EP229. The woman on a mission to banish the word ‘parfum’

Have you ever looked at the ingredients on your cosmetics and seen that elusive word parfum or fragrance? And have you then ever wondered what that word actually means? Well, if you have, you are not alone, because this tiny little word often sits right at the end of the ingredient list, and it can hide a multitude of sins. So, the word parfum means perfume in French, but when used in cosmetic labeling, it basically represents an undisclosed mixture of scent chemicals and ingredients that can contribute to a formulation's fragrance. So do you want to know how many different ingredients could actually be listed under this one little word? Well, it's a sizeable number. According to the International Fragrance association, who maintain their own transparency list on their website, they record over 3,000 fragrance ingredients. So it's basically an incredibly long list of chemical names that won't mean anything to most of us. Now, not all of these ingredients will necessarily be used in cosmetics, but this list should give you an idea at least of how many different fragrance chemicals there actually are in the world. And despite all of the moves towards transparency and traceability in the cosmetics industry, the fragrance world has resolutely resisted any shift in this direction. They are literally shrouded by secrecy, and some suggest that they want to keep it that way because it allows them to maintain a stronghold over beauty brands and other fragrance brands. Now, one woman is trying to smash that world wide open. Ashley Posner founded State of Change Solid Perfumes and her own fragrance house called Lucent Labs in direct response to the archaic and out of touch fragrance industry. You are going to love this podcast because Ashley is on a mission to disrupt the fragrance world. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, in which I challenge the beauty industry to become more sustainable, champion, independent and green beauty, and encourage you to join me in changing the beauty industry for the better. I'm your host, Lorraine Dallnayer. 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 Ashley Posner, the CEO of Lucent Labs, the only fragrance house offering transparent, validated, safer fragrance formulations for brands who are building safer, healthier products. Ashley is also the founder of award winning solid fragrance brand State of Change. A pioneering brand offering skin loving fragrances with eco friendly plastic free packaging and a focus on 100% ingredient transparency. With a background in chemical engineering, roles in manufacturing at Estee Lauder and Ahava and time living in Grasse in France, there is no one better equipped and more passionate to build a new protocol for safety in the fragrant supply chain. Hi Ashley, how are you doing today?

I am good, how are you?

I am good. I'm really pleased you're here. I'm so interested in what we're going to talk about today. Let's get started. Could you please introduce yourself for our listeners and tell us more about your story and your businesses?

Yeah. My name is Ashley Posner. I am, I have a background in chemical engineering and I'm a huge lover of science and all things dorky. As I told you, we live deep in the fragrance space. So I am the founder of Lucent Labs and State of Change. Lucent Labs is a modern day fragrance house. And I know we'll get into this conversation, but we are a modern day fragrance house that builds the fragrance piece of the formulation for brands that want to build safer, healthier products. And I know you and I will get into the details of what that means from the technical side, but really we help brands and companies that are formulating their products fill in the fragrance piece of the formulation that is transparent and validated, safer than what exists across the market. And I also founded State of Change last year. State of Change is a skin loving, solid Fragrance brand with 100% ingredient transparency. So whether your audience knows or not, putting the word fragrance on the label can represent 300 or more ingredients that aren't disclosed and very minimally regulated. Our focus was really to provide a product that is actually good for your skin, that's safe for people with allergies. That's all of the things that people kind of fear and have concerns about fragrance and to give them a product that they can actually wear and love as well.

Amazing. Your businesses sound fascinating. I have so many questions. So let's start at the top. You already alluded to it. You talked about a fragrance house. What is a fragrance house?

So a fragrance house is the business that develops the formulation specific to the fragrance that goes into any scented products. The obvious being, you know, fine fragrances, where everybody's head goes as soon as they hear the word fragrance, they go to find fragrance. But a fragrance has actually supplies across everything from your shampoos and conditioners and your body products, your laundry detergent, anything that has a scent in it. Most of them are actually fragrance and flavor houses. So they actually go all the way into the flavor industry as well. So all your drinks, all your, you know, lip glosses and lip products, everything across both of those products.

