Investing in Natural Ingredients

Joining Trend Hunter's Innovators Series of forward-thinking business leader interviews, James Fulford, Innovation Manager, Glasshouse Fragrances at Sapphire shared the Megatrend that has been most prevalent within his industry in recent months.

Naturality

The major trend that's happening in beauty is this evolution of clean beauty. So in terms of naturality, there's been clean and free-from claims and safe ingredients and that's converging with veganism, and cruelty free to animals. Another example is the movement that China did, banning testing on animals as being compulsory on cosmetic ingredients. This has been quite a big shift in the last few weeks.

That's sort of growing but it's not a new trend, as Anita Roddick spearheaded that in the 80s with The Body Shop. But then we see social purpose and social compliance coming through more with purpose-driven trends. I see more of a sense of this convergence of naturality as a holistic, all encompassing position. It's more about not wanting to do harm to self, not wanting to do harm to animals, not wanting to do harm to the environment, and not wanting to do harm to society as a whole, and these ideas are starting to converge all in one space.