It was a pleasure to host beauty entrepreneur Emma Lewisham at our Herne Bay Store for an intimate In Conversation event, to celebrate the launch of her new Supernatural Crème Cleanser, now available at Simon James.

Tell us a little bit about your journey so far, and where Emma Lewisham is at today? 

I never actually set out to launch a beauty brand - before Emma Lewisham, I was working for a global Japanese technology company and was very happy in my career. Like all good businesses we started from a culmination of so many things - all the dots that connect in your life to take you to that point, and this was very much the way with Emma Lewisham.

From growing up in farming and having a real understanding of nature and sustainability, to studying both science and business at university, and then going on to work for a Japanese technology company where I learnt so much about circularity, craftsmanship and excellence and a real care for what you create and put into the world, as well as losing my mother really young to cancer, I was very in tune with my health and wellbeing in the ways that I did things.

When I was trying to get pregnant and was speaking to a fertility doctor, that was my lightbulb moment. The research now is very clear that what we put on our skin and consume does significantly impact our health, and it really made me incredibly passionate about using natural products. But at the time - 8 years ago, the products available were lovely, but very simple -  lacking science, efficacy and luxury - you were directed to the whole food stores not like Simon James, and you would get products that were a bit gunky or smelt a bit funky.

I thought, why should women have to compromise their health for products that they love using? A single plant molecule carries billions of years of intelligence - so the issue has never been nature's capability, it's been science’s ability to extract it, and we were very fortunate that 8 years ago science and nature were catching up. 

So what you see in our products now are not the rosehip oils of the world, but neuropeptides and ingredients that can genuinely relax muscles, so that innovation is very much there.

We've always found the way that you formulate your products incredibly thoughtful and logical. Can you tell us a little bit about how you formulate and how that differs from a more traditional approach?

Coming from a technology and science background, not from the beauty industry, really helped us identify a major gap in formulations and skincare. We always put the problem at the heart: we started with our Skin Reset Serum to help with hyperpigmentation, and something that became apparent when I was looking to see what existed already - was that all the language and focus was around ingredients - a miracle broth, or a single miracle ingredient that a marketing story was hung on. Yes, we think nature is the most intelligent, but it’s not just the ingredients they supply, it’s the natural laws of our body and skin. I stepped back and thought, why is skincare not logically created for how your skin works, instead of around ingredients? And so from the start that's how we formulated our products. We worked with physiologists - out of any scientist in the world, they understand how your skin and body works. I also went back and did postgraduate studies with Harvard in biochemistry and physiology to understand this at a much greater depth.

Your skin is exquisitely intelligent, it's running multiple processes simultaneously at once, it has its own nervous system, it knows when you're sleeping. With skincare you're not decorating the surface, you're very much communicating with a system. Putting a singular ingredient on the skin is not how it works, you have to have multiple in synergy to have a genuine cut through of results. We like to say that Emma Lewisham is skincare that your skin would choose.

Can you tell us a little bit about the thinking behind the new Supernatural Crème Cleanser and what makes it distinct?

Our customers have been asking for a cream cleanser as a preference in format, and that was the opportunity for us to sit back and ask where is the gap? We started not by looking at what was on the market or at ingredients, but very much looking at the skin. We identified three pillars that if we could address them simultaneously it could genuinely elevate skin health and give you an incredible springboard to the next steps - that’s hydration, your reactivity, and your microbiome. The other thing we addressed is how often do you rush through cleansing to get to your skincare - the serums and products that really do the work. We invest a lot in our skincare products and we spend a lot of time doing it, so why can't a cleanser be skincare from the very first step? And so that was the vision and what we set out to achieve, which we very much have. 

The Supernatural Crème Cleanser has all the hallmarks of feeling really luxurious, but the testing behind it is genuinely remarkable and proves that you're getting skincare from that first step. We suggest that you leave it on for 45 seconds - really get in there and massage it into your skin. Our hydrating tests show it leaves your skin more hydrated than before cleansing, and your hydration stays above baseline for 5 hours post-cleansing without using a moisturiser, so it is essentially putting a moisturiser on your skin from the cleanse which I think we haven’t seen achieved before. In terms of what it does for your microbiome health or for inflammation or redness, this completely settles it down within 7 days. So it's a really intelligent product in a bottle, I genuinely think it’s not just another cream cleanser on the market but one that's really intentional and will offer genuine benefits.