Before Beef Tallow, There Was Sheep-Derived Lanolin. Everything To Know About The Lowkey Skincare Ingredient Adored By Margot Robbie, Ancient Egyptians – and Us

24:17Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, much like human oils, like it behaves best at human body temperature. So the best hack would be to keep it in your pocket close to you if you're wearing it out and about. Like if you're outside and it's freezing cold, keep it in your jean pocket. Don't keep it in your outside pocket. Right. But if it's gone hard, just hold it with your hand in your hands for a couple of minutes. It'll soften up with body. Basically, body temperature is its friend. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, I love this product and I agree. It's kind of like almost like a petrolatum alternative to me. And it's interesting.

24:50I want to do a story at some point on like the best oncology skincare, because I have people really close to me who are going through oncology and anybody who is going through oncology, speak to your doctor. I'm not a doctor, but I did pass on the, the one-on-one ointment, the Lano original one-on-one ointment, because I just felt like this is something I'm confident is not going to irritate. And anecdotally, I can say it has not irritated and she's been loving it. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. So there are, you know, it's, it's, there are only very few skincare ingredients that I would trust or skincare products, you know, that are going to be effective.

25:33One of the one-on-one uses that I do is I used to put Vaseline up my nose and in a pinch, I will before a flight or in the winter. and I have used Lano for that as well because the truth is when you do put Vaseline up your nose, it does smell like petroleum. People don't really talk about that, but it actually does. So this is like that alternative and you're not getting that odor as well. And it's just, you know, more natural, all of those things. Yeah. That's my favorite hack, Jill, I will say. Whenever someone says, what's your best off-label use? I'm like, when I go flying, because, you know, your mucous membrane is your body's natural barrier to absorbing germs and capturing something.

26:13And when you're flying, the air conditioning, as you would know, completely strips that away. So that's why you're more likely to get sick when you're traveling. So whenever I fly, I'm like exactly the same, Jill. I put it up my nose. Yeah, I know. It's not the sexiest thing to talk about, but it works. Do you have any other hacks for how like any off-label ways you like to use the 101 ointment, Kirsten? Every day I'm using it in a different way. I like to supercharge my creams when I'm traveling with it. So if I travel, I generally travel with just one cream that's called out everywhere creams.

26:47But sometimes if you're like a super cold or super air conditioning, it can get a bit dry. So I just add a dollop to whatever cream you have to supercharge it. It is my savior when I'm transitioning from day to night in like when you haven't actually had your pedicure done. But yeah, it's spring and you're wearing sandals for the first time. when you look at your feet, it's like, oh, they're like white, like the white skin and the cuticles. So if I'm caught like that, I'll just put some 101 all around my heels, all around my cuticles and everything that's sort of dry, goes nice and glossy and nice.

27:21And it looks like I've had a pedicure basically. And the nose hack is one of my favorites as well. Pedi-cure in a bottle. Love it. Or in a tube, I should say. yeah and the 101 ointment I'm guessing that it went through some iterations to perfect it or was it literally just the one and done like tell us about the journey to get the formula exactly right or even to Carlene's point figuring out that the tube was the best method or like what was that journey like it is we did go through a few iterations because to get the right texture you can mix a really solid lanolin with a lanolin oil like it's still pure lanolin but it's getting that sort of the right viscosity.

27:57So there was some work on the viscosity, which took a lot longer than you would expect. And also to get that, I had to be dense enough that it was like really dense, but not so dense. It didn't come out. And then I also at the same time developed, at the same time, I developed a 101 plus also a 101 SPF. And up until very close to launch, we were doing them both at the same time because I'm believer in SPF. But then at the very last minute, I pulled the SPF because I didn't like what the SPF ingredients did to the texture of the lanolin. It kind of made it much more soft, a bit yellow. I didn't make it taste good.

28:33So that was like a last minute pull from the range. And up until like literally what I'm here in New York for right now, we haven't launched an SPF bomb in North America at all. So we finally, I finally got a formulation I was happy to put SPF in only recently. It was actually really quite hard to get SPF and melanin to a format that I was happy with. Yeah. Well, we're here. You're holding it. So tell us all about it. All right. What do we have here? Sun Balm is the lip balm texture you love with the SPF that you need. So as you would know, your lips are the most delicate skin on your whole body because it's got no oil glands on your lips.

29:10And it's basically the same skin as inside your mouth. And it's very easy to not put sunscreen on your lips because you don't want the flavor or you want to put a lipstick on. But generally, it's a really great idea to have SPF on your lips most of the time, especially down at the beach. I formulated with a really, really beautiful, simple, natural lanolin base with a SPF 30, which is globally compliant, which is I wanted a global formula, which was really hard because of all the regulations, as you would know, are very different. Even in Canada, they're different. US, Europe, Australia. So this is a compliant formula for the whole world.

