British Brand My Skin Feels Finds Beauty In Food Waste

Danielle Close has known she wanted to create a brand since working for Charlotte Tilbury as a makeup artist at 19 years old.

She was part of the founding team for Tilbury’s beauty brand and spent around four years handling its social media and marketing. “I got to see a brand from a concept to an idea and from an idea to a physical product,” she reflects. “I saw Charlotte do it and I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

Since working for Tilbury, Close has consulted for various wellness and beauty brands such as Naturisimo, 8Greens and 4.5.6 Skin. Her interest in starting her own company never waned but she knew she wanted to have a more environmentally friendly approach. “For many clients of mine, sustainability is a tick box exercise and I was like there needs to be a brand that’s showing other brands that they can be doing better and we’ve all got to be better together,” she says.

My Skin Feels launched in March with two products: My Skin Feels Clean, a cleanser priced at $37, and My Skin Feels Moisturised, a moisturizer priced at $47. The brand uses food manufacturing waste from Italy in its products. Specifically, it utilizes tomato skin from ketchup which has doses of vitamin C, breakfast oats which have soothing priorities, olive oil left over from production and orange juice waste. The ingredients are fermented to bring out the antioxidants. “Italian food waste is probably the most sustainable food waste,” Close explains. “It’s all organic and it’s not tropical fruit farming. It’s all stuff that’s grown very locally in the soil.”

She works with an Italian formulator and the products are made locally in Brighton, a seaside town located south of London. The formula is packaged in brightly colored aluminum tubes inspired by time Close spent in California. One percent of sales go toward Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, which helps fight food waste in the community.

In addition to being sustainable, Close wants My Skin Feels to be a tool for mental health. She’s dealt with anxiety for the majority of her life and often turns to beauty as a salve. “It sounds so frivolous, but washing the day off really helps to reset my mental health,” she says. “Even on the darkest days, if I could just get in a bath, it really saved me.” She wants to encourage others to do the same while simultaneously tapping into their emotions, something that, she says, English people have a particularly hard time doing.

“If we can start with how your skin feels—my skin feels clean, my skin feels dry—we’ll eventually get to how you feel,” she says. Close plans to launch more face products as well as body products down the line. She says, “As the brand grows, the mental health message gets stronger, each product gives more time in the bathroom and more time for self-care.”

My Skin Feels’s primary customers are millennial and gen X women. She’s also found that their kids and husbands are using it, too. “It’s really cool because it’s more sustainable. It means there’s one product for the household.”

Close frequents London markets to get the word out about My Skin Feels and recently hired a public relations team. The brand launched direct-to-consumer and is stocked in local boutique shops. Close hopes to ramp up mainstream wholesale partnerships in the near future. One piece of feedback she’s received from retailers is that the product range isn’t big enough, which points to a common conundrum sustainable brands often face. She says, “The whole point of the brand is that there isn’t a bigger range. It’s all about small products that are needed. It’s an interesting industry thing that we have to go through.”

Her long-term goal is to open up a brick-and-mortar shop where The Body Shop’s first store used to stand in the North Laines area of Brighton. Currently, there’s a plaque on the wall commemorating the store and the company’s original founder, Anita Roddick. Close envisions a shop downstairs and treatment room upstairs. She hopes to pick up where The Body Shop left off. “Anita Roddick’s vision is no longer, really, because of L’Oreal, and so I would love to reignite that and finish that conversation.”