Josie Maran describes her skincare and beauty products line as, “Nothing but pure.” Maran’s route to success comes down to ditching the chemicals and sticking to nature. Launched in 2007, Maran found the secret ingredient to her dream of a product made from pure ingredients with nourishing and firming results—an argan plant from Algeria. Josie Maran Cosmetics fortified a very back-to-basics approach almost a decade before consumers began to demand a green focus of their products.
So it’s an intuitive step that, 12 years later, the latest ingredients included in the company’s newest product line, Skin Dope, would be CBD and hemp. Yes, CBD as in cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive compound of cannabis.
CBD in beauty and skincare
In the last few years, brands have added CBD in, well, nearly everything. It’s used in moisturizer, hair pomades, bath bombs, and, increasingly, more beauty and skincare products. Quartz framed this CBD boom, or the so-called “green rush” with cannabis sales overall, so eloquently, “At the intersection of the $4 trillion wellness-industrial complex and the $17 billion legal cannabis industry sits a little bottle of CBD oil.” Analysts in the report estimate the U.S. market will surpass $20 billion by 2022.
Extensive research of CBD’s benefits had been relatively limited because it was listed as a controlled substance under U.S. federal law. Hopefully, with its recent declassification, long-term testing can increase the already known benefits of the natural property and provide us with fresh insights about its use.
The birth of Skin Dope
Back in the early 2000s, sitting in makeup chair after chair for her modeling career, Maran says she’d ask makeup artists to use more natural products on her skin. Often, they couldn’t oblige. “I was getting my makeup done every day and my skin was breaking out like crazy,” she says, “When I asked the makeup artists if there was a brand or a product they could use that was both efficacious and healthy for my skin they always said no.”
In most cases, this sense of weariness was reason enough to start her business. But Maran says that the idea to use argan oil as the foundational natural product in her future business was sparked from a chance meeting with a woman with gorgeous skin. “She looked decades younger than her age, which she accredited to this amazing ingredient, argan oil,” she says. “Both sparked the idea to create a brand that pushed innovation boundaries to deliver healthful, high-performance skincare and makeup with argan oil at the core.”
Since then, Maran has developed skincare products centered around the ingredient, like the 100% Pure Argan Oil, whipped creams and body butters, cleansing oils, moisturizers with SPF, and even makeup like mascara, lip balm, and tinted moisturizer.
Released earlier in 2019, there are two signature Skin Dope facial oils: CBD with argan oil and hemp seed with argan oil. Maran cites her Northern Californian heritage of innovators and rebels (Humboldt County, Haight-Ashbury, and Silicon Valley) to help her along with the decision to include these ingredients into Josie Maran Cosmetics. “As hemp legalization was finally taking off, I got my product development team together with an organic farm up north to work on CBD and hemp seed formulas paired with argan oil—the core ingredient of my entire line. We first came up with a 50/50 mix and our Skin Dope line was born.”
In an interview earlier this year with Allure, Maran said that together these pure products “work harder, better, faster.” When asked how that might benefit a customer’s skin, Maran says “100% Pure Argan Oil is nature’s richest source of omega fatty acids 3, 6, 9, high in vitamin E, and antioxidants, and is highly receptive to the skin. When paired with another pure ingredient, like CBD or hemp seed oil, argan oil draws the formula into the skin to get the ingredients to work quicker for faster visible results.”
According to Maran, the argan oil helps firm up and nourishes skin while a sun-grown, full-spectrum CBD oil soothes and calms it. She says that including CBD into the product line has helped enrich the company’s—and her own—relationship with the customers buying the products.
“A lot of what makes CBD such an amazing ingredient is its soothing and calming properties,” Maran says. “This means providing relief for dry skin and the appearance of redness. It’s something that many customers have tried numerous other chemical and herbal products to aid without luck.”
With Skin Dope, Maran manages to continue that natural, clean approach to skincare by including a new—yet old—ingredient. The hemp plant, originating in Asia, has been traditionally used for medicinal relief for thousands of years; traveling to Africa, eventually to Brazil, the Americas, and onward, in non-Western cultures. The manipulation of the plant’s properties into a variety of uses, recreational or otherwise, is fairly astounding. Yet, it’s only just beginning to be accepted by the mainstream.
Be the first to sell hemp-derived CBD in your industry
As hemp-derived CBD becomes a prolific ingredient in the beauty space, it’s crucial to note that we are watching an entirely new industry unfold before our eyes. Maran says, “As the stigma behind this plant lifts more and more, people are seeing the benefits for skincare and beyond, and the results are speaking for themselves.” She continues, positing a little how a brand can be both a provider and an informed educational resource for her consumers. “On the flip side of this is that as a new frontier, there is a lot of confusion and misleading information. Consumers need to do their homework to make sure the efficacy behind the products is true. My team and I are super passionate about being leaders in education to ensure consumers are only getting the highest quality ingredients.”
It’s an exciting time to be wading into the CBD waters. Maran gestures toward a broader CBD and hemp seed oil experience in 2020, hoping to highlight more of the natural benefits of this plant that’s now a billion-dollar industry.
This article was originally published by our friends at Shopify Plus.