29:48And then the decision was about like, do I do SPF 15, 30 or 50? And I think a lot of people are trained to think 50 technically is best, but I found when I've tasted 50 lip balms or when I've tried them in my own formulas, they just taste so chemically to me that you end up not actually using it. So, and the exponential difference between 30 and 50 isn't an extra 20 % coverage. It's, you know, it's like 23%. Negligible. Yeah. It's really not worthwhile having a lip balm that tastes that bad was my decision. So I got to a point where I got the SPF 30 I was happy with, with a taste that was, you can definitely still taste the SPF.

30:30You can't get around that. SPF requires certain chemicals, but it's nice. It's beautiful. And I put a little bit of shimmer in it just to make it really pretty. And then what I love most about this, I love the feel of it, but I also love the color. It's like the golden look, but the smell for me, I love, it's just beach, it's sunscreen, it's pineapple, it's coconut oil. It's for me, it just, it smells like summer. So it was really fun kind of putting that together. And I mean, fundamentally, I just wanted to make it an SPF that you would want to use all day, not avoid using because it smelled not really bad or tasted really bad.

31:08But it also hydrates lips. SPF ingredients can be very drying as well. So the lanolin counteracts that really nicely. Curious what filter you use. Is it ever an option to use a zinc or titanium? Like I'm curious what that process was like for you. Yeah, so sometimes we use titaniums and the titanium dioxide has obviously got the white cast. So we do use that, what you classify as a mineral filter by default in some of our colors to give it opacity. But in a clear balm, you can't get around the whiteness it creates and creates a pastiness that's really ugly. So we do use an SPF system of about five different chemical filters.

31:47They've been used for decades safely across the world. So that's why I chose the system I did because it was basically generally approved to be safe in every single market. So generally approved to be the safest ingredients in the world. great. I can't wait to try that because I love just like a soft sheen versus a sparkle, but I think it's so pretty just with the lip liner. So I have it and I cannot wait to try it.

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34:08Join blvd.com slash beauty.

34:17I want to ask you though you mentioned this earlier coming from the PR side it's like you you mentioned that you knew that you loved lanolin but it had basically a PR problem it wasn't being communicated properly and I read in the dermatologist times that in 2023 lanolin was named Allergen of the Year. And I wondered, you know, were your PR crisis alarms going and how do you respond to that? Yeah, that cut me deep in my soul. No, look, I think I accepted many years ago, there's a certain teachings that the dermatological community have, and that the Lannerman is an allergen. And I, no matter how much I speak to them, I'm blue in the face and say, but it's safe for newborn babies to ingest.

35:07How do you explain that. I've literally had one of the top derms in Australia say, I don't know. I think the medical community and the derm community, they're taught different ways. And there are many things that are allergens. I mean, soy, I mean, there's so many things. Lanolin is, anyone can be allergic to anything. So in short, I don't think you're more likely to be allergic to lanolin than anyone can be allergic to anything else. And mostly it's of great benefit, not the other way around. Yeah. I mean, and you can always do a patch test, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't exist.

35:40I just don't think it's a prolific thing. And in particular with the newborn baby safety piece, it doesn't make sense to me. Mm hmm. Yeah, I agree with you. I think there's there's a lot of ingredients like natural, you know, even essential oils, I think, get a bad rap. But you can always patch test and kind of take responsibility for your own journey. Whether something's right for you or not. Right. The EU have a very, very strict law book on listing allergens. So when you look at our ingredients list in the EU, there's probably usually about four or five things you have to list as a potential allergen.

36:17Lanolin is never one of them, but what is often one of them are the fragrance components. You're much more likely to be allergic to a fragrance, whether it's natural or non-natural in a product because, you know, there's stronger, there could be essential oils, there could be many things. But that is considered far more of a scary allergen than lanolin itself. We don't have to list lanolin as an allergen. Yeah. But people who are allergic to wool, should they stay away from lanolin? Do you know? We should definitely patch test it. Yeah. So it just depends what part of the wool they're allergic to.

36:48They could be allergic. You know, if you look at wool under a microscope, it's kind of like quite spiky. So they could be allergic to the texture of it or they could be allergic to the lanolin alcohols in it, in which case, yes, they are allergic to lanolin. So definitely if they're allergic to wool, I would definitely patch test. Yeah. Yeah. And if you could please clarify, because some people may not know exactly how you're sourcing from the sheep. We're talking about sheep shearing for the lanolin. Can you just walk us through how that works and how the sheep are involved? And if people may wonder if it's safe for them, let us know.

