The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
Mukti, founder of Mukti Organics, tells me that she “walks what she talks” – and she really does. “It’s a holistic way of life and living,” she explains of her lifestyle, one that encompasses far more than the organic skincare range she has grown renowned for. “It embraces the principles of an organic lifestyle.”
An affinity for nature has always been a core part of Mukti’s DNA. “I was raised in the country,” she tells me. “I’ve got that connection with nature, and I’ve had that since I was a child. My happiest moments were spent in the garden. For me, I’ve always felt happiness in nature.”
Mukti’s early connection with nature was not something she grew up believing she would transform into a career- in fact, Mukti thought she’d eventually follow in her father’s footsteps. “My father was a lawyer and I always thought I’d study law to try and impress him,” she explains, “but that wasn’t where my calling was.”
“My mother was a model and I always looked up to her. I remember her getting ready for fashion parades and she was always putting on her face. She was very conscious about how she looked. She used to feed us nuts and seeds, and I’d look at the other girls with their white bread jam sandwiches and was always a bit jealous. I grew up with a health conscious mother who was always concerned about her visual appearance, so I was conscious about health as well. I went to boarding school and one of my friends was from Byron Bay, and she introduced me to a brand called Rachel Perry- it was aloe vera based, and I loved it. She introduced me to smashed avocado, too- it was a long time ago! I remember thinking ‘This is lovely. There’s something really nutritious about this food.’ It made me feel great. I think that all tied in to me having an interest in alternative and natural products as opposed to anything else.”
It was that interest in organic produce that Mukti eventually harnessed into what has become a 20 year passion for organic living and alternative, natural therapies. “I was always interested in plant medicine,” Mukti tells me. “I started studying at a young age and ended up studying naturopathy first, then acupuncture. When I was in college I started doing the remedial therapies section of study first, and then I started working with people in a massage sense doing a lot of remedial therapies and working one-on-one with people. That’s how my passion for natural therapies began.”
With that passion for holistic therapies ignited, Mukti’s next steps saw her working to turn that passion into a living. “My husband and I had a couple of hairdressings salons,” she explains. “He would do the hairdressing and I was looking at an add-on service in beauty therapy. I worked with a great clinician in Brisbane who taught me a lot about natural medicine. I could see the healing benefits of herbal medicine, natural medicine and alternative medicine. We moved to the country when I was pregnant, and we moved into a permaculture community. I set up a co-op there where everyone could bring their produce so we could use that as a community base for people to swap their food out. After Kiyana [Mukti’s daughter, who is now in her 20s and works alongside her mother] was born, I was given an opportunity to work in a guest lodge in Maleny, the township.”
Mukti’s time working in the guest lodge served as the catalyst for what is now Mukti Organics. “They [ the lodge owners] marketed to a lot of teachers and nurses who were quite stressed out, so they would come up on Monday and Tuesday and have a pamper package,” she explains of her role. “The other woman who I worked with would do the massage and I would do the facial component. I would often get asked ‘What products are you using?’ At that stage I was using a combination of different products- a bit of Jurlique, and another brand out of the States called Paul Penders which were very herbal based. I had an epiphany. I thought ‘I’m offering a service. Why don’t I offer a product as well?‘
What felt like a simple idea and a natural next step, given Mukti’s background in plant medicine and knowledge of aromatherapy, turned out to be exponentially more difficult that she’d initially though. “It was a little more challenging than I’d first anticipated.” Grappling with the many components of running a business beyond product formulation caused Mukti to simplify that initial goal and focus on basic skincare rituals. “I thought ‘If I can get a cleanser, toner and moisturiser out, steps 1, 2 and 3, it can grow from there.'”
By this stage, Mukti had left her husband and was working, as a single mother, to formulate her products and launch a business from home- on her own. “The first product I made was a lip balm, and it was a disaster. I thought ‘I’ve got to rescue this lip balm- what can I do?’ So I started to study cosmetic formulating. Back in those days, it was before the turn of the century, so there wasn’t a great deal of information out there about natural product formulation and there wasn’t a certified organic standard- that didn’t come about until 2002. It was very much in its infancy, and finding raw materials that were unadulterated and clean was almost impossible. Now, with the evolution of the mindful beauty movement and with the evolution of and demand for green chemistry, it’s become a lot easier. Back then, I went to a few natural chemists and they actually poo-pooed the idea that you could make natural products.”
“It was all trial and error, and there was no one to turn to. It was a bit of a lonely path. At this stage I was still living in the permaculture community so I moved into the township of Maleny because I realised I would need somewhere where I could send and receive the products. I started the business there. At that stage it was still a home-based business, and I was selling at the Eumundi Markets. From there, I had the foresight to start collecting people’s email addresses. That was the beginning of the database. This was back in 2000.”
Early success at the Eumundi Markets lead to steady business expansion. A loyal customer base lead to an increased demand for organic skincare products, and was Mukti still running the business almost entirely single-handedly while raising young daughter. “There was a lot going on!” she exclaims. “I was doing 16 hour days, but I was loving what I was doing. I’m so passionate about it. I think it’s really good, when you start something, because you’ve got to do everything yourself and then you appreciate it. Even today, every aspect of the business I know and understand- because I’ve done it all.”
Where natural skincare has seen an increase in popularity in recent years, the turn of the century saw sceptical consumers asking Mukti one (very broad) question- why natural?
“To me, it just makes sense,” Mukti explains. “The body and the cellular makeup of plants is very similar to our own, so we have a natural affinity. We can utilise those components of natural products, and we expel what we don’t need. When it comes to plants, you’ve got antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, a plethora of constituents that are basically food for the skin. Harnessing those in the correct formula is part of the journey. I believe now that the IP belongs in the methodology, and that’s been a 20 year process of understanding how to put all those ingredients together so they work synergistically and in a compatible way. For me, it just made sense to use plant medicine. That’s all our ancestors had.”