Wow. Well, are there many fragrance houses in the world?

The industry is interesting. It is an oligopoly. There's pretty much eight very big fragrance houses globally that run a very antiquated industry. They own the market. So the interesting piece about the supply chain and fragrance and really why we started what we're doing and kind of how State of Change was born as well, was realizing that piece that I mentioned before, that fragrance falls under the loophole of trade secrets. So it is not a disclosed formula. And all of those houses, if you just think about it logically, they create a fragrance formula for a company, and they don't disclose the formula. So theoretically, that company is kind of locked to them for life if you have a successful product.

Right.

So it's a very interesting supply chain. There's not a lot of collaboration. It is what it is, and it's been like that for a really long time. Our mission is really to come from a very different mindset of really, at the end of the day, our whole ethos is transparency is greater than clean. You know, people use the word clean all the time. I'm like, it doesn't mean anything. I believe in science and validation. I said, like, open the door, pull back the curtain. If you make everything transparent, number one, you have more eyeballs on everything, and there will be more information, there'll be more collaboration, there'll be more, like, everything moves in a better direction, and it's just not what really exists. People haven't had the option for a solution like that, which is really. That was our goal, to build a solution for the tens of thousands of brands that have been born in the last 10 years who care about this word clean. And clean is now table stakes. We know that, right? Like, clean is what everybody is, hopefully, and it's the standard that people want to build to. And our theory was all of these businesses that are claiming clean still don't have transparency into that last piece of the puzzle. So we kind of looked at it as like the last frontier towards this mission of clean and we build safer, healthier products. All of our. We have a whole ingredient selection, material process. We have a validation system. It's really all the things that should exist if the curtain was open, but it isn't. In the industry. And, you know, it's really hard to change things that exist. It's a lot easier to build something new.

Absolutely. Wow. This is absolutely fascinating. So basically you're saying there were just, you know, just a handful of these fragrance and flavor houses worldwide who dictate how all of our cosmetics and perfumes and cleaning products and household items smell. So why is there no transparency around fragrance? I mean, you called it an antiquated industry. Why is it like this?

But it all comes back to the loophole of trade secrets. Right? So as a business, it's actually not in their best interest to disclose. Right. Then they would have to compete for their customers. Right. Like, if you look at it as a business owner, you're like, yeah, exactly. Like, it's not. Right. Like, oh, I can make this thing for somebody, and if they're successful, they have to come to me and I supply their product for the rest of the life cycle of that product. Right. What a great business. I mean, I want to be in that, too. It's so interesting when you look at it that way. It's kind of that piece, and then the other piece is looking at the historical formulas that exist. There's a lot of very successful products on the market. If you opened up those formulas, there are ingredients in them that people would not be happy to see are being used on their body. I think the shift towards awareness and education in the last 10 to 15 years is just didn't trickle into this piece of the industry because of the supply chain. It doesn't really benefit any. Eventually, they'll have to move in a safer direction. And I guess it comes down to. I always look at it as trust. I think, like, if you're not going to show me what's behind the curtain, that concerns me. And I'm not saying that every consumer knows what every ingredient is 100% you don't. But if somebody's not willing to show you that concerns me or show someone. So the interesting piece about the supply chain also, I think that people are really not aware is like, you want to argue, oh, you put fragrance on because it's their special formula and they don't want to share it. But in this interesting situation, most of the brands don't have visibility to their formula, which I think is where it was a real red flag for me as a brand owner and how I came to really realize how deep this problem was. I literally said to our fragrance house, how much money can I pay you for an open formula? And this is What I want it to be, right? So that I want it to be and giving all my restrictions of safety and what I want people to be comfortable with using on their body, validation for ingredients. And I was told, no, Ashley, that's not how the industry works. And that to me was my aha moment. And I said, like, in today's world, people care what goes in and on their body. Even if as a brand, I want to keep that for myself. As you know, that's part of my moat. We have this amazing signature scent. Fine. As long as there is a proof point behind the scenes that you can say, I feel so confident with this because I've looked at the ingredients, we validated it in terms of internally and, you know, or there's a third party, whatever it is. What we realized so quickly is these third party certifications and people who are trying to do that validation on the fragrance piece were not able to do it because the fragrance houses didn't want to disclose the formulas. And to me, that was. It really was a supply chain issue more than anything else. And the number one answer in my mind was open it up. So build a better model. Right? Like the. I always say to people, like that whole movement of fragrance free, when that hit, I don't know, like five, eight years ago, and everything was fragrance free. Fragrance free was a band aid. It was so that these fragrances can still make a lot of money on all the products that they have. And the products that were worried about allergies, sensitivities and all those things said, oh, well, we're just going to go fragrance free. Well, you know what? The product isn't as good, the experience is not as good.

