Health & Beauty
CLEANING UP BEAUTY We chat with Karen MacDonald from Blomma Beauty about her cherry-picked collection of sustainable beauty brands TELL OUR READERS A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOURSELF ? Blomma Beauty is an experiential retail concept for natural, organic beauty and wellbeing. What that means is that rather than just selling online or stacking products on a shelf in a traditional way, we try to bring the products and the brands that we stock to life through events and education. Whether that’s through a workshop or a talk, an event or festival, or through our online store or the pop-ups that we host. My background has always been in buying so I’m a retailer at heart and love finding new ways for customers to access, learn about and shop organic and natural products and brands.
Department stores are only just clocking on to natural beauty now so I was left with only a few options. The guy in the health food shop down the road didn’t know about beauty and buying online created so many wasted products through trial and error. I’d read that more organic brands than ever were coming to market but I just couldn’t find them. Secondly, having seen the demise of the high street during my time as a buyer I wanted to create a concept that would bring the theatre back to the shopping experience. It’s why we team our web store with different events to bring brand stories, the founders and the products to life for people but also to shed some light on the complex world of ‘clean beauty’. My hope is that people come to us for impartial advice on
WHY DID YOU START YOUR ORGANIC ONE-STOP BEAUTY SHOP? There were a couple of factors. Firstly, I wanted to create a space where people could discover a variety of different beauty brands. When switching to a natural skincare regime, I found it so difficult to find brands that suited my skin and made a lot of mistakes along the way!
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the brands that we stock but also have fun with their beauty regimes and feel inspired. HOW DO YOU CHOOSE WHICH PRODUCTS TO STOCK? At first, I approached the brands of the products that I used in my own beauty regime and luckily; they believed in the vision and continue to support me. Now I’m lucky that we get approached directly but there’s a strict criteria, which a brand must meet in order to partner with us. Of course, they’ve got to meet the EU standards (be cruelty free, safety tested and registered with the EU cosmetic platform etc.). The product must also be natural, ideally with a good proportion of organic ingredients and have made considered packaging choices both for the product itself but also how it’s shipped to the customer. There is no point harvesting considerately from nature for your products and then
