Getting the ingredients

Karen Farley launched her own natural skincare range in 2006. She met up with students from Dunstan College, Blue Mountain College and Wellington High School via video conference.

In this session Karen Farley explains how she gets the ingredients for her natural skincare range from both local and overseas sources. Even the water is specially sourced.

Transcript

Dunstan High School

Where do you get your raw materials, and how do you make sure they are natural?

Karen Farley

To get a product that you want everybody to really like and to be the best product out there - I mean, from my point of view - you really want to make sure you have the best ingredients. So you go to the source of where you think you can get the best products from, really.

Where we source is from, actually, locally and around the world. We do have native New Zealand herbal extracts which are sourced from New Zealand. And it’s really good to have a local component in a natural skincare which is made here, and using the native herbs.

We have kumarahou and titoki, which are very good and soothing for skin; on chafed skin, or sensitive skin, they have a very, very soothing effect. We also use papaya leaf, which again has great healing properties for the skin. Now that is actually sourced from overseas.

So sometimes I’m going directly to specific distributors or manufacturers of products to get those things.

We look at the quality of the water, for example. If you look at the most natural water, you’d be going out up a mountain. The water would be full of oxygen, it would be very clear, it would be very pure.

We can purify water, but that doesn’t necessarily make it as energised as natural water, so I’ve actually gone to great lengths to make sure that the water we have produced for the product is purified using modern technology, but also revitalised using a very innovative European technology, which actually makes sure the water cluster size is very small.

I’m getting a bit technical here, a little bit scientific, but the cluster size of the water is very, very small. And that is good for a cosmetic range because it actually helps absorb very, very well.