Take a peek in your bathroom and count how many products you use for grooming. Now, how many of those products have ingredients that you can list off the top of your head? I honestly couldn’t think of one if you paid me.
We know so little about what we use to keep ourselves looking spiffy. Jessica Assaf, an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School, picked up on that at an earlier age. The longtime activist for safe, healthy beauty products has teamed up with some of her superstar classmates at HBS - Enke Bashllari and Katie Power - to bring consumers the most effective, luxurious skin treatments out there with a new brand called RAW Is Everything. And it’s all from nature.
When Assaf was 15, she - like most girls that age - started to play with makeup and become more interested in beauty. But it took little time for her to notice that many of the most marketed cosmetic products available were full of chemicals that did more harm than help.
“I realized through my own research that most ingredients in beauty products weren’t safe,” Assaf told me. “The FDA doesn’t require pre-market testing or approvals before products hit the shelves. So many ingredients have been linked to cancer, reproductive harm and neurotoxicity. That really scared me.”
“It’s an intimate thing to be rubbing something on skin and not knowing what’s in it,” she continued. “It became part of my identity to educate consumers about what they were using and, at the same time, promote safe alternatives.”
Since then, Assaf has been heavily involved in the cosmetics industry and activism, advocating consumer awareness about what exactly is in their favorite beauty products. She started a blog with Alexis Krauss called Beauty Lies Truth to spread the word about cosmetic safety concerns and potential alternatives, and it’s been going strong for nearly two years.
Those efforts were all well and good, but when Assaf came to Harvard Business School, she met equally as powerful female peers and that’s when the real movement started. As she put it, “When I started business school, I realized that I don’t have to spend all of my energy talking about the problem when I can help fix it.”
So Assaf teamed up with Bashllari - who has her PhD from Columbia University Medical Center and who invests in health and wellness companies - and Power - who’s a branding and marketing wizard. These women set off to do thorough research into which natural components were the most effective, safest means of treating common skin concerns that affect women. It took more than a year to examine and test different components, but they’ve pinpointed several potent oils that have been some of world’s best kept beauty secrets for centuries.
"Beauty is superficial so it’s easy to let people think that science can do it better."
This female power team launched its RAW line a matter of days ago, and it’s already packing orders. It consists of four, single-ingredient products that range in price from $45 to $55, including its Age-Defying Concentrate (rosehip oil), Facial Moisturizer (passionfruit seed oil), Antioxidant Treatment (raspberry seed oil) and Clear-Skin Treatment (tanamu oil). The products are all sustainably sourced, unrefined and cold-pressed to ensure these oils retain their integrity, safety and efficacy.
Currently, all of the products can be purchased on the startup’s site. But, soon enough, the line will be launching exclusively in luxury retailer Bluemercury’s stores throughout Boston and New York City. By that time, RAW - which has been bootstrapping since its inception - is hoping to position itself for raising a round of funding and the then-graduates will be dedicating themselves full-time to the venture.
The RAW ladies are also planning on getting out in the Boston community, staging pop-ups to start a dialog with women about their skincare, what they should be using and why they should be wary of the products pumped out by major retailers. Assaf explained that:
They scare you into thinking you have a problem that you don’t have. So much of the beauty industry focuses on short-term results, but no one thinks about long-term effects. Beauty is superficial so it’s easy to let people think that science can do it better. But there are even more effective, natural ingredients that have been used for hundreds of years. You don’t need invented ingredients. There’s a general trend of going back to the way things used to be, and I think that’s here to stay.
Image via RAW Is Everything.
