As consumer demands for beauty products and skincare regime tools continue to be a trend, pressure falls to skincare and cosmetic companies to keep up.
"This focus on sustainability is seeing a rise in high quality, natural and sustainable products as well as driving positive business practices creating collaboration and solutions that are leading to real change in the industry." He saw chemists mixing a cream base with steroids to create ointments to treat issues like eczema, using formulations developed in England.
Joanna Gardiner joined the company in 2000 as a sales representative and today works alongside her brother Patrick who is a pharmacist. In recent years, she has developed a second brand in the company, Elave, which she said focuses on preventative and protective skincare. "The drier your skin is, the more likely it may have a crack, and this can be easily irritated. People don’t tend to think of the skin as the largest organ in the body.
Returning to An Spidéal, Co Galway, in the early 2000s, she heard about people taking seaweed baths for skin benefits due to the vitamins, proteins and minerals occurring naturally in seaweed. "We spent three years developing the product, travelling across Europe, meeting marine algae experts and professional cosmetic formulators," she said.
Ms Uí Chathmhaoil said that Irish consumers were very aware and savvy when it came to sustainability, but also wanted to see proven effectiveness in what they buy. "All our products are cruelty free, and 97% vegan across the board. Our ingredients have a naturally short supply chain, but sustainability is non-negotiable and it’s everything we strive to be".
A farmer's son, he always enjoyed animal husbandry, but through working with snails, he discovered something quite unexpected, he said. He explained that his end of the work is labour intensive, caring for the snails and extracting the mucin through harvesting three times a year, with an average mature snail producing just one gramme of mucin a year.
With that, the mucin falls down into a container below, which Mr Corley then collects after he has returned the snails to the farm.