Liz Earle Naturally Active Skincare blog

When fragrancing Liz Earle Naturally Active Skincare and Haircare we use an array of citrus oils, including bitter and sweet oranges, mandarin, lemon, grapefruit and bergamot. One of the most fascinating things about the genus Citrus is that almost all parts of the plants can be used to produce fragrant oils. The flowers, leaves, fruit and even twigs are distilled or expressed for their essential oils and all of them have a distinctive fragrance. I’m a particular fan of oranges, especially at Christmas, when their cheery colour, spicy scent and zing on the tongue evoke the joys of the season.

I’m an enthusiastic participant in all aspects of the Christmas season, from Christmas cakes and sugar mice to homemade ornaments and wreaths. But nothing gives me as big a kick as Christmas stockings (well, maybe the faces of teenagers hauled out of bed at 7am to open them). The fundamental foundation of every stocking is the orange stuck in the toe (in our house, we prefer oranges with loose jackets like satsumas, mandarins and clementines). The pragmatist in me says that the valuable space an orange takes up in the toe of the stocking reduces the amount of money you spend filling it. The ethnobotanist in me says that’s only part of the story, so I set out to explore the origins of the Christmas orange.

In the immortal words of Julie Andrews in the perennial Christmas favourite The Sound of Music ‘let’s start at the very beginning.’ To identify the region in which the ancestors of modern citrus fruits first grew, taxonomists (researchers who classify species) took into account the plant’s needs for water and high mean annual temperature, looking for geographic areas that met these criteria and had the ethnobotanical link that could explain documented historical distribution. Taxonomists identified the mountainous regions of southern China and northeastern India, where citrus would have evolved in the sheltered valleys and on south-facing slopes. Protected from mountain winds and watered by the warm monsoons, citrus spread by seeds and cuttings carried out of Yunnan, Assam and Burma by traders travelling through the mountain passes. The different species and varieties would have evolved not where the genus arose, but where the seeds and cuttings had been taken by traders.

On the basis of physical and chemical characteristics and genetic makeup, scientists have proposed three true species from which all other cultivated species, crosses and varieties originate: Citrus medica (citron), Citrus maxima (pomelo) and Citrus reticulata (mandarin). All loose-skinned oranges, including satsuma or clementine, are types of mandarin. The mandarin can even lay claim to both the bitter and the sweet orange. They’re a cross between the pomelo and the mandarin, showing how different varieties can be produced from the same parents, sharing some common characteristics yet being drastically different in others (just like kids). The bitter orange appeared in Europe in the 10th century, but there is no written evidence to support the introduction of the sweet orange into Europe until the 15th century.

So how did oranges end up in Christmas stockings? Some think they are a symbol of the golden balls children were given by St. Nick, others of golden coins given out by royalty.  Or maybe it’s just because they taste nice and keep the kids quiet for a while?

Oranges would have been expensive delicacies imported into Britain – an exotic, colourful, fresh fruit putting in an appearance in the dead of winter. Then, in the 17th century, the English aristocracy adopted a Dutch craze and the orange became a show of wealth and social status, with orangeries sprouting from the sides of country houses and in grand gardens.

Oranges have long been used as the base for pomanders – perfumed balls used to scent musty medieval rooms and modern linen cupboards. Sticking anything in an orange gives my husband childhood flashbacks of citrus porcupined with cocktail sticks of cheese, but it is easy to create a festive and elegant seasonal decoration with a scent that’ll infuse your home with the holiday spirit.

To create a pomander you’ll need:
1 medium or large orange or other citrus fruit
About 1 oz (25g) cloves
1 teaspoon of ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon of allspice
1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
A length of ribbon
A similar length of fabric tape
A few pins and cocktail sticks
Paper bags or tissue paper

Gently knead the orange in your hands to soften the skin. Use the fabric tape to divide the surface of the orange into four quarters, pinning it into place. Pierce the skin of the orange with the cocktail stick and press in a clove stem first. Make sure the cloves aren’t touching: holes that are too close inevitably become one and the cloves fall out. You can arrange your cloves in a pattern that partially or completely covers the orange, or just stick in as many cloves as the orange has skin surface to hold.

