The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
She’s now known, globally, as “The Beauty Chef,” but a teenage Carla Oates would never have believed she’d grow up to work in the beauty industry.
“My real interest was in nutrition,” Carla tells me, “but I was exposed to the fashion industry from an early age. My mum had a very natural flare for styling and I grew up around it, so it felt very natural for me. From quite a young age in my teens, my friends used to ask me to style looks for film clips and when they were doing creative projects they’d ask me to style them, but I didn’t want to do fashion. When I finished school, I’d been ask to style so many fashion shoots that I just ended up doing it, but my real interest really did lie in nutrition. I went along the path of working in magazines. I started writing and getting lots of different jobs in that space. When that evolved into becoming a beauty editor, I started really veering off into natural health and beauty, and that’s when my career in that space really started.”
Despite not having a vested interest in beauty as a teenager, Carla was in early high school when she first became aware of the correlation between nutrition and the skin. “From a very young age I understood the relationship between what we consume, our skin health and our overall health because I had allergies and eczema as a child and teenager,” she explains. “My mum took me to a naturopath when I was about 13 and she [the naturopath] eliminated certain foods from my diet, like gluten and dairy, that I was allergic to. From a very young age, I saw that strong connection between what we consume and our skin health and overall wellbeing. My interest was really sparked at that stage. I studied naturopathy in my early 20s- I started, and I was also doing a science degree, but because I had children quite young and I was working, I sort of left those behind. My interest really was in research, but the glamorous world of magazines pulled me away.”
Although she is an advocate for the link between gut health and the skin today, a teenage Carla was slightly harder to convince. “After school, I used to go to the gym, and then I used to go and get deep fried spring rolls and a coffee milkshake,” she laughs. “At home, my mum cooked very healthy food but being a teenager I used to go out with my friends after school and eat a lot of junk food. My allergies and eczema were really bad, and when mum took me to the naturopath and I had all these blood tests and she saw that I had these allergies, mum eliminated those foods from my diet. I realised at that age how adaptable we are. We can, after a while, break habits. A lot of it is very psychological. Milk, for me, was quite repelling after months of drinking soy milk. Of course I would deviate, being a teenager, but I realised when I would deviate, my allergies would flare up as well. It was about striking a balance.”
That initial reluctance to adopt new habits was something Carla recognised years later, with history seeming to repeat itself in the shape of her own daughter. “My daughter went through a stage in her teenage years when she thought I was an ‘organic freak.’ She went through a rebellious stage of saying ‘Why do we have to make everything we eat? Why can’t I have packet food?’ She’d come home from school and say ‘I went to McDonalds and had a Pepsi today.’ And I used to try and not react. I could see her skin getting worse, as she had both eczema and acne at that particular time. It started breaking out on her back as well, and she got very upset and said to me ‘Mum, my skin is terrible. Can you help me?’ It was perfect timing- me just waiting, thinking ‘I’ll bide my time, she’ll come to me,’ and she did.” It was then that Carla took her own advice, cutting sugars and processed foods from her home. “Within three to four weeks, her skin had completely cleared up.”
As her passion for nutrition and understanding of the effect our inner health can have on our outer beauty grew, Carla began to gently shift the focus of her work in a new direction. “I worked in magazines on and off for around six or seven years as a fashion editor, a beauty editor and a popular culture writer,” she explains. “Then I got the job as beauty editor for the Sunday Life Magazine. I had a column, and it went a bit natural because I became quite concerned with the toxic chemicals in mass market skincare. I had women and men from all over Australia writing in to me and saying ‘Carla, can you recommend something for my psoriasis and my eczema,’ and, being a natural researcher, I was looking at all of these ingredients that were potential carcinogens, tetrogens and neurotoxins and thinking ‘These ingredients are not going to help their skin.’ I really wanted to make it my mission to educate people on how to look after their skin more holistically. I worked as, and still do work as, the natural beauty columnist for Wellbeing Magazine. I penned a column for the Sunday Telegraph’s Body & Soul Magazine called ‘Do It Yourself Beauty’ for about six years, and I wrote a book in 2004 called ‘Feeding Your Skin.’
“It was when I became a beauty editor that I became very concerned with the amount of toxic chemicals in skincare. It was a bit of a wake up call.
“Body & Soul were very progressive, and the editors that I worked with at that particular time let me write lots of interesting stories that, at the time, were quite left of field. Now I look very mainstream!”
