Keeley is 19 years old and in her second year of studying Health and Skincare Therapy. She loves giving facials and seeing how happy it makes people when their skin is so radiant afterwards.

Keeley’s outlook on life is that people need to slow down and appreciate everything around them and realise what’s important in life, instead of worrying about things and always being stressed out and in a rush. Being very ‘green’ conscious, Keeley is proud of her amazing veggie garden – filled with raspberries, mulberries and papayas just to name a few.

Well done Keeley – we’re delighted to have you on board!

After the success of our introductory video we now have the second video up and running. Basic principles of the esse skincare regime – it’s great, have a look!

Odilia is 20 years old and is currently studying a BSc (biological sciences) at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is passionate about helping those in need and is aspiring to join ‘doctors without borders’. Her hobbies include gyming, running and playing the violin.

Behaving in an environmentally conscious way is important to Odilia – from recycling as much as possible and being water wise to using green cleaning products and growing her own vegetables and herbs.

If you would like to enter, refer a friend or simply vote and stand a chance to win great prizes, visit www.faceofesse.co.za

After much hard work, some long hours and loads of fun, we are thrilled to have our first esse-video up and running!

Let us know what you think.

Celest is a 28 year old beauty writer who views life as being amazing and full of unexpected happenings: “it’s part of your journey to roll with the punches and make it a better place for the people around you. Just love, nothing will fail if it comes from a place of love”.

Celest uses green cleaning products and is an active recycler, both at home and at work, all this together with embracing the challenge of vegetarian cooking.  And what makes her happiest: tea and a hot bath…and running with her dogs on an empty beach in the late afternoon when the sky turns pink.

The biodiversity here is incredible. Just in our small province of Kwa-Zulu Natal we have 11 times more tree species than the whole of Europe combined. We are tapping into this natural resource to bring new actives to market that are enormously beneficial to skin.

Our plants are generally sourced from the wild – not cultivated – because we have shown that they are more potent this way. To make sure that the wild harvest is sustainable, Esse has affiliated with PhytoTrade Africa. PhytoTrade serves a dual function – to monitor the wild populations of plants and to ensure that the people harvesting the plants are fairly and promptly paid. This way we can ensure that our impact on the African bushveld is a positive one – empowering people by encouraging them to value the fruits of the bushveld.

I hope that you’ll try our products to see what African extracts can do for your skin.

PhytoTrade also makes sure that the level of harvest is sustainable and that the wild populations of the plants are maintained. Last year we travelled to some of the PhytoTrade members in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Namibia. It was inspiring!

These projects make an enormous difference to the quality of life in these rural communities. The majority of the harvesters are women in very rural settings. They use their traditional knowledge of these plants to optimize the time of harvest and they use the money from selling Baobab fruit or Marula nuts to send their kids to school, or put a new roof on their house or maybe buy cattle to allow them to plough the land.  Every year things get incrementally better for the communities harvesting these fair trade ingredients, with the result that the community gains in strength.

But when you buy certified cosmetic products you get more than that. If a product is certified by Ecocert (or another organic certifier) then it won’t contain some key ingredients that pose health risks.  It also won’t contain ingredients sourced from petrochemicals and the preservatives used are very closely controlled. So it’s a guarantee that the product is genuinely natural and organic and not just another marketing spinoff.

Buying organic is also subscribing to a new, more sustainable, way of living. The argument about when oil is going to run out is pointless. If we don’t change our lifestyles, it will run out. Before it runs out we need to have moved on to a new system. I think that organic farming and mindful, ethical products are a step toward life on earth that is indefinitely sustainable, richly varied and beautiful.

Esse has also paid attention to new developments in biology and applied these to skin care. The scientific community has realized that our bodies are not just made up of human cells. As a matter of fact, there are 10 microbial cells for every human cell in your body. Even if we go by the weight of DNA in your body you are still only 46% human.

This has had a huge impact on the way that we view skin. We now have to consider skin as an ecosystem and that has an impact on the products we make. We have always pH balanced our products at around pH 5 to help mutualistic bacteria and improve the skin’s barrier function. We use very mild preservatives that minimize the impact of the product on the skin’s ecosystem. We use pre-biotics to selectively feed beneficial microbes at the expense of detrimental opportunistic species. At the moment we’re working on pro-biotics to address specific skin concerns. Here we supplement the skin with live bacteria to help rebalance it.

We do still use traditional actives like low molecular mass hyaluronic acid and oleuropein but we make sure that they are from ethical, natural sources and that they are safe and effective.  We will always offer product that is at the cutting edge of skin care but we won’t compromise on the long-term health of your skin to get short-term results.

We take a long-term view on skincare. In ten years time we want you to look back at your decision to start using Esse as one of the best of your life.