We recently hosted a pre-sale for our NEW Tinted Lip Serum and as of June 10th, we are officially shipping them out to customers!
This product has taken a long time to perfect and I can't tell you how great it feels to have finished this product and launch it into the world! At first I had a deadline to get it out before May, but good work takes time and I hit a couple of roadblocks along the way.
One of the biggest road blocks I hit was trying so hard to find vegan and all natural ingredients. It was important to me to use ingredients that were safe and non-toxic because I wanted to stay true to my mission - providing you the best, high quality, safe, natural ingredients in my products. But I quickly learned that vegan and all-natural don’t always mean safe and non-toxic in the cosmetic world. For example, I really didn’t want to use beeswax in my Tinted Lip Serum but the vegan alternative was actually a bunch of chemicals mixed together in a lab. To me, while it was vegan, the chemicals used to create a vegan beeswax wasn’t safe to put in my products and on people’s skin. This not only happened with beeswax, but with other ingredients as well, like colors, collagen, and a moisturizer that didn’t make the color run.
I felt stuck after finding this out. I wanted so badly to create a product that was vegan and non-harmful but it was looking like I could either do that and falter on my mission, or stick to my mission and create a non-vegan product that was still safe and natural. In the end, I decided to use the beeswax and research other natural ingredient alternatives that could be substituted for the other ingredients.
Since I had to do a lot of research, I knew it would take time and trial and error before it was ready. So I decided to push the product launch out until late spring so I could have the time to find ingredients that fit my mission and actually work. It took a while, but I found a great company that makes amazing, natural, and non-harmful powder colors that didn’t cake when mixed with the Lip Serum (don’t ask me how many different color companies I tried and how many formulas I made, it was over 60!). Then I stumbled upon two of the best non-toxic and natural alternatives I could find!
These ingredients are a pomegranate steroid and a vegetable collagen. Pomegranate sterols are fairly new in the cosmetic world but have been around for years. Its primary function is that it can hold twice its weight in water so it is a great barrier compound to help keep colors from running while moisturizing at the same it. It’s typically used in place of animal derived lanolin (which acts a barrier on your skin to treat dry, rough patches on your skin and has recently been found to create allergies in people) and petroleum (aka Vaseline, which most of us grew up on putting it on our dry skin and burns as kids). While lanolin is natural, it is not vegan and while petroleum is not natural, it is vegan. See my dilemma? Both products that I could use did not fit my mission and it took a lot of time and research to find pomegranate sterols.
Now that I had a color provider and a barrier agent, I needed to find a non-harmful collagen. Collagen is primarily an anti-aging ingredient that conditions and moisturizes your skin. Until recently it was almost always 100% animal derived, but the growing need to find safer, vegan ingredients led to a vegetable based collagen discovery. I didn’t even know that plant based collagen was a thing until I started down this research path, and I am so happy to have found it! This allows me to offer a superior Tinted Lip Serum product (our original currently does not contain collagen but we are testing it!) and help me safely keep my customers lips younger looking and super smooth!
These are some of the road blocks I faced while trying to create and launch this product. I have to say, for a minute I thought that it was impossible to find alternative ingredients to match my mission and I truly did not think I could find a way to make a Tinted Lip Serum work. At one point I considered giving up and not launching this product. But, I knew I didn’t want to give up because that is not the kind of mindset I want to practice, so I kept pushing through, worked harder, and found the answers I was looking for. I am proud of myself for not giving up and I am proud of myself for being able to provide my customers with a great lip product.
One thing I learned during this process is that when you're in the middle of a problem, things can and often times will seem impossible; but once you find a solution and take your project to the finish line, you can't help but feel so proud, happy, and accomplished at the same time! That is how I feel launching this new product and I hope you all love it and see how an impossible became a possible!
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