37:22Yeah, of course. So Australia is the biggest producer of merino wool in the world. As a result, our farming practices are super controlled and there's very strict rules in place to protect animal safety. So the general wool industry in Australia lives under that umbrella. So if you go to the Australian Wool Council of Australia, you'll see there's a whole code of conduct and the space and what you're allowed to use in terms of pesticides. So there's a whole wool like animal royalty policy, which has always been in place. Australia has always been wonderful with their animals. And we have a policy that we only buy from Australia and New Zealand wool.

37:59So that kind of ensures that that conduct that they live and work under extends to the lanolin that we get. So the way it works is the farms shear the sheep, the wool goes into big bales, they go to market and the wool industry is the first user of the wool is the wool industry. And then in the process of refining that wool and putting it into your jumpers and your rugs and your curtains and your, you know, your upholstery coats, everything, everything's got wool in it. They wash it and you boil the wool and the lanolin comes out like it rises to the top as like an oil and they get skimmed off.

38:39And that's like the raw wool grease, they call it. And then the wool grease can be put to use in many ways. It can be used industrially on the bottom of boats to keep them waterproofed. It could be used to lubricate machinery or it can be purified to different levels of quality for pharmaceutical use and medical use in various ways, like the fraction technology, like a filtering technology. There's a lot of different ways that you refine lanolin to get it to this grade where it's really considered very, very pure and safe to use for skincare. Okay. And then the medical grade, like, do you, do you believe that in the cosmetic industry that most brands that are using lanolin are using medical grade or is there something we need to look for on a label using a cosmetic grade or a pharmaceutical grade okay you don't have to list it on your label either you can use whatever grade you want it doesn't but i think most companies who are using lanolin will just buy basic cosmetic grade which i think is probably perfectly fine you wouldn't want to use it as a raw material like it'd probably be the smell getting a bit stinky and a bit sticky right once you put it in the formula.

39:49I mean, it's lanolin and creme de la mer and Arden eight hour cream. It's sort of it is around. So my guess is that's what they're doing. And I think to be honest, that's probably perfectly fine for 98 % of the population. Right. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Okay. So the quality of the lanolin does matter. And then we've interviewed a lot of folks in biotechnology lately, and some of them might say that we don't actually need to extract lanolin from sheep anymore that they can actually duplicate whatever is the molecular magic that's in the lanolin in a lab and never have to touch a sheep again so where do you see the future of lanolin heading and what impact will that serve so like sheep will be touched for the wool industry no matter what unless you suddenly eliminate wool fibers from your fabric supply chain which you really shouldn't because it's biodegradable.

40:47It's far more biodegradable than a synthetic fiber. I think wool is a wonderful circular ingredient in the world. If you have wool, you will have lanolin as a byproduct. So it's always going to be there. So number one, I don't imagine why you wouldn't want to use it. It's a very beautiful circular ingredient. It's part of the supply chain. It's natural and it's biodegradable. But if you did prefer that, if you didn't like the idea of an animal product and you wanted the feel of it, I have yet to try a synthetic alternative that genuinely feels the same. From all of my reading, the complex, the structure is quite so complex, it can't be replicated.

41:22I've tried like over the years when the whole vegan thing was really big, I don't think it is anymore. But when it was really big, I did look at potentially doing a vegan 101 and I tried and I couldn't get there, man. I did try. And that's why I didn't launch it. It just wasn't there. Yeah. And when I do something that's taken so much energy to create and synthetics and God knows what, when lanolin is, it's there, it's natural, it's going to exist anyway. It's circular, it's bi-degradable. That's my own mistake. I want to ask you a bit about Australian beauty because I feel like lanolin comes to mind, of course, you know, your area of the world is known for wool and that just makes so much sense.

42:04What else is like popping? If we were to go to Australia, what else do we need to go and get there? If we went into Mecca or something like that. SPFs in general are very much having a moment. The Aussie SPFs are really good. What else do I think from the Aussie? Some really beautiful like rosehip oils and eucalyptus oil products, which have been around for generations, which are very loved. The pawpaw ointment, look, it's to me, I mean, it's a very petroleum heavy product, but it's perfectly nice and it's cheap and everyone's kind of got it. It's a nice, just easy thing to have in your cupboard.

42:37So that's a really nice one but I think probably more so I would say our SPFs yeah our sun our sunscreens are great yeah we're really you know because we've had to balance you know not only the stringent regulations we have the sun like proper yeah and we have skin cancer a lot of skin cancer so yeah it's taken very seriously yeah what's the sunscreen you've got at the beach you've got your lano lips with you know the new tropical SPF for your lips what else are you putting on? You know, last time I was in America, in LA, I bought the vacation one. Oh yeah. I love the, I love the retro advertising.

