Voilition Beauty is the latest name to drop at MECCA in New Zealand, a clean crowd-sourcing brand giving consumers the power to vote on what products they want to end up on the shelves. We caught up with founders Patricia Santos and Brandy Hoffman to chat about the brand and find out their skincare secrets. 

We’re so excited to hear that we’ll now be able to pick up Volition Beauty from MECCA stores in New Zealand. Can you tell us a bit about the brand and what made you decide to launch?

Volition is a crowdsourcing - or as we like to call it “outside in” - clean beauty brand that utilises the power of the consumer and democratisation in its product development process. We both had seen countless beauty launch failures and copycat products and therefore we wondered how that could be avoided. By hearing straight from the consumer and allowing them to vote on products they want to see made, it eliminates - or greatly reduces - the possibility of those factors. Consumers are smart and they know what they want, so why not have them tell us?

Giving consumers the power by putting ideas and development into their hands isn’t something we often see in the beauty industry. Can you talk us through the process of how a product comes to be, from start to finish?

It starts with the idea submission which we vet for three things: differentiation, feasibility and safety. If it ticks all of those boxes, we move forward with it and create it into a campaign that needs to be voted on. The innovator taps into their community to vet the votes. If a product reaches its threshold of votes, we’ll make it! From there, we work with a network of labs to manufacture the formulation while our team works on packaging, copy assets, and marketing initiatives. After that process, you’ll find it in the Volition Beauty assortment.

What is your typical beauty routine?

AM

Turmeric Brightening Polish Baobab Toning Essence
Strawberry-C Brightening Serum Celery Green Cream

PM

Cleanse
A top secret eye cream that is launching late in 2020
Snow Mushroom Water Serum
Hibiscus Unspottable Correcting Oil
2 X week ACV Resurfacing Pads
1 X week Detoxifying Silt Gelee
1 x week Turmeric Brightening Polish (used on the body)

There has been a lot of hype over the past few years around clean beauty products with a lot of push back from consumers around transparency, practices and ingredients. For those who don’t know what it means, how do you define clean beauty?

Clean beauty takes away the suspicion. No suspicious ingredients, practices, standards, or formulations. We make the best, most effective skincare with high quality, safe ingredients that don’t sacrifice performance or efficacy. We completely understand the confusion for consumers around “clean”. For us, cruelty free and non-toxic formulas are our mission and how we define “clean”. We formulate to EWG standards to take away any guesswork around toxicity levels.

Having been involved in the beauty industry for a large part of your career/s, how have you seen the standards and norms around beauty shift/change?

With the digital age, there’s so much information out there where beforehand consumers blindly bought products without having access to that knowledge and brands not being transparent about it. Now, they look at the INCIs, the online reviews, and the social proof from consumers and influencers alike before they buy. The shift in standards is really attributed to the consumer. We’ve seen across the board and with our community that cleaner, safer products and practices are expected and demanded. Obviously since we’re crowdsourced and work off democratisation, we happily oblige.

What are some of your stand out products?

All of our products are special to us but two that stick out are our Turmeric Brightening Polish & Strawberry-C Brightening Serum. The turmeric paste DIY is a centuries-old beauty hack used by Eastern Asian brides to glow before their wedding. Our innovator, Anuradha, is an American-Indian woman who used and experienced her cultural DIY, the glow also came with stained skin. She sought a formula that gave the same results sans the staining from the turmeric. Our labs extracted the turmeric from the root, eliminating the colour residue. There’s a lot of turmeric or turmeric- inspired products now, but ours was the first we ever saw in skincare in a significant way.

As for the Strawberry-C Brightening Serum, our innovator Varika had her own DIY beauty hack rubbing strawberries on her face to achieve an amazing glow. She used to do this only in the summertime when strawberries are in season, so Varika’s idea stemmed from the need to have a strawberry-powdered formula all year round. It is not a very well-known fact that strawberries contain more Vitamin C than oranges and also pineapples, and so Volition’s 20% Vitamin C scrum packs a punch when it comes to the delivery of this all important brightening ingredient. When Vitamin C serums were really having a moment in 2019 the strawberry was not an ingredient that was talked about much in skincare, and yet it is a familiar ingredient that most people love and can easily understand can be a brightening powerhouse ingredient. And we were right because the Strawberry-C Brightening Serum has quickly become a Volition best seller.

Do you have any other favourite beauty brands (from MECCA)?

Ilia and Drunk Elephant; Two fellow clean beauty brands which we are big fans of.