[Q&A]

Pat Peterson

SupplySide: How would you gauge the interest of mainstream companies in adding natural ingredients to personal care products?

Pat Peterson: There’s an overall new awareness of the fragility of our whole ecosystem, based on awareness of global warming and similar factors. People gravitate toward natural ingredients because they see them as less impactful on the Earth. There’s also the group of people jumping on that bandwagon because it’s been successful, and they kind of want to buy into that.

Consumers want natural ingredients because they’re wonderful—very effective and pure. The danger for consumers is they might assume one natural ingredient is as good as the next. The responsibility really lies with the company to do it ethically and give the consumer want they want. It is also important to really look at sustainability issues with natural ingredients. As you can imagine, it’s really easy to just deplete something to the point where it’s gone forever.

Peterson: That’s probably what we spend most of our time on. We have people who are actually out there finding unique ingredients we can work with from a sustainability point of view. And then we bring them to Aveda and check them for all the quality parameters. With natural ingredients, one time you can get a batch of something and it has a certain pH. The next time that natural ingredient will come in and it will be a different pH, and you have to adjust your formulas. A lot of things go into dealing with natural ingredients that you just don’t get in the synthetic world.

Science is very incremental, and sometimes there’s a rush to judgment with lots of things in our media. Sometimes you find out later it was never problematic, but if we perceive consumers have a problem with it, we will move out of it, just because it’s precautionary. We owe that to our customers.

Peterson: From day one, Aveda had an absolute belief that ingredients from nature—essential oils and plant extracts—were extremely potent and had not been studied effectively for personal care products. The company’s founder saw how the medical industry adopted so many of these natural ingredients, and he wanted to take that same effectiveness into personal care.

Some of the things consumers are concerned about are preservatives, for example, because they’re usually synthetic and are very potent. So Aveda has looked for many years as to how to take things from nature. One of the biggest breakthroughs we had a couple of years ago was to look at wintergreen oil. That oil is chock full of ingredients we’ve been able to make into preservatives. For example, salicylic acid comes from an ingredient in wintergreen oil, and we’ve incorporated that into sunblocks.

Peterson: Formulating with natural ingredients is always harder, and Aveda doesn’t use synthetic ingredients, which we call quick fixes. Instead, we use ingredients from nature, and, believe me, they prefer to go back to nature, so we have to figure out how to stabilize them. Right now we’re in development for a product line to look at anti-aging. You’d be amazed what you can do with seaweed. You separate it into so many components, and some of it helps with wrinkles, some of it is anti-inflammatory. The neat thing about one plant ingredient is that it is so complex because it does all those things in nature by itself. It protects itself and so all those things get translated into plant extracts.

Peterson: Something that’s really coming on strong is a class of ingredients called phycosaccharides—very complex plant sugars. We’ve been looking at those very closely because they do amazing things. Essential oils are always a very large area. And mangosteen has been on the fringes of the nutrient world and is very interesting for all sorts of things.

In addition, we have found tiny amounts of ingredients work very effectively. If you put too much in, you’re just going to irritate the skin and charge the customer way too much. A large part of our research is keeping the minimum amount of a key ingredient.