Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic have very good skin indeed, the type that glows from within, the kind that makes you want to have what they’re having. The comely beauty entrepreneurs, both in their early 30s, are in town to promote their two-year-old skincare brand, BYBI Beauty, at Sephora’s Fall 2019 launch, and 8days.sg is having a chat with them about clean beauty, which is essentially beauty products that eschew toxic ingredients and synthetic chemicals — basically nasties like parabens, mineral oils and sodium lauryl sulphate — and are produced using environmentally-conscious methods with ethically-sourced ingredients.

Interest in #cleanbeauty is at an all-time high, riding on the momentum of the #cleaneating and #cleanliving movement, and Elsie and Dominika, who are based in London, acknowledge that they’re here at a good time. It all started with a blog called Clean Beauty Insiders, where the former ad agency colleagues shared clean beauty recipes and tips. It became so popular, the duo launched their own brand of beauty products, and the blog now has new life as a podcast (“Podcasts are massive in the UK at the moment!” says Elsie).

Here are a few things we learned from the BYBI beauty entrepreneurs (btw, BYBI stands for By Beauty Insiders) about skincare, clean beauty, the industry’s dirty secrets, and how to get their glow-from-within skin.

Throw out all your existing ‘not-clean’ beauty products and start from scratch? Not necessary, say Elsie and Dominika. “Our inspiration was to bring great natural ingredients and the idea of clean beauty to younger consumers, and make it accessible through colourful and bright packaging and an accessible price point. That was key for us. The entire range sits around 20 to 30 dollars, and we have a serum that is $61. Our hero products are our boosters, and the bestseller is the Bakuchiol Booster (in pic above), which is $23. We have five boosters altogether, and three of them are available in Singapore. The idea is you would own most of the boosters, and drop them into existing skincare routine — into your moisturisers, serums and SPFs. That way, you kinda customise your skincare without having to reinvest and have a full arsenal of six to seven new products.”

“If you switch up to something like BYBI, first and foremost, you would feel the potency of the products you were using, and you won’t need to use as much. Literally, a drop of one of these serums would go further than a whole dollop of a cream [from another brand], for example. We don’t wanna waste space in formulas with unnecessary fillers — not just fragrances but stabilisers, emulsifiers, things that pad a formula out — we’re all about potency, pure ingredients, and we see the benefits from a efficacy point of view, of using raw ingredients, of getting something that goes a long way.”

“With natural, it’s a bit of a slower but steadier transformation. Rather than with some of the hero products in more mainstream brands where it’s a quick hit — like with retinol, where you can really see the results the next day, but where it can be quite damaging to the skin when it works so quickly — our products work within the natural cycle of your skin. In two to three weeks, you get generally much healthier skin. Our products are targeted at optimising your skin health and holistically treating your skin, rather than trying to treat one condition that is the result of poor skin health. Overnight, you won’t see anything, but in two to three weeks, you will start to see healthier skin, a more glowy texture, improved strength and condition to the top layer of skin, reduction of fine lines and pores, and more balanced skin as well, if you suffer from oily skin.”

Bybi Beauty Smoothe and Soothe Scrub, $46 and Babe Balm, $35

“Our Bakuchiol Booster is a vegan and natural alternative to retinol. Bakuchiol been used in Chinese and Indian medicine for centuries, and is a plant-derived extract that essentially behaves in exactly the same way retinol does, in that it increases retinol production and skin cell turnover. It’s replenishing and rejuvenating, and great at balancing out oily skin, with none of the negative side effects of retinol, such as the peeling, sensitivity and inflammation. A lot of people struggle with retinol — they don’t know how to use it. The Bakuchiol Booster is really easy to use — just drop it into your skincare or use it neat — and it’s just absolutely flying off the shelves for us. We also have a Strawberry Booster ($23, above pic, pink bottle) that’s great as a skin softener for sensitive and dry skin. It’s just pure strawberry seed. We formulate with a 100 per cent natural ingredients, with no synthetics in anything. We put in ingredients that have the best benefits for the skin, if they smell nice that’s great. And if they don’t, you’re still gonna have great skin!”

“The beauty industry hasn’t exactly been super upfront about certain things. There is waste in beauty, a lack of sustainability, plastic pollution, and a lot of irresponsible practices. There is packaging used that is knowingly unrecyclable, that sits on the earth for ages, and non-biodegradable ingredients that go down the sink into the sea. Brands are very knowingly creating more and more waste. These are the things we take issue with. We are really conscious of our environmental footprint. We use ingredients that aren’t toxic for the environment, as well as sustainable, biodegradable recyclable materials. We minimise packaging — we don’t use a box within a box within a box.

There’s a lot of talk about sustainability in fashion but not a lot about sustainability in beauty. Beauty is just as big a polluter as fashion. That’s where we see issue with the industry and want to make positive change. Instead of using plastic labels, we print directly onto glass bottles using plant based ink. You can take apart our packaging and recycle the parts individually, and in the UK, we’ve started a recycling scheme, where you can return your bottles and we sterilise and reuse them. With our raw materials, we make sure the ingredients are sustainable and renewable, are not travelling really far to get to us, and that there are good ethics around the supplier, and the workers are being paid fairly.

Bybi Beauty Buriti Booster, $23

“The thing about clean beauty products, and we mean products that are 100 per cent natural, is its potency. Across our range, you don’t find products where the No. 1 ingredient is aqua, or water. In fact, we’ve only got a tiny bit of water in one of our water-based products and that’s rosewater, because it has benefits for the skin. If you have a look at the back of the pack of more mainstream products, you’ll find that water is the No. 1 ingredient, and it essentially means the product is diluted. Water is widely used across the beauty industry and it’s kinda why we started BYBI in the first place — we felt frustrated by the lack of good stuff in the products we were using, and the high amount of water or synthetic fillers that don’t do anything other than pad up products.”

Bybi Beauty Supercharge Serum, $61

“The definition of ‘clean’ is firstly a bit ambiguous — the way some brands use ‘clean’ is different from how we use it. Within the BYBI world, when we say clean, we mean 100 per cent natural. But another brand which may not have 100 per cent natural ingredients may still say their product is ‘clean’. I think as consumers, you have to decide what your personal definition of clean is, and what matters to you. Is it product with zero synthetics? Or are some synthetic ingredients okay when you know they benefit your skin? It’s deciding what clean means to you. The best thing you can do is teach yourself how to read an ingredients label. That’s where we started. The great thing about clean beauty is that it’s led to the rise of transparency for brands. If you’re truly clean, you should be open about your ingredients. As a brand, we have the English translation of an ingredient and also, we make our ingredients list massive, so you don’t need a magnifying glass to read it!”

Bybi Beauty Swipe Clean Oil Cleanser, $50

BYBI Beauty is available at Sephora stores and Sephora.sg.