Right.

You put on a skincare product, some of those rods don't have a great smell. Right? Like, that's why fragrance, these billion dollar businesses exist. It's for that exact reason. And I said, like, that's just. That's not a good enough answer. There should be a solution built that actually solves the problem. Don't just stick a band aid on it. And that's really what we realized, like we needed to build, which was just the ability for all these brands who do care about all this. And they talk about it, they make these big statements about the rest of their formulas, but they still have fragrance that isn't disclosed and they don't have visibility into it. And they don't write like, it's just. It was a big concern for me.

Yeah, I totally get it. Well, let's talk a little bit about how fragrance shows up on the ingredients list. Because we've all looked at ingredients lists on our cosmetic jars and bottles and we've all seen the word fragrance or parfum. What does that actually mean? I mean, you alluded to this earlier. You said 300 different types of ingredients can be hidden under that word. Like what kind of.

It's really like a fun equation, right? So it can be naturals, it can be synthetics. At the end of the day, the reason that word is so feared is because on the. If you think of it from a legal standpoint, fragrance equals anything else that you put in that is a fragrance ingredient. If some other ingredient that you don't want to list lands in your formula and for some reason someone tested it, technically, it becomes a catch, all right? And that's why people that are really aware of this problem try to avoid that word. And what happened in the industry, which I think is a cause of a lot of miseducation. So there's the natural versus synthetic conversation, which is a different conversation, but in the fragrance space, the answer to writing out all your ingredients was to say, I want an all natural fragrance formula. What people who aren't deep within the space don't realize is like 30%, it's more than 30% now of the US population has sensitivities and allergies. Naturals are pretty much just filled with allergens. Right? We all know, we watch with the eu. The EU regulations are changing all of the MOCA regulations. It doesn't match up. Right. And so it goes to the same thing. Because putting fragrance on are usually a blend of naturals and synthetics. And I think synthetic ingredients got a really bad rap over those years because of that said, oh well, if we want to, if we don't want to put the word fragrance on, we'll put essential oils on. That doesn't mean it's fragrance free. Right. There's just all of this nuance and a lack of education at the end of the day. And I think part of that is the same thing. It's because of the supply chain and the way it exists. And there aren't a lot of people coming in with this different mission for change to better the formulations. What we worked really hard on doing is being a part of the education and saying, if you think that your customer wants natural formulation and that's what you want us to build for you, great. If you think that by opening up the curtain and there are safe synthetic ingredients that exist that are often much more sustainable if you want to get into that conversation, than a natural product, right? There are biotech ingredients, There are so many. Science is amazing. And there are so much innovation that has happened in the last 20 years, but, like, substantially in the last eight to 10 years. And we shouldn't be like shaming science, right, just because of this loophole. And so our whole theory is we often poke at a lot of the brands that come to us and say we want our fragrance to be natural. And I always say, why? And I'm not saying that it's bad, I'm just saying why. Right? Answer the question why? And then build something that's appropriate to your consumer. Because all of the brands that we have, a lot of brands, and it's come up a lot in the last year that care about sensitive skin irritation, sensitivity, all of that for people, everything with the microbiome, all of these things have come up as a very big topic, probably because we're all using too many products on our skin that aren't good for us.

