These days, clean beauty seems to be the phrase on everyone’s lips. Though the concept has never been formally or universally defined, it’s still managed to find its way into our beauty cabinets, our salons, and all over the packaging of our favorite products. But before going clean was ever a mainstream trend, clean haircare brand Innersense Organic Beauty had long recognized the need for creating pure, organic, and non-toxic hair products for professional hairstylists and consumers.
Since founding Innersense in 2005, co-founders Greg and Joanne Starkman have spent the past 19 years dedicated to setting and upholding a new higher standard in the industry for clean haircare. Innersense has made a point to actively exclude numerous potentially harmful ingredients from their formulations, in favor of ethically and sustainably sourced ingredients that are not only beneficial to people (and their hair), but also the planet. It’s this level of care and unwavering commitment towards health and wellness that has helped the brand to earn much acclaim throughout the industry, from consumers and stylists like.
Last month, I had the opportunity to experience the magic of Innersense firsthand after attending the Chicago stop of their multi-city tour, Innersense on Tour. For those who don’t know, the brand has been on the road visiting stylists in multiple cities nationwide—including Atlanta, Miami, New York City, and Las Vegas— to showcase their newest innovation, Color Purity. While attending their Chicago event, not only did I have the chance to see their talented top artists carry out a number of incredible hair transformations using the brand’s groundbreaking clean hair color system, but I also received so much great pro insight into styling and cutting a variety of different hair types. The best part? I even had the privilege of chatting with Greg about all things Innersense—including the brand’s beginnings, their clean beauty standards, their journey to creating Color Purity, and their future plans. Keep scrolling for all of his amazing insights.
The Tease: For anyone not familiar with Innersense Organic Beauty, can you share a little bit about the brand’s philosophy?
Greg Starkman: My wife, Joanne, and I’s personal journeys are what really empowered us to want to create Innersense. Both she and I have deep roots in the beauty industry. We’re both salon stylists. I left the chair after about 12 years and began working in big beauty and met and fell in love with Joanne in the beauty industry. It was the birth of our daughter, Morgan, who after about 24 months was diagnosed with a rare genetic disability called Williams syndrome, that really prompted Joanne to become a health advocate. She really wanted to make sure that she was going to be doing the best for Morgan and also the best for the family. And just through her personal journey, she began to recognize the amount of toxins that were in beauty products that she used everyday in the salon. What really became a big “aha” moment for her is that she wanted things that were healthier and cleaner, but none of the products that she would get at health food stores had the efficacies that she needed—not only personally, but also for her clients. So that set her on this journey of wanting to find out what she would have to do to create those products.
At the same time, I was working in big beauty, specifically product development and marketing, and began to recognize the emerging consumer trends relative to safe cosmetics. And mind you, this is going back to the mid-90s when the EU began to establish some very strong cosmetic safety standards. Here in the U.S., we were getting what we called EU directives, which were really focusing on eliminating the very egregious toxic ingredients that were being outlawed in the EU. So I became really immersed with organic chemistry, and between my understanding of that and Joanne’s passion, our whole premise for Innersense was to develop products that would eliminate the most egregious ingredients. And this is everything beyond parabens, sulfates, and silicones. It’s really eliminating all of the synthetic and additive ingredients that are really rampant. These are EDTAs, PEGs, DEAs, as well as harsh surfactants and other harsh ingredients coupled with cosmetic-based ingredients. Cosmetic ingredients are really rampant in beauty products and these are everything from resin, silicons, plasticizers, microplastics, as well as synthetic polymers that today are recognized like polyquaterniums. These are all ingredients that really have no benefit to the hair other than creating an external cosmetic benefit, but they’ll make the hair feel soft, shiny, and silky over time. But, what these types of ingredients are really doing is just building up onto the hair shaft and ultimately creating a barrier that will then compromise the hair’s health and integrity.
So understanding the foundation of that, I set out to formulate products that eliminated the use of all those types of ingredients and focused on curating and harnessing the true efficiencies and emollient benefits of the very ingredients that we were sourcing to use, without having to augment with other types of synthetics. And it was quite a journey. It took us over five years to develop the foundation of the chemistry and it wasn’t so much about the ingredients we curated, but how we processed those ingredients to ensure that they weren’t exposed to any types of harsh chemicals during chemical processing. And that’s really been the foundation of Innersense. So mind you, we were very early pioneers in the clean beauty space. But again, the mission of Innersense was really to offer the safest, purest, and most effective products in the marketplace and address the needs of a much more savvy organic consumer who was looking for products that were meeting a higher, cleaner standard that more importantly, didn’t compromise one’s performance.
