From Soil to Shelf: The Science of Beauty With Jorge Blanco
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What does it mean for beauty to be part of ecology?
This episode of The Nature Of was made possible with support from Davines. When my hairstylist recommended that I switch to Davines a few years ago, I was delighted to discover that their products are not only transformative, but they also have green chemistry and regenerative agriculture baked in from soil to shelf. We don't often think of science and food as being connected to our hair care, but all of these systems are interlinked. And Davina celebrates every hand that goes into the elixirs that they create, from the farmers to the hairstylists who put them into practice. So for this week's episode of The Nature Of, I'm doing something a little bit different and sitting down with Davinas' creative director, George Blanco, to talk about what it means for a business to truly be regenerative today and how nature can help turn beauty from something that is extractive to something that is a part of ecology.
George, welcome to The Nature Out. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me.
You know, I think when we think about beauty or we think about beauty as an industry, it's something that is most often extractive. What does it mean to you to see beauty as an extension of ecology or something embedded in ecology?
For us, I don't think we really have an option of thinking any way but of having it as an extension of ecology. There's a synchronicity that has to happen for us to feel that we're doing beauty responsibly.
How does regenerative agriculture influence haircare products?
And that synchronicity is based in the balance of... ecology a healthy state of that and then its effect on the healthy state of humanity and that's the extension piece yeah so for us it kind of has to be doing both things for it to be working in some way shape or form and we're constantly trying to calibrate that because it's very difficult for it to work right yeah
And the brand has such strong roots in nature, right? It's always been in many ways, a very nature focused company. Can you tell a little bit about the sort of origin and like how relationship rooted in nature has always really been part of the company?
The nature piece, I think it came a bit later considering that the brand officially started in 1983. That's a Great typical family story. The Bolatti family of Parma, Italy had an idea to start a brand. They did some packaging for other beauty companies for about 10 years. And then in 92, Davines was born under the Davines logo for the first time. At that time period, and for many years, it was really a mom and pop shop, so to speak. Dad was kind of the sales guy. Mom was tinking with products in a roughly 3,000 square foot, let's call it garage type basement space. And the son and daughter, Davide and Stefania, were growing up. By the way, from Davide and Stefania, you get Davines. People always ask how it's pronounced.
There you go.
There's a lot of issues around the pronunciation, but yeah, Davide and Stefania, Davines. So it's always been this family brand to the core.
What is the connection between beauty and green chemistry?
But in those early days, the science was always very important and very much to Davide. And we didn't know how to make science work at the time with a natural element. So we just referred to, let's try to use nature and science to create something that is high performing. But again, we were a small brand. There was no large acquisition or investment that propelled us forward very quickly. It grew and remains growing extremely organically, I guess pun intended. And in the early years, we realized that there was this treasure trove of naturally occurring things. that science could harness to push further. And that's where like this green chemistry and these ideas started to come into flux. So for us, once we hit upon that, it was just a matter of time before an interest became an obsession, before an obsession became a principle, and before a principle became just an unshakable foundation of how we work.
That was the very early days. And then just to leapfrog really quickly, it leapt forward into coming into awareness of the term sustainability in the early 2000s and what that meant, and people weren't really talking about it.
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