Possibly, yes, maybe.

But it's a very hot topic and it's very, very relevant in fragrance. So when people come and they say, but we want our formula to be safer, so we want it to be natural, I was like, natural does not equal safe. That's not how it works. And that is part of the challenge and the miseducation that's existed. So we spend a lot of time saying, we'll build you a formula that will be a blend of both. You can use great natural ingredients, you can use some safe synthetics. We will target exactly what it is that you're trying to achieve from a sensorial experience. But we're going to give you visibility as a brand. It's just so in line with what I'm going to call, like, indie brands and brands today care about, which is like, ownership of the things that are theirs. If you want to build a signature scent, you want to own that scent. I think a lot of these brands don't even realize you don't own it when these big fragrance houses build it. Right. You don't have visibility.

Well, let's talk about this a little bit, because I can imagine you've come to this realization that you can't get insight into the fragrance that you're having developed. You feel incredibly frustrated about it. And in response to that, you obviously went out and set up your own lab to basically go, industry. I'm going to cater for you. What's been the response to that since you set up your company? Lucent Labs. I mean, not just the response from the brands who are obviously coming to you, but also the response from the mainstream industry. How have they received Lucent Labs?

So it's been really interesting because how we approached it was I built Lucent Labs after launching State of Change into the market. And the response that State of Change got, immediately we won an Allure Best of Beauty award. We had all of these people talking about, oh, you can have, you're listing out all the ingredients on the website and they're clickable and people can see what it is like as if that was like the craziest thing to ever happen. It was not less than. It was probably four to six weeks after we launched that the interest and the response was so obvious that this was way beyond one brand that that's when we actually paused and pulled out and said, oh, we need to like really think much bigger on how to achie the mission of shifting this industry, which was the goal of Lucent. So the response has been very interesting because people within the fragrance industry who have been in it for a long time, obviously it appears that this isn't in their best interest. Right. Like, they're not used to it. We were at a few trade shows, we got some. I go through and just kind of walk them and ask questions. And I am Canadian. I am not aggressive. That's not my Persona. It's amazing that people, the answers were still just like so old school, you know, like, of course we don't share the formula. And I was like, okay, great. Even with the brands even signed under an NDA that like all the obvious ways that you should be able to share information. And so many of these houses just had such archaic responses. And that's when we realized for us, like, okay, you're building something for. We'll call them modern brands. For anybody who's trying to put out products now, they care about these things. Most of them didn't have a solution. So the people that. The demand we're seeing is insane. And it's, you know, indie brands that haven't launched who actually care about this topic. And they've been researching but they couldn't find a solution. And that is the obvious. I always think what's even more interesting is the we'll say like referral word of that people pass us on because there aren't a lot of people in this space and there aren't a lot of solutions. And often the industry is small ish. And when people have a good experience, they pass on the name what we have seen in that respect is just alarming. Almost like it's been so fast, so big, and from brands that are in, like, every Sephora door, every Target door, right? Like, these are not tiny brands who are saying, okay, well, could we reformulate this scent? Could we, when we launch again, make it transparent, Stick all the ingredients on the il on the back of the label? Can we make bigger, bolder statements about our fragrance? Because I think that's where the shift is going. It's talking about allergens and sensitivities, but it's also being able to make statements. You know, there's so many sub sections that deal with fragrance and have a fear of fragrance, whether it's, you know, that there are endocrine disruptors or carcinogens. Right. Allergies. There's so many different subsets. So why not build with the intention of the brand and who their consumer is?