Mix the ground spices together and put them in a paper bag. Place the orange into the bag and gently roll it in the spices, tipping the bag to completely cover the pomander. Gently remove the orange from the bag, shaking off the excess spices and wrap in tissue paper or leave in the paper bag. Store the pomander for a few days in a dry, warm place like the airing cupboard, leaving it until the skin under the tape is dry. Once it is dry, remove the tape and replace it with a ribbon, tying it tight around the orange. Be careful not to do this last step too soon or the pomander will continue to shrink as it dries, leaving the ribbon too loose to hold it safely.

Hang your pomander wherever you want to scent the air. Mine are in the linen and hall cupboards, but come Christmas week they’ll be the centrepiece on my dining room table.

For me, as for many other gardeners, the cooling weather announces the arrival of the apple season. Botanical Shine Shampoo and Conditioners celebrate the power of not one but three varieties of apples, each with its own story. Most apples are not self-fertile: an apple tree needs the pollen of another tree to produce fruit. Take the combination of two genetic pools, add the apple’s habit of constantly displaying new characteristics, and voila you have lots and lots of variation. Most of these variations aren’t special enough to be propagated and shared, but every once in a while one deserves a name. While more than 15,000 named varieties of apples have been developed over the fruit’s centuries of cultivation, only around 100 are commercially grown. The varieties we are using in Liz Earle Naturally Active Haircare, ‘Granny Smith’, ‘Golden Delicious’ and ‘Idared’, are among the top ten varieties currently in commercial cultivation and on the shelves of your supermarket.

In 1868, an Australian grandmother (the eponymous Granny Smith after whom the variety of apple is named) in New South Wales introduced the pale-spotted, green, even fruit of a vigorous tree into cultivation. Each and every ‘Granny Smith’ tree (or any named variety) is produced by taking a cutting of the parent tree and grafting it to rootstock. This means across the globe every ‘Granny Smith’ is an identical clone of Granny’s original tree. When it came to picking a good apple, Granny clearly knew what she was doing: by 1952, ‘Granny Smith’ apples were being grown as on the other side of the globe and today it is one of the primary apple varieties of the southern hemisphere. ‘Granny Smith’ apples are firm-fleshed, making them perfect for the rigorous journey from tree to supermarket display to your packed lunch.

‘Golden Delicious’ (or ‘Mullins Yellow Seedling’ as it started life) was a chance seedling found by Mr. Mullins at the turn of the last century. He thought his yellow apple was something special and sent some fruit to the Stark brothers, famous purveyors of apples and trees. Clearly the Starks agreed: according to legend, in 1914 Paul Stark travelled 1,000 miles by train and a further 20 on horseback to purchase the tree, spending the equivalent of $100,000. To protect his investment and court publicity, Paul Stark built a two-storey alarmed wire cage around Mr. Mullins’ tree. He literally protected his investment by making it impossible to get the plant material necessary to graft a ‘Golden Delicious’ without buying it from Stark’s.

Unlike both ‘Granny Smith’ and ‘Golden Delicious’, happy accidents resulting from spontaneous crosses, the ‘Idared’ is a deliberately engineered apple. A cross between ‘Jonathan’ and ‘Wagener’ apples, the ‘Idared’ was developed and introduced by the University of Idaho in 1942. ‘Idared’ apples are oblate in shape – like a mandarin or clementine – and are red over a green or greenish-white under colour. It takes between 160 and 170 days for an ‘Idared’ to develop from blossom to ripe fruit. Once they are ripe, you can find ‘Idared’ in everything from pies and baked goods to juice blends and everything in between.

So the next time you see ‘Granny Smith’, ‘Golden Delicious’ or ‘Idared’ apples when cruising the fruit aisle, think of Granny, Mr. Mullins and Mr Stark, and the team at the University of Idaho who helped put those apples on the shelf and the shine in Botanical Shine Shampoo and Conditioners on your hair.

Before we launch a product here at Liz Earle, much detailed work goes on secretly behind-the-scenes! As I’m sure you’re aware, haircare took us 6 years to perfect – we knew finally that we’d hit on the ideal formulation when the phones were ringing off the hook with our happy testers wanting more product!