While her immediate editors may have been progressive, shifting public perception was slightly more difficult for Carla- given that, in 2004, the natural beauty movement had not begun. “It was really niche,” she tells me. “At the time, some beauty editors who I’m still in contact with now would laugh at me and say ‘Carla, you’re the feral beauty editor. You’ve gone rogue on us!’ I thought ‘You know what? I just really don’t believe in the industry. I think it’s really one dimensional, I think it’s not particularly health, I don’t believe in a prescriptive type of beauty.’ Looking at the products, the goop in bottles, it didn’t resonate with me. The message in the beauty industry felt very harmful.”
Perception aside, Carla persisted in her goal to shift the paradigm. “I felt so strongly and passionately about it,” Carla says of her research into gut health and natural beauty. “I always knew that this information was the future of beauty and the future of skincare because it was the truth. When people start to delve a bit deeper into understanding what makes skin healthy, it’s not chemicals in a bottle. As we evolve as humans, we’re going to start to question if one type of beauty is the only type of beauty.”
Armed with that knowledge and with her ‘Do It Yourself Beauty’ readership steadily increasing, Carla began to experiment with her own inner beauty formulas in 2005. “Because I was writing about topical skincare for the Sunday Life, I wanted to give women and men healthier alternatives. In my column, I started publishing recipes like healthy face masks. Feeding Your Skin is actually full of topical recipes. It really started there. I’m such a dag, but I love reading scientific and nutritional journals,” she tells me of the catalyst that drove her to begin experimenting with at-home fermentation. “I remember stumbling across a piece of research that looked at certain types of bacteria and eczema. I did lots of research around that and I realised that there was a correlation and connection between gut health and skin health. I did a lot of reading into lacto-fermented foods, and I started making those food at home and introducing those into my kids’ diets. I saw a big difference in their skin health and their gut health. I was eating the food too and friends and family were asking ‘What are you doing differently? Your skin is so glowy!’ I was feeling more energetic and had this overall sense of wellbeing. I was the local pusher for bacteria- I’m still pushing that!,” she laughs. “I literally had all of my fermented vegetables growing in the kitchen, I had neighbours come in and I would ask ‘Would you like some of my bacteria today?’ They became very popular with friends and family. People noticed their tummies were feeling better, they had stronger hair, skin and nails, more energy and less inflammation in their bodies. I really knew I was onto something, and being so passionate about wanting to change the paradigm in the beauty industry, I thought ‘I’ve come up with a real solution for skin issues by addressing gut health.’
“Your gut is where everything happens. Your gut is where 70% of you immune system lies. It’s where we make nutrients, it’s where we make detoxifying enzymes, it’s where we make neurotransmitters and it’s where we metabolise hormones. So much happens in our gut, and it can therefore affect our skin. What happens in our gut can impact our skin profoundly. Where there’s gut inflammation, more and more studies are showing that there will be skin inflammation. When people have a healthier microbial balance in their gut, they’re going to have a healthier fatty acid profile in their skin. People with SIBO, which is Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth, are ten times more likely to have acne.”
Having seen the effect fermented ingredients had on her own and her family’s skin first hand was motivation enough to develop a product, but that scientific research cemented Carla’s thinking- this was something she needed to take to the masses. It was in the year 2009 that Carla launched The Beauty Chef’s first product- GLOW.
“So many people said ‘It’s too weird, it’s too left of field, it won’t work.’ I just felt so strongly about it though. It worked. It worked for my daughter, myself and for my friends and family. I truly believed in it, so I was never swayed. I was very staunch in my resolve around wanting to bring this to market. I’m such a determined person and when I really believe in something I give it my all. I was really unwavering in my dedication to make this happen because I truly believed that it would help so many people. It was a real solution. I was working as freelance writer and stylist at the time and my kids were young-ish so I was juggling, then of a nighttime I would have a desk in the wardrobe and I would work on my brand. With a brand new concept, I thought ‘How can I educate people?’ When you come up with a new concept in an industry, you need millions of marketing dollars behind you to educate people about that concept. I didn’t have that. Luckily, it did get quite a bit of attention. Vogue did a story on it, and then Italian Vogue did a story on it because they thought it was quite novel and interesting. I got a little bit of swell from it being in different publications, and then it became such a word of mouth product- because it worked.”
While word of mouth was strong enough marketing tool in the brand’s infancy, Carla soon realised that, despite GLOW’s increasing popularity and a swell in sales, stockists simply didn’t have a place on the shelves for it. The “inner beauty” category still did not exist.
Out of necessity, Carla continued to sell The Beauty Chef through her own online channels until, in a moment of serendipity, she was contacted my the Home Shopping Network. Initially reluctant for fear of being viewed as, as Carla words it, “daggy,” Carla now concedes that saying “yes” was “the best thing I did for my business.”
