LOLI Beauty empowers you to customize your own skin, body and hair products to work for you in all your uniqueness. They make it easy: choose a ready-to-use multipurpose base and then customize with mix-ins. They call the personalized approach to pure and potent beauty BIY – Blend-It-Yourself.
To find out more about this unique brand, Made Safe connected with LOLI’s founder, Tina Hedges. Read on to learn more about how LOLI is shaking up the beauty industry.
Made Safe: Why are you proud of your MADE SAFE Certification?
Tina: LOLI stands for Living Organic Loving Ingredients, and we take great care to source directly from purveyors of freshly harvested food-grade ingredients that live up to Made Safe’s standards for safety and sustainability. We are proud that when someone uses LOLI’s products they can be sure that they are beyond pure and potent – they are effective and free of known toxic ingredients.
When I learned about Made Safe’s goal to help eliminate toxins from everyday products, I knew that this was the type of independent certification that aligned with LOLI’s mission to make sure our products, ingredients, and packaging are safe for people and the environment.
Gaining the MADE SAFE certification for a breakthrough skincare and beauty oils like our Plum Elixir serum means so much to me and the LOLI team. We work hard to make sure our products are safe and made only with the best ingredients. Now with MADE SAFE certification, our customers know this for sure.
Made Safe: What got you started in the realm of safer beauty?
Tina: After I left corporate beauty, I was suffering from idiopathic allergies and adrenal fatigue, which several months later turned out to be early onset menopause in my mid-30s. I started to wonder what kinds of nasty chemicals I had been exposed to by applying 15 to 20 beauty products day after day, testing lab samples as a beauty marketer. This led me to completely detoxify my beauty routine. I went back to making my own products, taking inspiration from my Jamaican and Cuban heritage of creating a clean, kitchen-made beauty regimen with powerful food-grade ingredients. At some point I realized that the beauty industry needed to be stirred up – I could no longer stand by and allow the industry to sell diluted and polluted products to the consumer under the guise of a “natural” approach. I decided to launch LOLI Beauty as a pure, potent and personalized skin, hair and body product line that is also the world’s first zero-waste organic beauty brand.
Made Safe: Tell us more about why you launched LOLI Beauty.
Tina: With LOLI Beauty, I wanted to offer women a way to discover, shop and enjoy skin, hair and body products. We turned to the clean food movement for inspiration to remove the wasteful water, and to source fresh and lovingly cultivated superfood ingredients.
After many years working in the beauty industry, I became saddened by its lack of transparency with the consumer. Not only are most skin, hair and body products 80-95 percent chemicals, but they are then overpackaged in toxic plastic. The new wave of clean beauty brands is an admirable attempt at removing some of these nasties, but this brings its own set of safety issues since many of the founders behind these brands do not have backgrounds in formulating or sourcing. Most natural beauty brands are sourced from a select few turnkey manufacturers who source from a select few beauty ingredient suppliers that are less than transparent regarding ingredient provenance and purity. This wild west of beauty needed a pure and potent makeover, so LOLI Beauty’s mission is to stir up beauty to make a conscious change that’s equal parts ethical and effective.
Made Safe: How are your products different from other products in the space?
Tina: There are so many ways we are raising the bar on clean beauty. From our face and hair beauty oils to our miracle balms, scrubs and masks, we source all our own ingredients, verifying how they are cultivated and their purity. We upcycle ingredients from the food supply to eliminate waste, like with our Plum Elixir and Date Nut Brûlée, and our food-grade ingredients are minimally processed to maintain their potency. And our products are packaged in reusable food-grade glass and certified compostable materials.
We don’t feel the need to give the consumer a long list of what’s not in our products since we put a graph directly on the label showing the percentage of every ingredient in the formula. Even clean, green products can still contain up to 95% water or some level of synthetics or other nasty ingredients.
LOLI Beauty is also the first personal care brand to be a member of Made in a Free World, which helps identify human trafficking in our supply chain so that we can reduce the risk of using ingredients produced from forced labor. We’re completely transparent in our sourcing and committed to reducing people trafficking.
Made Safe: What’s the one thing you would never, ever do as a maker of better products?
Tina: Having worked in the beauty industry for many years, I know just how many products are watered down and contain toxic fillers and nasty chemicals – not to mention all the overpackaging in wasteful and harmful plastic.
At LOLI Beauty, we would never add water to a formula to dilute the natural, organic ingredients. When a formula has water as a main ingredient, it also requires preservatives and chemical emulsifiers to ensure safety and create delightful textures. We also would never overpackage in plastic.
Not only are women exposed to hundreds of chemicals a day through their personal care products, but the planet is threatened with water scarcity and plastic pollution in oceans and landfills.
When you stop to consider that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish, and by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be affected by water shortage, it’s mind-boggling to consider that the $560 billion beauty industry is basically selling consumers polluted water overpackaged in toxic plastic. We want to stir up how products are sourced, made, packaged and experienced, and in doing so, make a meaningful change for people and the planet.
Made Safe: What’s the one product in your line you can’t live without and why?
Tina: One of my favorite LOLI products is the Plum Elixir, an amazing miracle beauty oil for skin and hair. It’s even more powerful than either argan or marula oil. It’s food grade (made with edible ingredients) and sustainably crafted from upcycling the plum kernel. Research led us to a farm in France that’s the leading organic purveyor of the highly coveted, award-winning Ente plum. The owner of this farm was the first to press the kernel, which is usually discarded, into a food-grade oil that we discovered is more effective than other beauty oils for hair and skin.
I use this Plum Elixir serum daily on damp skin and dry hair for hydrating, rejuvenating and smoothing. It really gives a glow and is wonderful as a gloss on the lips, too.
Made Safe: What is your go-to self-care practice?
Tina: As a female founder in a beauty tech start-up, there’s a lot of pressure so it’s important to find the micro-rituals that help keep me balanced. I may not always have time for a 20-minute meditation, but I can always find time for a 5-minute meditation or angel reading. I love what I call my walking meditations, where I walk in the park before work or even walk to work; I put away my phone and repeat a mantra while I just observe my environment. Many times, the universe sends me signs while I’m on those walks – like spotting the exact message I need on someone’s T-shirt or stepping over a mantra card! It’s incredible how when you let go and ask for guidance, the universe shows up in neon lights.
Certified Products from LOLI Beauty: