? I think we're. We need to evolve that capacity as well. And I think you're involved in that right through your school.

We are, yes. And it's interesting you raised that. Actually, we recorded a podcast episode, gosh, it must be about two years ago, about rainforest ingredients, because we actually taught a mini course on it in our membership site. And when we hosted a webinar on it, there were a couple of people in the chat who were really angry really passionately angry about the fact that we were talking about rainforest ingredients because there's this vision of it's from the rainforest, therefore we must leave it entirely untouched. And I wonder if that's something that you've ever come up against actually, because there's this criticism of it's sort of holy, don't touch the rainforest. And yet everything you've been talking about suggests the opposite. Exactly.

I think there are parts of the world that really need to be left untouched, including really important pieces of forest in Congo or in the Amazon or even in the Atlantic rainforest, or even in the boreal forest in Canada and Siberia and all of that. But those forests are surrounded by people you have in the Amazon, for example, the meat that you eat or the feed of the chicken or the pork that you're eating is already coming from the forest. So it's way better to have ingredients that are really supporting trees to be standing, because you're adding value to standing trees, then the forest having more value deforested because then you're putting cows and the Amazon. Imagine a hectare of primary forest in the Amazon, like the number of species and diversity and intelligence of life in that piece of land. And you are taking all of that and putting less than two cows, two heads of cow, two heads of cattle per hectare of Amazon rainforest. So of course it's better to find partnerships that you are taking products in a very gentle and non extractive and non invas way to also go back to Brazil, like the forest peoples really fought in the 80s to have extractive conservation areas. So specific conservation areas where they can do the extraction. So they cannot do it everywhere, but in certain areas they can. Rubber tappers. This activism in Brazil came from the forest community. So who are we, you know, white people of the global north to like suddenly say, you know, the forest should be untouched and forest communities that are there on the buffer zones will have to find a way to make an inc.

Yes, absolutely. It's a complex topic.

Yeah, but we have that issue. I remember having those conversations at Lush as well, at the very early start of this work.

Yeah, interesting. Well, let's, let's take the topic out a little bit wider again because we're talking about regeneration. Regenerative beauty you've already hinted at. Well, you've said very openly, we're nowhere near that yet. Is there even really such a thing as regenerative beauty? Do you think it could ever even exist?

I don't know. At the moment. I think we shouldn't stop trying to. I Think our future right now depends on us not losing hope that we can actually achieve a regenerative economy. I just don't think we can achieve it with current levels of consumption. So I think part of creating a regenerative economy and then regenerative beauty would be part of it is really looking at our levels of consumption and changing a bit the culture of fast fashion, fast cosmetics and fast consumption. I don't think without this we'll ever really be able to achieve this. But we will when the economy are growing the basis of life. So when we are creating cleaner water through the way we're doing business or having more forest or better soil health. So I think it can be done. It's just hard without touching consumption.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's a conversation though that the beauty industry is very reluctant to have. Is it a conversation that you're having at Lush?

I think what I keep saying at Lush is to decouple economic prosperity from material growth and I think that's really important. So again, back to the conversation of what is beauty and how do we turn this industry into being an industry that actually cultivates beauty in general rather than it being a round product? I think at Lush we're doing that well. We're really expanding our spa network. So again we get a larger part of our income from experiences. I think also Shop Parties is a super interesting offering at Lush and very unique. You know, you can go to the shop, learn how to make a product to have like a face mask and a pamper session, get a little bit of the information about the ethics of Lush. And I think moving towards more experience based relationship will get us a little bit closer of reducing consumption. So I think every brand needs to be thinking about how do they dematerialize.

Yeah, it's a very valid point, particularly for the beauty industry. And I can see how the Lush experience is starting to play out in some of the retail stores as well. Because I know that you've changed the way some of them are set up. It feels more like an experience now that you go in there. Was that intentional? Was that part of this?

Yeah, I think we really believe the spectacle and theater is what's going to keep people showing up to the high street. You know, if not you can just, if it's just a transaction rather than a relationship, then you can buy online, come to the store. Because we say that the main goal of our sales assistant or sales colleagues are to be day makers. It's really make the day of the people that are coming to our stores and to take that very seriously about how do you make someone's day by being an oasis of kindness and offering such amazing customer service that you're getting so much value of the experience that makes it worth going to the high street. And I think we also see our role in keeping the high street fun and active and not not turning to, you know, ghost towns, which a lot of town centers are becoming. How do we remain relevant? Right. In a. In a world that is constantly rewarding more theater and spectacle and transaction.

Yeah, true. I love the thought process that's going into this behind the scenes. And thank you for sharing this. In terms of the term, this whole concept of regenerative beauty, do you think there's a risk of it being used by other organizations than that it would become subject to greenwashing at 100%?