43:14So at the moment I've got the vacation one and I don't know, it's really simple and basic. I love it. It's great. Oh, NECA in Australia. It's like a Sephora. Yes. It's Aussie. NECA have their own in-house sunscreen that they've had for about 10 years

43:36Yeah. And in fact, the people who used to work on that, they're the ones that started ultraviolet. Yes. But the Mecca original one is the one that I use on my face, but probably the one I would choose to use on my face. You've worked in beauty PR. You did work in beauty PR for over 15 years and you've seen countless brands and trends. What self-care or skincare trends do you think are here to stay versus which ones do you think are just noise? I'm not a big fan of sheet masks at all. I just don't think that having a sheet on your face makes it go in any better. I think you can just put a cream on and it goes in the same way.

44:15Yeah. I think Actives are here to stay. I think really simple Actives, like the single ingredient Actives, I think they're really nice. I've always thought that with The Ordinary, I thought that was really smart. I think any ingredient that says it's anti-aging or wrinkle reducing, I think, I don't believe any of that. I believe in ingredients that kind of can slightly micro surface or like a vitamin C which resurfaces a little bit and can maybe fade dark. Like I believe that that's based on knowing legally the percentage of active ingredients you're allowed to put in a product generally isn't what does the job.

44:53So there's a lot of active ingredients I just wouldn't bother with. Yeah, but I think a vitamin C is really nice. for me, I keep it, I just can't be bothered to using, for anything to get a good effect, you have to use it religiously every day for months on end. And I just can't be bothered. So this has been my face cream for 10 years, this Lano Everywhere cream. I just believe in keeping my skin really, really hydrated. The lanoin does protect my skin. Keeping it really happy and hydrated is the best skincare I can do. That's just me, but that's my beauty philosophy is essence more. Yeah. And it's completely non-comedogenic, right?

45:28We didn't really cover that. Yeah. So we have vitamin E in all of our creams, which is an antioxidant, which should stop any creams oxidizing in your pores, which is what causes the blockages. If my son had acne, I wouldn't probably put lanolin on him if he was going through a breakout because your skin's producing a lot of its own oils already. And that's when I would probably use a CeraVe or something really simple and really like super, super, super light, like a gel or something like that. You know, lano fundamentally is for normal to dry skin, but if your skin's going through that deep acne or something like that, it's probably not the right cream for you.

46:11And so how many years of lano have you had now and where do you see the brand going next? So we, this is our 16th year. Amazing. I feel like we've lived a lifetime. You know, I'm really proud to have established what is what I now consider to be, you know, a forever brand, a brand that could live beyond me. And for us next, we are going to continue to keep our core really present, like our 101 range and keep introducing those to a whole new generation, a whole new Gen Alphas and Gen Zs and just keep recruiting from our core range. Coupled with launching really fun new products, which have the lanolin benefits and have the serious treatment nature, but people can have a bit of fun with like, have you got lip oils as well?

46:57Yes. Yeah. Yes. They're great. I mean, it took a while to formulate because I was like, does the world need another lip oil? Right. I was working with this liquid lanolin and I was mixing with the hyaluronic acid and I was coming up with this beautiful kind of cushiony, puffy, beautiful formula that would stay on for hours. So you get the benefit of something that felt lighter, but still your lips felt amazing hours later. So I love these. They're great fun. So we'll continue to do innovation and fun, limited editions and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. My vote is that we have the 101 ointment on Air Australia, at least in the business class, the little kits.

47:33Oh, yeah. I know. That would be so cute. I'd love to. We've spoken to them a few times. It's very like they, you know, wow, their price points are low for buying that stuff. but we'd like to if we can get there at some point. Yeah, that's so fun. So fun. Well, thank you so much, Kirsten. And I just want to offer a friendly reminder to our Breaking Beauty listeners that we have an exclusive promo code with Lanolips. If you want to try anything that we talked about today, you can go to lanolips.com and use code beauty at checkout for 20 % off your first purchase. Once again, that's use code beauty at lanolips.com at checkout for 20 % off your first purchase.

48:15We'll link to this offer in our show notes and on our website. Thank you, Colleen and Jill. Thank you. This was a delight. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening. You can find details on every product mentioned in today's episode, along with our exclusive promo codes on our blog at breakingbeautypodcast.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter. Every episode will be delivered directly to your inbox so you won't miss a single thing. And get social with us. Let us know what you think of the episode. You can follow us on Instagram at Breaking Beauty Podcast. And did you know we also have a private Facebook group?

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49:27Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest, in products or services referred to in this episode.