Natural and organic UK cosmetics: the best sustainable beauty brands
Valley Mist: What is it?
Valley Mist create their natural skincare and wellness products for customers who are seeking to harmonise personal wellbeing with planetary health.
Jo, the founder of Valley Mist, believes that maintaining our bodies in as natural and unpolluted a state as possible is a key to good health. After growing tired of petroleum-based lip balms that didn’t work, she created a range of naturally-derived lip balms that were super successful and skincare products soon followed. Their skincare range will leave you feeling hydrated and glowing.
On the Valley Mist website you can shop a variety of products, from protective lip balms in plastic-free, compostable cardboard push-up tubes to up-cycled candles made from waste oils, butters, and waxes.
They also stock home and health and beauty ranges from other brands they trust, so if you’re looking for a genuinely good brands, then Valley Mist is a great place to start.
Valley Mist offer a refill scheme available at their flagship store in Leyland, Lancashire. You can pop in with a container of your choice and top up your washing up liquid, shampoo and hand wash from their refill station. Any refillable products you buy in glass bottles can be returned in-store or sent back via post for washing and reuse year-round.
Valley Mist best-sellers:
De-Stress Ambience Room Spray
£16
Soothing Skin Balm With Frankincense & Lavender
£12 – £13
Light Liquid Glow Anti-Aging Moisturising Serum
£5 – £36
Valley Mist: How sustainable is it?
The ethos of Valley Mist is to create high-quality natural products, being the change they wish to see in the world by treading as lightly as possible on the planet and encouraging their customers to do likewise. Built from the ground up as a sustainable beauty brand, Valley Mist works to embody this commitment in every aspect of their business.
Their products are handmade in small batches by artisans in Lancashire at the Valley Mist Lab at Charnock Farm in the UK. All makers are paid a living wage and the lab is designed to be a safe place to feel, talk, dance and get stuff done.
Valley Mist founder Jo says: “It has taken years to bring Valley Mist to its current position. The development of various products started long before the launch of the business. Along the way I have had a number of failures and a build-up of waste product, ALL of which I have carefully stored and not thrown away since 2014.”
Their recycled aromatherapy candles contain a portion of that waste, closing the loop on the reuse/recycle front for the waxes and oils to ensure zero waste in their production.
Valley Mist began selling just four varieties of lip balm in a biodegradable paper tube. For their lip products, they use organic European beeswax, at least 30% organic cocoa seed butter, mango butter and sunflower oil, blended together to create a soothing, protective balm for your lips. The paper in their lip balm tube is made using a combination of recycled fibres and wood pulp. They personally observe and record the decay of the lip balm tubes over time in their Valley Mist Chive Plant pot, which you can see on their Instagram highlights here.
Valley Mist now offers over twenty plastic-free sustainable beauty and wellness products. All Valley Mist product packaging is either compostable, recyclable or reusable/refillable. The postage packaging is also 100% plastic-free, and they reuse all packaging materials sent to them by suppliers, so they rarely need to order new boxes for shipping. They use a local printing business for all their printing needs, and all inks and printing materials are non-toxic, plastic-free and suitable for home composting. Despite their best efforts, they do ship the paper-board tube from abroad, but they hope to eventually encourage British manufacturers to offer these greener alternatives in the UK.
Valley Mist donates 8.5% of profits from their paper tube lip balms and their recycled candles to charities such as the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, The World Land Trust, and they also support their local Bra Bank. This charity focuses on raising money for secondary breast cancer research. Customers and the local community can drop off their unwanted bras, and when they have 900, they are sent to the charity, which sells them to small businesses in Africa that, in turn, donate them to women who would otherwise be unable to afford a bra.
They are currently working towards growing their own ingredients that are currently imported. They are in talks with local landowners about this, with the goal that a variety of locally grown and manually harvested ingredients can become a part of the regenerative farming revolution and help with wildlife diversity.
Valley Mist: Where to buy?
You can shop their online store: https://valleymist.co.uk/
You can shop their Zero-Waste Flagship Store: Valley Mist Skincare & Wellness, Unit 5, Charnock Farm, Wigan Road, Leyland, Lancashire, PR25 5DA