20 years have passed and, while natural beauty is more accessible than ever, the need for regulation within the beauty industry has never been more crucial. “I am very concerned now about the number of chemicals in the environment that we are exposed to, so part of that education and that journey is to really bring that message out that there is an assumption that everything and anything that is out there has been tested for use on humans.”
This concern is what drove Mukti to research, write and publish her first book- Truth in Beauty, a consumer’s guide to decoding cosmetics labels and understanding the largely unregulated beauty industry. Mukti assures me, however, that she will never resort to fear mongering. “It’s just about having awareness,” she explains. “It’s about minimising exposure to potentially dangerous ingredients. We live in a world that is very industrialised, and we’re subjected to many different chemicals in our environment. They’re ubiquitous. It’s about harm minimisation. It’s about being aware, because there is no watch dog. There is no one sitting there ticking off every label of every product that’s every been made, making sure they’re safe to be used by humans. There’s no one studying the combinations of those ingredients and how they interact with each other on a daily basis. I think as consumers, we’ve got to empower ourselves.”
The only thing that does guarantee a product is regulated, Mukti explains to me, is certification from a third party. “We first become certified in 2006 with the Organic Food Chain,” she tells me, making Mukti Organics one of the very first Australian companies to reach certified organic status. “Organics is complicated and it limits what you can use in your products. There are also so many certified organic standards, so looking for certain logos is something else- it’s a minefield! Every standard has different allowable inputs. The gold standard that we now use, and became certified with last year, is COSMOS ACO. I chose to change over to COSMOS ACO because it’s a globally recognised standard. It’s also a harmonisation of many different standards from across the globe.”
“What certification does is it gives the consumer confidence that the product has gone through testing from a third party perspective. Every raw material has to be an allowable input. There are certain things that aren’t allowed in [certified organic] formulations so it does make it a bit more challenging. You’ve got a third party auditor who physically comes in to the business and goes through all the different processes- even down to the constituents of the essentials oils that are used in the product. Everything, down to the last drop, has been accounted for. It’s a very time consuming process, and it’s also a costly process because there’s so much involved.”
Although organic skincare is, at long last, being wholeheartedly embraced by the wider beauty community, Mukti is still faced with naysayers. “As far as efficacy is concerned, I believe now that with the evolution of green beauty and green chemistry, they [natural products] can definitely contend with mainstream, luxury brands. When it comes to comparing organic and natural with mainstream, luxury brands- what are you actually paying for? Are you paying for the marketing? The advertising? The packaging? We’ve got to dig a little deeper. Are you buying into the story? Are you buying into the glamour?”
Mukti is no longer running her business from the Sunshine Coast hinterland with a baby on her hip, but she is still sits at the helm of her rapidly expanding business. “I’ve got a really great team now,” she tells me of how she manages it all. “We have a small research and development department within the business, who I work closely with. I come up with the ideas and look for a niche product, or see something that I want to create, reverse engineer and create a certified organic version of it, so the development process is quite long sometimes. Last year we launched Vital A and Vital B serums, and they each took a couple of years to develop. You’ve got to test them on other people to ensure that they’re efficacious, to see how well they work. That can take a while.”
So how does Mukti maintain a work-life balance? By practising what she preaches. I live, eat and breathe what I have written about in my book,” she says. “It’s a lifestyle. I’m very regimented and I have a routine. I get up at 4am and my day starts with meditation and writing in a gratitude journal. I then sit at my desk by 5 and have a bulletproof coffee, I intermittently fast and I only eat certified organic food. I drink water, I exercise, and I don’t sit for long periods of time- we’re designed to move. I make sure I get a nature connection and sun in my eyes. I want to live a long healthy life, so it’s about balance. In order to juggle those things, you’ve got to have adequate sleep and support your own health and wellness. Now, I’m probably the healthiest I’ve ever been. I think from there you become a more vibrant, exuberant human being, and you can help more people. I believe that’s what we’re all here to do- we’re here to help others.
“Every day, for me, is an experience to learn more about how I can be a better person. How can I help more people? I remember when I did start my business. Because I was so passionate about it, I went into a vortex. As soon as you start to get those signs of restlessness or you start losing concentration, it’s a good indication that you need to move away.
Mukti is of the belief that we, the beauty industry, have come a long way in the two decades since she entered the realm of natural beauty, however we have just as far a way to go before we can guarantee what we’re putting on our skin has been regulated. “There’s definitely a mindful beauty movement happening now,” Mukti says of consumers’ shifting attitudes. “People are asking questions and consumers are becoming very savvy. They’re very educated. I wished, when I was writing the book, that I was making it [the lack of cosmetics regulation] all up. I had a lot of very sobering ‘WTF’ moments at 4am just thinking ‘This can’t be right.’ But it’s all about arming yourself with knowledge- becoming aware, asking questions. The name Mukti means ‘Freedom from false knowledge and lies,’ so it’s been the driving force behind the brand and behind me. I’ve always been one to question everything. I’ve never accepted anything at face value. I think it’s good to be curious.”
Regulation aside, Mukti agrees that technology and, more specifically, social media are responsible for the other large industry change she’s seen emerge in the last decade. “Dismorphia is a big problem right now,” she tells me “There’s an obsession with perfection rather than just embracing ones unique beauty. Everyone is starting to look similar. Underneath all that is a deeper self esteem issue. If we go back in time, people used to always use lipsticks- in war times, for example, lipsticks were the highest selling products because they made people feel better. It’s about enhancing your beauty without harming yourself.
Treat ageing as a privilege, as opposed to something to be frightened of.”
To listen to the full interview with Mukti, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify.