A question I have is, so many of these brands obviously have their own formulators or chemists in house. Often they're founders of formulators. I mean, we've trained up, you know, tens of thousands of them. Why aren't they making their own fragrance blends? What's the thing stopping so many brands from doing this and then going out into the world and asking someone else to do it?

I think that it's really interesting. I always feel a little bit bad saying this, but fragrance is like its own subset. Because my background is also in chemistry, right? So I'm the first person to be like, but I could do it, right? Like, you're like, I'm just gonna mix some things together and it's right. It's just percentages, the nuance of a nose. And scent is so much more complicated than, like, formulation for, like, products. Product formulation. And I know this because I've been in it for the last 13 years, and I can see it. I think what happens. And we get so many of these. We get people who are like, my chemist said that they could. And then. So the chemists either have a bunch of stock fragrances that also aren't disclosed, and they have no visibility into those formulas on their shelf. But the chemist is like, I'm going to make this really easy for the client. I'm going to give them three options off here, and they give them three options and they put them in and they're like, it's okay, or whatever, and that's fine. Maybe there's one that they like. Maybe they run into a compatibility issue, and there's no visibility into anything. In it. So it's. So we're dealing with reworking products for people trying to build a similar fragrance. Because when you try to reverse engineer something, but you have no visibility into one piece, makes it really, really challenging to solve the problem. For people that like problems, it can be fun. You know, like, we still take on those projects, say to them, like, we will do the best we can do, but we have this, like, black hole over here. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna remove the black hole. We're gonna build you something that you are equally as happy with, but it won't be a black hole anymore. So as we have problems, and if you see the fragrance turn, etcetera, we'll be able to figure out what it is. So we have a lot of brands who kind of did that. And, you know, if you formulate yourself, number one, I would actually say, go try it.

Right.

Most of the time you're gonna try it with essential oils. That's just. That's what's available, Right. That's the other piece. So I think that that's a subsect, and if that fits your needs, try it. Right. Like, 100%. We get a lot of brands that come after they've tried it because they spent so much time and energy and often money building a formula for a product that they're so proud of, and they want the sensorial experience to match that product. And it's not. And it's not their fault. It's because this is a whole other specialized area that is beyond just product formulation.

Yeah, I totally get it. I mean, we see it a lot with the formulators that we teach as well. We do teach how to blend beautiful fragrances together. But what a lot of formulators end up sometimes doing is working with single notes, which can be lovely, depending on which single note you're using, of course. But yes, it is a skill in itself, of course.

And it's personal preference. Right. And a lot of who we get, I always say, like, we're not for everybody. I was just saying to somebody yesterday, like, if. If you. The brands that we are successful for are brands and companies that need help, and they either they've gone through this process and they've realized, like, it's not matching the same level. Right. They've. They've really made a beautiful product, and the scent is not matching. And single notes and essential oils are great if they fit the need that you have. If you are looking for something, I don't want to say that's more exceptional, but it's more sophisticated depending on what it is that you're trying to achieve. That's where I think what we do really well is 100% of our client base are people that care about ingredients. So they make distinctive choices. They answer the question why? And they say, I care about. And we have our own internal selection tool of ingredients that's based on retailers. So, like the retailer list of what, depending on what, where people want to be sold, based on government regulation and then based on third party certifications. Right. So if you know that these things are meaningful to you at the beginning, we have, how we intake information is way too much at the beginning. And the intention is if you build something that meets all of those standards from the beginning, you will not have to reformulate it. Right. That is the goal. The goal is efficiency. Right. It's cost savings down the road. We watch a lot of brands going into, going from the US to the EU and having to reformulate things. And if you just do it from the beginning, you don't run into that problem.

Very true. So very briefly, I mean, how do you work with a brand then? Because they come to you, you help them develop the fragrance and then you give it to them. Like, how does that all work?