I’ve been out and about since the launch three weeks ago, hearing your first-hand experiences so thought I’d hop online to share some of these with you here….

I recently visited our John Lewis counter at Cheadle, and was literally stopped in my tracks as I headed into the store, by one of the John Lewis partners. Her striking platinum blonde hair was short and stylish, yet she explained that she was missing the shine and gloss from her naturally darker hair tone, and had been considering returning to her natural hue. However, Botanical Shine Shampoo and the Conditioner for Oily Hair then entered her life – and she showed me the shine and ‘life’ that she’d regained in her fine hair. She was so delighted that she’s going to continue life as a blonde!  I personally was thrilled to hear this and to see the results too. As a blonde myself (I have highlights to lift my dark blonde hair), before we launched haircare, I too used to wish for gloss and shine and even toyed with going darker after my daughter was born; so I couldn’t agree more that our new duo really does give your hair that life and shine.

I also bumped into a producer from the BBC at John Lewis in Oxford Street recently. As well as persuading her team to use Liz Earle skincare about 3 years ago (guys included), this lady was now passionate about spreading the good word about our haircare. Her thick, glossy dark bob was, she explained, ‘actually very thick and unruly’ and coloured, once a month. She’d found that our haircare combo had helped keep her scalp free from irritating itchiness and she’d noticed less hair in her hairbrush when brushing, suggesting that she felt her hair was getting stronger. She also praised the manageability of her hair after use – ‘it absolutely passed the combing through/tangle test’.  Her top tips for a great bathroom aroma: ‘combine the haircare in a shower with Orange Flower Botanical Body Wash and it really is an experience’.

I also jotted down some of the snippets from our recent chat room sessions, from customers who’ve been using the new range for only a few weeks, to give you a flavour from our online customers…

• ‘I used the dry one [conditioner]. I’ve been using Philip Kingsley’s Elasticiser for the last 2 years as I have really coarse thick hair and don’t think I will need to use it now. It’s brill!’
• ‘Feel that I can grade down conditioner now – my hair is in such good condition’
• ‘I didn’t think you could get shine with blonde hair – everyone is commenting!’

Finally, I have also been struck by how many of you have described your haircare experience with Botanical Shine as achieving the results of a ‘special occasion’ haircare treat, but being affordable enough to use everyday. This is wonderful praise and we are very grateful that you’ve taken the time to let us know.  Thank you for sharing your stories with me. Look forward to hearing more!

Every once in a while, a botanical ingredient comes along that grabs my attention and just won’t let go. The blue seakale we are using for its protective properties in our Botanical Shine Conditioners is one such ingredient. For a start, I’m absolutely passionate about halophytes, salt-tolerant (you could even argue salt-loving) plants that tend to cling to coastal edges. Add to that the supplier’s commitment to capturing, recognising and rewarding local knowledge about the plant (knowledge that is disappearing at an all too rapid rate), and you can guarantee my interest. Grow it sustainably using a heady blend of traditional practice and cutting edge techniques and top it off with the irresistible tidbit that blue seakale is native to the Isle of Wight, and blue seakale has a number one fan!.

On the surface, blue seakale is an unprepossessing plant for nine months of the year. Spending the winter months with its crown and roots buried under half a metre or more of shingle, the large glaucous blue leaves put in an appearance as the weather warms in spring. Seakale focuses its efforts on a few summer months of floral display, with mature plants flowering between June and August. Sprays of fragrant white blossoms are followed by globular woody seed pods perfect for seaborne voyages, although only a small fraction of the 5,000 to 10,000 seeds a single plant produces each year find a suitable spot to grow.

Once common enough to be a part of local diets wherever it grew, seakale has become a rare and protected species across Britain. Which makes what our supplier is doing in preserving local knowledge and mastering cultivation techniques that much more important. I find it impossible not to be a fan of a company committed to respecting and preserving any plant, let alone one as interesting as blue seakale. Based in Brittany, France, the team employ a number of traditional and novel methods to sustainably cultivate plantations of blue seakale. Then in June and July, leaves are harvested by hand before being extracted with equal care. Not only is the company committed to traceability and the protection of natural resources, and to creating the best, most potent extracts, but they apply the same scrutiny to respecting the traditional knowledge and intellectual property of the local people who share it with them.

