Emma Lewisham is Cleaning Up the Beauty Industry

Emma Lewisham is building a clean beauty brand in more ways than one. Based in her home country of New Zealand, Lewisham’s eponymous skincare line is not only formulated from 100 percent natural ingredients, but is also paving the way for sustainable skincare. Aiming to better the reduce, reuse, and recycle sequence, the brand has plans to go carbon positive, regenerating and offsetting emissions for a more environmentally friendly future. 

Like fashion, the beauty industry has a waste problem. The vials and containers that line our vanities represent an industry that produces over 100 billion units of packaging globally each year. When we’re done with these products, the containers and packaging end up in landfills, oceans, or get incinerated. Lewisham was determined that her brand would break this chain. Instead, she’s established a circular beauty model, which means that her products, like the new Illuminating Brighten Your Day Crème, are refillable or recyclable. As part of the Emma Lewisham Beauty Circle, customers can send back their used product containers, which the brand will then ensure are safely repurposed or recycled. (The Beauty Circle program is currently only available in New Zealand and Australia, but the founder has plans to expand this globally this summer).

While many other cosmetic brands will use Earth Month to tout eco-friendly initiatives or so-called green practices, Lewisham wants to avoid the tokenization of sustainability. Her brand exercises those principles every day, not just for a dedicated month or holiday. In fact, Lewisham believes that more of the beauty industry should feel this responsibility. She was surprised to see the lack of momentum towards circular beauty and says that her brand’s initiatives are always ongoing—this year, all Emma Lewisham products will be moved to refillable packaging and the brand is also on track to hit its carbon positive milestone, a first for a beauty brand. 

“When you've got your name on a bottle, you do really care. You don't have a brand or business name to hide behind,” Lewisham tells L’OFFICIEL. “It's about being circular, it's about a carbon-positive path, and it's about regeneration and transparency.”

The latter was a major factor not only for the packaging production of her brand but also the formulations. It took Lewisham three long years of research and development to launch the line. A former business executive at a global technology company, she says she has always been someone “who is curious, inquisitive, analytical, and someone who looks to prove the impossible, possible” through her work. Lewisham pivoted her career after losing her mother to cancer and facing a challenging pregnancy herself, during which she found out that a skincare product she had been using to treat hyperpigmentation contained a carcinogen banned in the UK and Europe, but not New Zealand. This set her on a path to create a completely natural yet high-performing skincare line, using only vetted ingredients that align with the Environmental Working Group’s standards of clean and safe ingredients. 

To ensure transparency in the supply chain, Lewisham says she was asking wholesalers and suppliers questions that they had never been asked before. “It wasn’t easy,” she shares. “They didn’t return my calls and it was a good year of basically harassing them to disclose the information. Now, we’re one of the few brands that know exactly where our ingredients are from, where everything is produced, where our packaging is made and who makes it, and that they’re treated fairly and with respect. We don’t turn a blind eye to that.”

Another element that was critical for Lewisham to get right was the efficacy of her products. “I don’t think it’s enough to just be good now, you have to be great,” she says. “Our point of difference is that we’re scientifically validated and we’re 100 percent natural.” Lewisham wanted to measure quantifiable factors like the collagen production in skin cells (which is indicative of anti-aging properties), so she sent her samples along with a couple from luxury skincare brands to an independent lab in New Zealand to see how they compared. The results showed increased collagen production in the skin cells sampled with her 72-Hour Collagen Boosting Night Crème that outperformed the tests done with La Mer and Augustinus Bader.