Yeah. So, and these are like the interesting pieces that as we built, we realized we were doing something exceptional compared to what existed just based on, I guess, my own experience and our team and how we, how we look at things. So a fragrance house, the standard fragrance house, effectively sells you the fragrance oil. Right. That's what they do. They don't really want to be involved in anything. They're like, here's this thing. So often why a lot of the manufacturers are not happy in the world of fragrance is also because they end up running into issues with the fragrance and the product and compatibility way later than they want to. And they might be running a product. Right. Like, there's a lot of challenges that come much later than it should be. So our whole theory from the beginning was develop. We actually asked the brand. So kind of the steps of how it works is we come in, we ask too many questions right up front. So we have our own internal brief form. It asks you everything you could, we could ever possibly want to know about the scent, what you're targeting, all of those things, but also like restrictions and who it. Like what your audience. Right. Like what it is that they want. Are there concerns about whether it's natural, synthetic, whether it's standards? Where do you see yourself being sold? Down the road, all of these things come into play, and we can build something proactively to meet all of that. So that's number one. We then set up a kickoff call. We have a call, we have a perfumer that actually comes on, and we take that form and all the information you put in, and we pick at all the questions and we press back at building something that really meets what it is with the nuance and knowledge that we have in the space to build something that really meets what you're trying to achieve achievements. From there, we actually build a sensory sheet, so we give a variation with top, middle, base notes of what it is that you're going to see in that first round of samples. And we have samples in a brand's hand that are ideally, and I'd say 95% of the time are actually the scent sample is in their product. So if they have a finished formulation, we get product from them before that's unscented, and we sample directly in their formula. The reason for that, which is maybe obvious to me and you, is that not everybody is a nose and, you know, not everybody can smell fragrance and imagine what it might be like in their product. And the goal is really to minimize or eliminate friction in all of these steps. Giving it in. In the format that they're going to use. It allows people to experience it and say, oh, it's 100% this. So we've actually already seen the success in that because we've actually have not had any products that have been finalized that have gone more than two rounds of edits of variations, because people can see what it's like, they can figure it out. And then we actually. So we go through that process. Once the fragrance is confirmed, we do our own stability testing as well. And same thing. It's just our whole mission is, again, to make things easier. So we really try to plug in as a piece of the product development team. So whether that's a lab, whether that's directly with the contract manufacturer, whether it's with a brand founder, we want to be helpful. And we are fully aware that this piece of the industry has been. Is very veiled, and often the information has not been provided. And our entire backbone is based on transparency. So we often, at that point, help brands build out the verbiage they want to use and how they're going to talk about their fragrance, because I think that's the last kind of piece that people want to talk about, but they don't know how to talk about. And I think we're relatively unbiased of what you use. We just want to help you solve the problem for your customers.

I love this. I mean, you found such an incredible gap in the market as well. You alluded earlier to certification schemes. I just very briefly want to touch on that because I think that's fascinating because obviously, if you're certifying a product to be natural or organ, let's say, let's choose just a generic type of certification and you don't know what's in the fragrance and you can't find out either. Like, how on earth do you then get organic certification? How does that work? Our certification schemes dealing with this.

So, so what were they doing? I mean, hopefully until they've sent people to us, they were signing three. This was like one of the other red flags. And I was like, oh, my God. And I have a family of lawyers and I still like, oh my God. 3 way NDAs. So that the fragrance house could share the formula directly with the certification, but not with the brand.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

That's insane.

The first time I heard that, I was just like. And right away I talked to someone on the science team at one of the certifications and I was like, that is wild. Never mind the fact it took decent sized brand 18 months just to get that paperwork done. In today's world, speed is extremely valuable. Right. Like how quickly you can get things done, how quickly you can get things to market is extremely valuable to people. An archaic system.

Yes.

Right. Just all goes back to trade secret. Not what you're right. It's like, it's just. It's very interesting. So, yes, that is how historically they worked on the fragrance piece and how they become certified. But I will tell you, from knowing and speaking internally to many of the quite restrictive certifications, they don't love the fragrance area.