“In a time when there was no inner beauty category,” she explains, “I didn’t have a platform to educate and I didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to help build an amazing marketing campaign, so Home Shopping was an amazing platform for me. It gave me an hour once a week to go on TV and educate the viewer on the product. I was introducing so many new concepts- inner beauty, fermented food, gut health, skin health and how to fix your overall wellbeing. It really resonated with the customer. They started using it and they loved it. It’s now, however many years later, the number one health brand on Home Shopping Network Australia.”
Through her website, word of mouth and her weekly opportunity to educate through Home Shopping, Carla grew The Beauty Chef to a point where inner beauty did exist- and stockists had space for her.
“In business, what I’ve learnt is to stick to your gut instinct,” she tells me of how she decided which stockists The Beauty Chef was truly aligned with. “Sometimes saying ‘no’ to things is the most powerful thing.”
The Beauty Chef portfolio now includes eight inner and two topical beauty products however, on launch, Carla did not have ambitions to develop supplements beyond GLOW. “It was such an organic process. I didn’t really think about building a brand at that point. I was more product focused. I was really tapping into what I, as a mum, a woman and a human being, need in my daily routine to help to strengthen my health.”
As Carla identified those specific, daily needs, she expanded her team and, in turn, her product range. “All the products have so much love put into them and into their development. I now work with a team of nutritionists, naturopaths and microbiologists to come up with really beautiful, complex formulas that we hope are a pleasure to take.
“The Essentials Range is GLOW and CLEANSE. GLOW is the foundational product of the range. Everybody should take GLOW everyday- it’s your inner beauty support and maintenance powder. It’s your inner beauty moisturiser. CLEANSE, if you’ve got congested skin, that would be your everyday powder until that clears up a bit. The Boosts are like your topical serums. They’re designed to target really specific skin concerns. The Support products are helping out wherever you have lifestyle concerns- BODY, for example, helps to bring your body back in to balance.”
Through developing that collection of inner beauty supplements, a fortuitous experiment saw Carla stumble across her first topical beauty formula- the Probiotic Skin Refiner.
“I was using the Probiotic Skin Refiner for years, very selfishly!” Carla explains of how the product gained traction ahead of its launch. “It was actually the liquid that comes off the bio-fermentation of all of the foods in our products. It’s a bioactive liquid from the fermentation of grasses, algae, herbs and spices. It’s completely natural and it completely self preserves because it’s got a pH of 3.5. Because we use a lactic acid fermentation [process], it has naturally got lactic acid in it. I joined all the dots.”
Knowing that her own testimonial was absolutely not enough to see the product enter the market, Carla had her team of scientist test the product to establish its efficacy. When the results returned a Lactic Acid percentage of 5%, an incredibly potent measure for a purely natural product, Carla got serious about preparing the product for sale.
“I was using it, and my sister looked at it and asked ‘What’s this?’ I said ‘It’s a bioactive liquid from the fermentation of my products,’ and she said ‘I can’t believe you haven’t told me about it!’ She started using it and she was obsessed- she still is, to this day! I started giving it to friends and more family, and they said ‘It is incredible.’ It is incredible, because it’s completely natural, it’s a byproduct of the fermentation process, it has a pH of 3.5 which means it exfoliates the skin naturally, it’s got lactic acid which is an Alpha Hydroxy Acid which helps to dissolve to intercellular glue that holds dead skin cells together so it helps to improve cellular turnover and it helps to improve and repair the skin after sun damage. It really was one of those products that I was experimenting with, then I got a lot of flack from my friends and family for not introducing it to them earlier. We had 50 women externally test it, which I always do, and the product received five starts from everybody.”
Having grown her business to the point of quite literally creating a new global beauty category, Carla is excited and inspired by how much the beauty industry has changed since her time as an editor. “I love the fact that in the morning, before women have even thought about applying their moisturiser or putting their makeup on, they have picked up a kale, coconut and Beauty Chef chia seed smoothie for radiant skin and wellbeing. I love that healthy skin has become something that people want to attain. Rather than “perfect” skin and perfectly applied primer and foundation, it’s about healthy skin. I love that there’s been that whole paradigm shift and that wellness is beauty and beauty is wellness. The great thing about looking after your skin from within is that not only does your skin look better and more radiant, but you feel better. When you feel better, you look better. There’s no amount of cosmetics that can replicate the radiance of when someone feels good in their skin. There’s a bounce they have in their step, the energy they have in their voice and the way their skin radiates because they feel so good in their skin.
I also think that idea of one type of beauty has shifted. It’s now about women being the best, healthiest, happiest versions of themselves and really embracing uniqueness and individual beauty rather than a prescriptive, “perfect” type of beauty. I think that’s so healthy.”