We are thrilled to be using a plant that is such a symbol of island life and its unique environment. So excited, in fact, that I’ve had a host of eagle-eyed scouts reporting sightings all summer. A characteristic species of strandline and shingle beach plant communities, blue seakale is a tough plant, perfectly adapted to the nutrient-poor conditions of coastal sand and shingle where it is found in the wild. We’ve even spotted one optimistic opportunist growing on a neglected bank of shingle near our island home. Once you know what you are looking for, it’s hard to miss the deeply cut, ruffle-edged kale-like leaves. After all, leaves of up to a half a metre in length make clumps of blue seakale hard to miss.

Just think about the way that blue seakale protects itself from the ravages of the Atlantic winds and salt sea spray as you care for your hair with the Botanical Shine Conditioner, confident that its colour safe formula will leave your locks glossy and conditioned, whatever your hair type.

This is a truly momentous and long-anticipated day for us all here at Liz Earle Beauty Co. so there really should be the written equivalent of a trumpet fanfare right here and now!! For so many years we have been the proud purveyors of Liz Earle Naturally Active Skincare – and now we are adding a whole new dimension with our launch today of Naturally Active Haircare. Shampoo and conditioner have long been the most frequently requested products for us to develop. When we started our research for these more than six years ago, we asked our customers what kinds of products they would most like us to create. We had a staggering response – over 20,000 of you kindly wrote in answer to our questionnaire (many of you writing pages of detailed information as to what you would really like). From this incredible research, our team has worked tirelessly over the years to formulate a truly exceptional set of haircare products.

Creating one naturally-based shampoo for all hair types, free from sodium lauryl sulphate, laureth and olefin sulphates (all of which can irritate sensitive scalps) has been a real challenge for us, which is why it has taken so long. Mainly because the usual more naturally-derived foaming ingredients don’t perform very well as washing agents. They tend not to foam properly, can strip or fade colour-treated hair and cause static. We know this because we tested over 100 different formulations using many different kinds of ingredients. Then, our team discovered a new breakthrough ingredient which does deliver outstanding amounts of foamy lather that gently cleanses without stripping, drying or irritating hair or scalp.

We have tested our new shampoo on very many different hair types, from fine limp hair to thick coarse hair, young children’s hair, older thinning hair, fine, wiry, colour-treated, permed – you name it, we have been there and tested on it! And the most exciting news of all is that our new shampoo works wonderfully well on all hair types. Yes – just as Cleanse & Polish Hot Cloth Cleanser works for all skin types, so Botanical Shine Shampoo works well for all hair types. How fantastic is that? No more confusion when we are faced with a baffling array of different shampoos, wondering which one to choose. We have taken away all the guesswork and very carefully formulated one shampoo which delivers gentle cleansing and outstanding shine for everyone. Excitingly for me personally is the fact that our new genius shampoo doesn’t irritate my very sensitive, eczema-prone scalp and all my problems
with itching and flaking are truly a thing of the past. What a wonderful result.

In the same way that we have three Skin Repair Moisturisers for each skin type, so we have created three conditioners, depending on your hair type. Each one of our new Botanical Shine Conditioners contains key botanical ingredients to seriously condition and shine, depending on whether you have fine hair that needs light conditioning; normal hair that requires a little more nourishment, or dry / processed hair that benefits from a more deeply moisture-enriching formula. We have a conditioner to perfectly suit your individual needs and you will be amazed at how little of these silicon-free formulations you need to create the glossiest, healthiest-looking hair. Each of our three Botanical Shine Conditioners is based on natural plant oils (not silicons or mineral oils) and contains a wonderful native ingredient, found locally here on the Isle of Wight, called blue sea kale (also known as sea cabbage) which is an excellent anti-fade ingredient to keep processed hair colour-safe. Each conditioner also contains a new, unique and exciting emollient called yangu oil which comes further afield from Kenya. This unusual seed oil is hand-harvested by the local people in this developing country, who are personally benefiting from our partnership in producing this luxurious cold-pressed plant oil that delivers exceptional sheen and shine on all hair types.

