Introducing Scence

It’s been a while since we shared our Scence story: who we are and why we founded the brand. As a welcome to new sign ups to the mailing list and a refresh for people who have been part of our extended Scence family for a while, here is a little recap on our background and how and why we created an award winning, vegan, sustainable skincare and wellness brand (with a little luxury with our candle range and vegan delight via our chocolate  added in, because who doesn’t love chocolate! )

Creating a beauty brand and how Scence came into being is a question that is often asked by our customers so if you haven’t checked out our About Us page, here is a little background information…

We are Krista and Mel,  the founders, and sisters, with a shared passion for natural skincare, therapies and the natural world.

We are trained therapists and qualified in ITEC Complementary Therapies to include Anatomy and Physiology and Swedish massage, further massage therapies accredited by the Guild of Holistic Therapies – aromatherapy, hot stone massage, Indian head massage and lymphatic drainage massage.

Our specific interest in skincare led us to train and qualify in beauty therapies accredited by the Guild of Beauty Therapies, skincare formulation courses and reiki healing. Whilst we loved providing therapeutic services we realised our real passion lay in formulation and creating bespoke aromatherapeutic balms for our clients.

We particularly wanted to develop a natural deodorant that actually works and find a way of packaging it in compostable paper packaging. We just couldn’t live with single-use plastic and researched the alternatives such as glass, aluminium and PLA – we weren’t happy with any of these and neither did we want to simply wrap it like a soap bar as we wanted to created a push up and glide-on stick for hygiene and ease of application.

We wanted to work with UK based packaging companies as sustainability and carbon emissions are always at the forefront of our minds and we found a brilliant and innovative company that worked with us to develop our paper tubes and jars. We will be writing about our sustainable packaging in our blog soon so watch out for this.

Our natural deodorant was originally formulated with sodium bicarbonate as the active ingredient but we reformulated using magnesium hydroxide as we realised this was much gentler and would not cause skin irritation. We will be writing about magnesium v sodium in natural deodorants in the coming weeks so another one to watch out for there!

We launched in 2018 with a range of vegan, 100% natural and cruelty-free deodorants, lip balms, body and face moisturisers and hand balms and we moved into our solar-powered lab in Falmouth a year later. We make everything here in small batches and also ship from here, so we have a fully in-house, sustainable and zero mile fulfillment operation.

Our team is small but mighty and we all wear many hats. Mel is in charge of production with help from Andrea and absolutely loves her role in new product development. Mel is a skilled formulator and loves researching ingredients with real efficacy and will not compromise in her selection. Her latest masterpiece is our SPF30 sunscreen which is a transparent (non-whitening) formula made with a natural zinc suspension to ensure safe and even coverage.

Krista looks after marketing, communications and business development as well as website updates, packaging design and artwork.

Sarah joined us in 2020 as office manager and looks after our customers and retailers. She is the one packing and posting your orders, answering emails and calls. Sarah is a qualified Environmental Scientist and works with our partners for ongoing sustainability and has ensured our climate positive position through local tree planting to offset our carbon output.

Our mission from the start was to make clean and natural skincare without compromise to the environment and nature. We chose to work with the Vegan Society for accreditation as this is the most stringent body to ensure our suppliers and ingredients are compliant. We are proud to be pioneers and examples for the cosmetics world and inspiring other brands to consider their packaging and waste.

Creating a beauty brand is hard work but so rewarding as we feel we are making a positive difference and our growing and loyal customer base supports us moving forward. 2023 is going to be a great year as we have some lovely new products in the pipeline – so watch this space!