Despite the fact that the phrase clean beauty is thrown around so frequently in the industry, there’s no true definition for it. So many people interpret it in different ways, and it’s also not regulated in the industry. With that said, how do you define clean beauty and why is it so important to you and Innersense Organic Beauty?
Starkman: When we started, it wasn’t known as clean beauty. We called it safe cosmetics and toxin-free beauty. Of course, as the consumer demand grew, it became very commercialized. I would say that pre-Covid, there was just a very small community of brands that were really pioneering clean beauty and bringing amazing formulations to the marketplace. And then through Covid, clean beauty almost became very highly commercialized. That’s when people started getting a little bit gray. We call it cleanwashing and it’s no different than greenwashing. Today, believe it or not, better than 90 percent of brands out there make some sort of clean claim and to your point, there’s no standard for it.
So I often say that Innersense started creating products and developed our own standard. And I’ve always lived to that standard, and I still say that it’s much higher than our competition. But that’s left to the consumer to decide. Consumers are better label readers than ever and they’re becoming their best advocates. One of the things that I will probably say, and it’s not very politically correct to say this, is that as the business became very commercialized with “Clean at Sephora” and other retailers, those types of standards really began to dilute. And these were standards that were organically developed among the very brands that helped pioneer the clean beauty space. You have some retailers like Credo Beauty and Detox Market that have established some very stringent formulating standards and their consumers are really tapped into those standards. But as I said, it’s become very diluted and it’s created a lot of consumer confusion along the way.
How are you feeling about the current state of the clean beauty space and Innersense Organic Beauty’s current position in it?
Starkman: We’re recognized as the leading authority and I think that consumers and influencers who are really steeped in clean beauty have a very high respect for who we are and what we’re doing. It’s always tough when everybody is just slinging a word around with very little substantiation behind it. I think that consumers today need to be their own self-advocates and really peel things back. Don’t get caught up in a fancy story or beautiful packaging or a celebrity or influencer. Just really do your own homework.
And I have this conversation quite a bit with consumers where someone calls me and says, “Oh, did you see this new brand?” I always go to two places. So I first go to their about page to see who they are. A lot of these brands are incubators. They’re coming out of one place and they’re just brand farms. And then I go to the ingredients. I want to know what ingredients they’re utilizing. I usually see a commonality. They tend to all be utilizing cocamidopropyl betaines which are synthetic surfactants or a sulfate alternative that’s no different than a sulfate. Those ingredients tell me that they’re just leveraging the term clean, but utilizing a lot of performance ingredients that really don’t provide, in my estimation, a clean formulation. But then also, are they really providing the complexity of ingredient information for consumers who want to know what’s in their products? And that’s why if you go to our website, you’ll see that we list all the ingredients that we don’t use, which exceeds well over 3,000 as well as an explanation as to why they were excluded. We also include the ingredients that we do use, too. I think that’s really important because what drives consumer confidence and trust is having full transparency.
Back in May, Innersense Organic Beauty launched its new clean professional hair color system Innersense Color Purity. Why was expanding into professional color a natural next step for the brand?
Starkman: I think the thing is that as chemistry has evolved, the commitment to innovation is not always there because the economics doesn’t play well from the traditional sense. Color is unique because consumers are willing to sacrifice not getting their hair colored anymore because they don’t want to be exposed to the amount of toxins that are found in hair color. And so we really felt that there was an emerging need to create a professional hair color that we could bring to the market that was truly innovative. When we began to do the research in 2000, we really identified the fact that there just wasn’t a lot of innovation out there. Most hair colors come from Italy. We call it the “Fab Five.” There’s five predominant color manufacturers out of Italy and they do 90 percent of the professional color out there. And so once we recognized that there was no true commitment to really driving new innovation, we just decided to go it alone.
We commissioned a formulation chemist who we began working very closely with to remove the most egregious toxic ingredients from color as well as PPD, PPEDs, EDTAs, and all of the harsh surfactants and the synthetic ingredients. More importantly, all of the cosmetic ingredients like waxes and silicones that create translucency with color were removed and we reformulated the base to be all botanicals. So it’s primarily a shade-based foundation. It’s very gentle and very emollient. Then we also incorporated advanced oxidative dye chemistry to really bring in better, deeper dyes that are also less harsh on the hair. And the result came out to be Color Purity and this was an almost five year journey to get it right and make it work. Now it’s in the market and the exciting thing is that it’s being really well embraced.