No, I can imagine that. I mean, first of all, it takes 18 months to even sign a bit of paper. And then there's all this secrecy around it. And I'm sure the certification schemes aren't all that interested either. They just want to tick a box. Right.

Well, it's also bad for them because they want people to get through the certification.

Right.

So if you worked so hard on your product and they can't. And so that's what was happening really early on. They can't certify you just because of the fragrance piece. That is quite infuriating.

Right.

So it's actually not beneficial to the brand. It's not beneficial to the certification body. And we realized that really quickly. And we said, so here's a better solution. Like, this is a win for the brand. This is a win for consumers. Just even the mere fact of, like, opening up the curtain should make you trust a brand or a product more, because there are people who are knowledgeable who are going to look at that formula and have an opinion. And the Internet's a fun place now. That information passes really quickly, right? So I think that finally the world of science and validation is cool again. Maybe.

I hope so, yes. I mean, this is fascinating because ultimately the, the mainstream industry is. They keep saying all the right words, right? I even did a podcast recently on this transparency consortium that they put together. But really and truly, I mean, you've said a few words today that just sum it up, you know, antiquated, archaic. I mean, ultimately, they're a bunch of old dinosaurs, basically, and things dramatically need to change. So what is your big mission? You alluded to it earlier, but I want to hear it like, what are you trying achieve in the industry?

For us, it's actually phase one is transparency. So it seems so obvious that build a different solution for people that is better, that is validated, safer than what exists. Because the truth is why I said all of the brands that come to us care about these things are. I don't need to talk to brands that don't care about what ingredients are in a product. Those are not our customers. We make it transparent because we also have an entire material database on safety and we care about the safety of human health. And the goal is that you can still build a product or an allure, Best of Beauty winner fragrance that meets the exact same sophisticated standard of a beautiful fragrance. And it's validated, safe.

Well, I have no doubt that you will be completely disrupting the industry. What you're doing is fascinating, fun, amazing. I wish you all the very best with it. I'm sure you've inspired all of the listeners today. Where can they find out more about you, about Lucent Labs, and about State of Change as well?

Yeah, anybody who wants to reach out, you can email us@lucentlaboratories.com you can go in. We have a contact page. You can send in any information. We are always happy to share education, to share information to help founders on the journey. We know it's a dark space and if we can be a little bit of the light, that is why we exist. You can email me directly if you want to, if you have any specific questions. Ashley latuisateofchangeparfum.com and yeah, we're State of Change parfum on Instagram and TikTok and we State of Change talks a lot about why this is a problem. Right. And why our products should be better. Lucent Labs is really there to help everyone else achieve the same level that we were able to achieve with our own fragrance brand that focuses on all of those things and human health.

Amazing. We will include all of those links in the show notes. Ashley, you are a powerhouse. I can't wait to see what you do in the industry. I will certainly be following your story with great interest. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been lovely chatting to you.

Of course. Thank you for having me. I love sharing with people who understand the challenges in the industry.

Amazing. Thank you. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Have you ever considered what hides behind that little word parfum or fragrance on your cosmetic labels? How do you think the cosmetic industry's fragrance houses need to change? Leave us a comment on our social channels as both the Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you. And if you want to hear more about some of the topics we covered, please do delve back into the podcast archives. Some great Examples include episode 216, in which I rather sceptically take a look at a new traceability initiative in the mainstream beauty industry, or episode 75, in which I interviewed Sally Goldstone on the sustainability of essential oils, or episode 25, one of our first ever episodes in which we spoke to Karen Gilbert, who runs her online perfume school, and we talked about fragrance in natural skincare. 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 Ashley 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 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 Botanica Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter or LinkedIn or Pinterest. We're everywhere and come and give me a Follow Lorraine Darmeier on Instagram and LinkedIn, visit our website@formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today. Sam.