Pioneering green sunscreen turns to gold

 

JULIA WADE

Wildcrafted and certified eco-pure, a pioneering all-natural sunscreen formulated in Mangawhai has received international recognition in a worldwide competition, winning gold and silver at the recent 2020 Global Green Beauty Awards.

Earth Kitchens’(EK) certified SPF 50+ Kawakawa & Tamanu natural sun protection, a pioneering creation by EK founder Jules Bright, won gold for Best Plant-based Product, and silver for Best Ethical Product at the recent awards. Held in the UK, the Global Greens judge over 350 ethically clean and green brands from ‘the big players to other global businesses’.

Announced in August, the win follows hot on the product’s national success in June’s Best of NZ Naturals Awards, winning the title ‘Best Natural Sunscreen’ and is an acknowledgement of the Mangawhai medical herbalist and naturopaths decades of dedication to take sunscreen ‘to the next level’.

“I was surprised as anyone to receive the awards,” Bright says. “I spent 20 years developing the sunscreen in my forest lab, ignoring an industry that kept informing me that it was impossible and ‘if it could be done, the big guys would have done it by now’.”

Officially certified in 2017, EK non-chemical sunscreen was a global leader, becoming the first all-natural product to successfully complete a four year certification process. Bright, a former registered surgical nurse is confident EK is the world’s first and only Biogro’s certified-natural sunscreen to balance the SPF50 rating with water resistance, invisibility and natural certification.

Ingredients for Bright’s products are locally sourced and wildcrafted from her ‘forest lab’ – plants in Mangawhai as well as other native forests around the country – and is poised to enter the sunscreen market in Hawaii and Europe she says, now that a ban on most sunscreens has been scheduled due to the impact on the environment from the harmful chemicals the products they contain.

“The great snow caps melt into crystalline streams and rivers and wash the forest medicine into the sea, as fish food and coral regeneration. However somewhere along the line, the corals became poisoned and started dying, from synthetic sunscreen ingredients; oxybenzone, octinoxate and other ingredients found in chemical sunscreens, which are now banned in many countries,” she says. “Earth’s Kitchen comes along as a luxury and healing skinfood which has certified as the highest sun protection factor, is cruelty free and safe for wee babes, made from, the forests for the oceans, just as nature had always done.”
 

What is wildcrafting? Wildcrafting is the harvesting of plants for food or medicinal purposes from their natural or wild habitat. It is generally a sustainable harvesting method, especially in regards to protecting endangered species, extracting only elements of a plant – such as fruit, flowers or branches – leaving the living plant intact. If the whole plant is required, seeds are placed in the hole left by the harvested plant for forest regeneration.