If you’d like to find out more about the remarkable yangu oil, we have put together a short film from my travels. ( Just click on the film player above.) I hope you enjoy taking a little look behind the scenes on my field trips, but more importantly, our entire team, Kim and I very much hope you enjoy your first Liz Earle Naturally Active Haircare experience. Do please let us know what you think.

It’s getting on for a year since my last design blog and it has been a very busy, exciting and extremely creative 12 months here at Liz Earle!

You may remember that the last time I blogged it was about Christmas….well, I’ve a slight case of ‘deja vu’ because as I write these words I’m on a photo shoot for our 2010 Christmas gift guide…and it’s looking amazing! I can’t give the game away just yet but never fear I’ll be writing a Christmas blog very soon…as it is only about 15 weeks to the big day (scary I know!).

But I digress….the subject of my blog today is our new haircare range…how we approached the pack design, what inspired us and how we shot the haircare cover story for the autumn & winter newsletter.

The design work started well over a year ago…that was the first time I got my hands on the shampoo and three conditioners that our hard-working technical team had been working on for over six years. With this level of attention to detail in the formulations, I was determined to do the team proud when it came to the pack design.

As with all packaging design…not only does the pack need to function well, it needs to look great too and to my mind it also should convey the ‘ethos’ and promise of what’s inside it…so this is where we began. We used the products in the shower over a period of weeks in many different bottles, pumps and jars before settling on the final tube…checking that the pack was easy to use, didn’t clog up or dispense too much…even taking a prototype pack on holiday to check it survived the rigors of airport baggage handling and didn’t leak in my suitcase! Once the pack was chosen it was onto the ‘look and feel’….and the design challenge of how to represent a botanical haircare range without showing hair?

This is where brainstorm sessions are crucial to any design project…we get together as a team and bounce lots of ideas around…thinking around the problem until we hit on a number of solutions. These are then worked up to the next stage and gradually whittled down and down until we reach the final design you see on your bathroom shelf. Two images stuck in my memory from our initial design mood boards…a fantastic photograph of a girl shot from behind with her long, glossy, healthy hair literally ‘flowing’ down her back…and a strong, green, lush and striking shot of botanical leaves (pictured left) by renowned London-based photographer Gareth Sambidge. And this was where the spark of inspiration came…

The graphic illustration across the front of the haircare packs represents ‘botanical hair’ shown as a luscious green, leafy stripe…mimicking a cross section through a head of healthy hair (in fact if you look really closely you’ll see that not all the lines are dead straight some are ‘swinging’ gently as hair would do as you walk), whilst at the same time looking like a succulent leafy plant that you could run your fingers through. Then because we wanted to represent the fact that our hair shined with health after using the shampoo and conditioners…we made the packs shiny too! This is a real departure for us as our skincare packs are all matt finish…the gloss not only looks great, but also has a very practical application as it helps to differentiate haircare from a ‘touch’ point of view from our other tubes when you’re in the shower!

The packs completed and the launch date fast approaching… it was then on to designing the launch newsletter. The newsletter cover choice however was easy and neatly completes the design circle for me – we went to photographer Gareth Sambidge…whose image helped inspire us originally…and worked with him to shoot a real botanical version of our graphic botanical illustration.

Rewind…to a flaming hot day in June 2010 and a day at Gareth’s studio in a quiet London mews. Carefully choosing plants with the right leaf structure and colour mix to represent the ‘hair’ illustration, we set about cutting selected leaves…working quickly as both sweltering June heat and studio lights seemed intent on drying the leaves out! Gareth skillfully shone varying degrees of light through the leaf structure to obtain the imagery you’ll no doubt recognise from our newsletter cover…the result, I hope, is a true, real-life botanical head of beautiful hair and one that hopefully answers my original design brief of how to represent botanical haircare without showing hair.

View our autumn & winter newsletter online