Naturopathica’s Founder Gets Real About “Clean” Beauty Ingredients

“As an herbalist, my product development begins right here in this garden, where I select botanicals to address the most common skin imbalances,” says Barbara Close, who founded Naturopathica nearly 25 years ago, in 1995. That’s to say the beauty brand came up in an industry that only relatively recently started to lean “clean.”

Now that the clean beauty movement is exploding, mbg visited Close at her new Teaching Garden on the North Fork of Long Island, New York, to talk about where this is all headed. Turns out, it might be time to rethink the “No List” conversation we’re all having. 

“I like working with herbs because they're so effective,” Close tells our senior beauty editor, Alex Engler, “but I also wear my esthetician’s hat and pair them with clean actives because all synthetics aren't bad. Well-researched, carefully considered synthetic actives like vitamin C, retinols, and peptides have visible results in the skin. And what makes our products unique is that we use those actives in what we call clean base materials, so all the surfactants, thickeners, and emulsifiers are working in harmony with the skin.”