Natural Beauty Then + Now According To An Editor Who Has Seen It All

Natural beauty has come a long way. We've watched as the industry evolved from a small handful of crunchy brands and products into a full-fledged glamour-fest. Gone are the days of sacrificing style for the sake of green values.

As an editor for Vogue, W, Harper’s Bazaar and full laundry list of incredible fashion books, Christine Lennon has seen it all first-hand. We asked her to share her inside insights after decades of experience and here's what she had to say - favorite products included...

I remember writing a story about “green” beauty for Vogue about 12 years ago, and being shocked when I saw the issue. The photo that the typically faultless Vogue art department chose to illustrate my story was a model backstage at a Dior Couture show dressed as a “forest fairy,” a psychotic woodland nymph straight from a Burning Man staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It felt like it was sort of a joke to people back then, when “natural” beauty meant homemade avocado masks, henna hair dye and some hippie oils from the health food store. Natural or “green” beauty was a novelty, or for the kind of people who ground their own nut butters (not that we’re judging) and was perceived as a sacrifice.

Three things have changed since then: Our understanding that ingredients are absorbed through the skin into the bloodstream (cosmetic chemists, dermatologists and “scientists” used to flatly deny this was the case); technological advances that can create elegant, non-toxic ingredients to incorporate into products; and the shift in our culture toward the idea that healthy beauty is a luxury, not a sacrifice.

From the mid-‘90s to the early ’00s, dermatologists and “experts” would claim that none of the freshly brewed chemicals they mixed into their products penetrated the deeper layers of tissue. Skin was an impermeable “barrier,” they said, insisting that nothing we applied topically was absorbed into the blood stream. That meant nothing good, or potent enough to re-program the skin not to age so rapidly, and nothing bad, which could potentially alter the healthy chemistry and hormonal balance in our bodies (or cause cancer, for example), could get through.

Today, we know better. Some researchers estimate that the skin absorbs up to 80% of what we slather on it. It was only after I spent the better part of decade smearing every new product on the market on myself that I started to ask difficult questions, and listen to the mounting concerns about the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of chemicals women put on their skin every day. These days, there is no greater luxury than finding and using a product that works like magic, is good for you and is gentle on the planet.

I look back at those early green-beauty pioneers with such admiration. They were, and still are, thought leaders in an industry that was slow to change. Sustainable, green, good-for-you beauty is anything but a compromise, and anything but a fad. Here’s a list of my favorite natural products, the classics and the new models, from then and now. [olists num=1]

Be sure to check out Christine's debut novel, The Drifter, out February 21st!

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