What impact do you hope that your Color Purity line has on the professional color space? And do you hope that it will inspire changes from other brands when it comes to professional hair color?
Starkman: I think like anything else, there’s others trying to make colors that are better for you. Some are doing it better than others. I think that we’re doing it the best way, but you know, I’m the founder. I think for the most part what we’re trying to do is create products that are better for the salon, the salon stylist, and then,more importantly, better for the consumer. And the consumer demand for products that are cleaner, safer, and that actually perform is critical. They’re not willing to compromise product performance, but we’ve been able to bottle that. So really expanding into hair color was also to be able to bring those same types of values into what we do from a liquids point of view into color.
What led you to want to launch Innersense on Tour and bring the Color Purity line on the road?
Starkman: Innersense on Tour is about storytelling. It gives us an opportunity to bring the community together to share not only the amazing artistic talent that we have but also the results that they’re able to achieve with their customers. They stylists that really love and work with our products every day are able to come and connect peer-to-peer and share why they love what they do and how Innersense makes it even better for them. So it’s an opportunity for us to be in the community and connect with stylists—both existing fans of the brand and those who are really interested in checking out what Innersense is all about.
What key takeaways do you hope that colorists and other hair professionals leave with after attending one of the Innersense on Tour stops?
Starkman: I hope they have an amazing impression of who we are. We’re not a big beauty brand. We’re not a commercialized beauty brand. As I said, Joanne and I approached this business with authenticity, and I think that’s really important for us. Authenticity, intention, and, more importantly, authority in who and what we’re doing. We have a purpose and we also want people to walk away feeling that and feeling like, “I want to be a part of what Innersense is doing. I want that to represent me as a stylist. And I want my customers to feel good about the product choices that I make that I work with them on.”
Innersense Organic Beauty just launched a body care line last month. What else can we expect from the brand for the rest of 2024 and beyond?
Starkman: So body care is really about us supporting our wellness position. It’s about the whole body, and we’re really excited about that. When we first introduced Innersense in 2005, we originally had some body products that supported the whole body, mind and spirit. As a struggling business, we just decided that haircare is our lane. And so it was always our dream one day to return to it. I think as we’ve expanded as a wellness brand and expanded into spas as well, I think that now was the right timing for the products. So we’re really excited about that.
Next year, we’re going to focus on scalp health and nutrition because that’s really critical as consumers become more and more aware of the importance of caring for their scalp no differently than how they care for their face. The skinification of hair is huge and we see that. We’re going to come at it from a much different place. We’re not promising hair growth. We’re just talking about how a healthy scalp leads to healthy hair growth and wanting to educate on the importance of that. And then we also want to continue to grow the styling tools that we have for the line. We also have some other very cool things coming up and a lot of good innovation.
Is there anything else that you would like to share about Innersense Organic Beauty?
Starkman: When I talk about Innersense, we’re very much a purpose-driven business and that’s why we’re socially, environmentally, and sustainably responsible. We’re a certified B Corp brand. If you think about all the things we do, it’s on our website. You can look at all of our fact sheets, and I think that is important because consumers really want to know what is the commitment that our brand has beyond the marketing. So we call it our mission-in-action, which is now our purpose, and it’s an important part of what we do. We’re very much involved in driving cosmetic legislation. Consumers in the U.S. don’t understand that the FDA has very little to no oversight over beauty products and so we’re dealing with almost more than 60 years without any type of cosmetic legislation. And while we recently had the passage of the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act (MoCRA), it only establishes that companies have to register their products. It still doesn’t provide the amount of safety testing that the FDA needs to do to validate product safety. It’s really important. So I’m part of a coalition of brands and believe it or not, none of the big brands are involved in this. They don’t want to be. They actually are very much in opposition of any type of oversight or regulation in the U.S. But to that point, we’re driving and are a part of working with the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. So I spend a lot of time really helping draft and drive legislation at both the state and federal level because I do believe that consumers deserve better protections.
To learn more about Innersense Organic Beauty, be sure to visit innersensebeauty.com/ or follow @innersenseorganicbeauty on Instagram. And if you’re interested in attending Innersense on Tour, you can purchase tickets for their New York and Las Vegas stops here.