And I also think there's some basic elements of this. If you have a very complex tax system that means that you are not even paying tax in the places where you're selling the product, you can never have a regenerative business. There are some fundamental basics of doing capitalism a little bit better that needs to come first. It's like living wage or paying your tax fairly, paying a fair supply chain. There is already like the basis and then you build on top of that. So most companies have a long way to go. I also think it's the process of understanding how you can have a positive impact through your operations. And I say these things a lot and I don't know if we really managed to do this, but imagine that we can look at the whole all business activities and we are able to say, have we evolved capacity here? Have we created more capacity? So it's the difference between having a cruelty free label or having a prize for the last 10 years that are really helping to build capacity in universities to replace animals in animal testing. Yeah, that's like a more regenerative outcome. We're really evolving the capacity of the system rather than just having a label or inventing naked products and then not renewing the patent. Right. We are again increasing the capacity of the whole industry to adopt formulas that use less packaging and less plastic. So I think that everyone is going to have their fundamental role in this ecosystem to move beauty into a regenerative space. And it's finding what's the essence of the brand that resonates with the essence of the customer. And how do you help build capacity in that area. And it may be that you will find that it's the supply chain. Others will find that it's the packaging. Others will find that it's refill and reuse and really creating that culture. Others may find that it's tapping to what we said. Beauty comes from within. So how do we really support our customers to feel beautiful without needing to. I think everyone has a role to play and we'll never have a perfect organization, but if everyone is helping shift that part of the system, I think collectively we can get a little bit closer.

Yes. Wow. Absolutely amazing. It sounds to me. I mean, nothing like this happens without it filtering from the top down. Tell me, is LUSH staffed fully by activists? Because that's how you're making it sound.

To me at the moment, kind of. I have to say, this has always been LUSH strategy. So LUSH strategies to employ the unemployable. My boss, like, I can't manage you. You're unmanageable. I have this reputation at Lush that I am unmanageable. And we have quite a few of those, really. I think it's a business full of people who question and who apply critical thinking. When I left lush and I'll share one more thing, it's two things. It's employing activists and really making sure that we're closer to the issue. We've had so many LUSH meetings where we're listening directly from the people that are being impacted by the causes that we're trying to fight for. And that kind of direct relationship goes a long way in turning everyone into an activist. And I have to say, I think Covid lost our ability to do that a little bit as a business. And we're just finding our feet again and finding what is the new way of doing activism as a brand. I think we're very much in those conversations. But I left Lush in 2012 because I thought if we really want this transformational environmental work, we need to look at governance and organizational design and making sure that the people making decisions feel closer to the consequences of that decision. A lot of the environmental issues that we have is because all the power is in glassed offices run by privileged and powerful people that have no connection to the Ogoni, the Niger Delta, the sacrifice zone for Shell, for fossil fuels. So I went deep into governance and into self organization. And how do we create an organization that is leaderful, where everyone feels ownership. And if you look at our retail team here, I'm always. The things that I hear from them make me so humble. I'm like, wow, I still have so much to learn. That's me going to do all this training on self organization and their fears. It's like this idea that everyone's voices matter and everyone opinions matter. Even if you're in a store, you should own your role and if you're a manager, you run your shop with a lot of autonomy. So that sense of again, building people's capacity to do this work, I think it just turns you into an activist because you can act like you have the space and the, and a culture that allows your best to come forth.

Yeah.

So it's not just in the environmental sense, it's also how we do retail.

I love this. I love this. Ruth, I could keep interviewing you for hours, but I have one final question. How do we turn the entire beauty industry into activists? That's a big one. How can we do this?

Wow. I don't think Lush has been particularly good at collaboration, but I think we need to be inspiring each other more. So this pre competitive collaboration where, you know, I'm part of the Sustainable Beauty Coalition connected to the British Beauty Council here in the uk and it's really cool to be with my peers, you know, discussing systemic issues of packaging, of reuse or, you know, consumption. So I think that's one strategy. I think another is to, I think invite staff and invite people working for the business that are really connected to those issues to have platform and have a voice and have what we call the intrapreneurs, you know, the really entrepreneurial spirits within the organization, letting them come forth. Rather than only the future of the business being the hands of people that are often very disconnected to what's happening on the factory floor or in the shops. And how do you do that? Bottom up. But for me, the revolution is always bottom up.

Right.

It's always what's coming from the community, from your customers, from the basis. But yeah, maybe I haven't answered your question really well. I don't know.

I think we need to inspire people more. You have certainly inspired me today and I know you have inspired all of our listeners. So where can people learn more about the work that you're doing with Lush?

Yeah, we have our website which is www.lush.com. we also have a website called weare.lush.com that has more about our policies and more of the stories and the things that we're doing. I think that's how. And also come to our stores, you know, like engage with the product, read the labels, talk to our shop staff and our colleagues in the stores and join our campaigns when we have them in the window, you know, come and Write to your MP and get involved.

I'd say I love it. We will include all of those links in the show notes. Ruth, it has been such a privilege to interview you today. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.

Bye bye. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Is regeneration a concept that you think beauty can embrace? How can the beauty industry leave the world a better place? Leave me and my team a comment on our social channels as we all love hearing from you and if you want to hear more about some of the topics we covered today, please do delve back into the podcast archives. Some great Examples include episode 169 in which I interviewed Sean Russell of the B Corp Beauty Coalition, who also made some really brilliant points around the very definition of beauty, which Ruth touched on too. Or episode 105 in which I talked with Anna Green, Education Manager here at Formula Botanica about the sustainability of rainforest ingredients, which of course we also touched on today. Or listen to episode 124 in which I set up my four rather controversial pillars of sustainable beauty, which I've since been invited to publish in many magazines around the world. World. There's a wealth of information in our old episodes and I do encourage you to go back and listen to them. Thank you for joining Ruth and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I really hope you enjoyed 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 the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanic Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Tik Tok, Twitter, LinkedIn, we're everywhere and come and give me a follow at Lorraine Dharmeier on Instagram. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today.