On Easter Sunday, Alex Porrata closed her eyes and shot a a cloud of rosewater into her face. “I love this,” she said with a pleased sigh as she and her sister, Yolanda, sat at a table in the Pine Cone Diner and chatted about their new business venture: nontoxic cosmetics.
The Porrata sisters are now consultants for a company that specializes in environmentally friendly personal care products, and they are holding their first “social,” or informational event about the line with wine and snacks, on Tuesday, April 14 at the diner. “We’re having fun with it, which is really the goal here: My sister and I enjoying ourselves,” said Alex, who lives in Inverness.
The cosmetics come from Beautycounter, a company that kicked off two years ago in Santa Monica. Through thousands of consultants around the country and its website, the company sells personal care products—from lipstick to sunscreen, shaving cream to shampoo—that do not contain ingredients it considers harmful.
The company says it strives to use ingredients that have been tested for safety. It does use synthetic ingredients, although it points out that there are many “natural” ingredients, like lead, that it argues are not safe.
In all, the line prohibits about 1,500 chemicals from its offerings, such as formaldehyde, which is often used as a preservative; phthalates, which the Environmental Working Group says is a hormone disrupter and linked to low sperm counts; and ethanolamines, which it also says disrupts hormones.
The company also advocates for stricter federal regulations for cosmetics, an industry lacking in oversight from the federal government. Except for color additives, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t have the authority to approve ingredients for makeup before they are sold.
“In the European Union, it’s highly regulated—there are over 1,200 ingredients they don’t allow. In the U.S. it’s only 11,” said Yolanda, who works at a spa, International Orange, in San Francisco.
An aesthetician for about eight years, Yolanda has always striven to use safe, nontoxic products. She said in recent years the profligate use of words like “natural” in marketing have underscored the need to be diligent when choosing what to apply to one’s skin, which she emphasized was a “breathable barrier.” What we put on it is just as important as the foods we eat, she said.
Alex used to buy most of her personal care products from places like Whole Foods, assuming they were safe, but she started to worry after her son, 4-year-old Ezekiel, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. She realized she wanted to be more conscious. She is now taking steps to eliminate potentially harmful chemicals from her home.
“One of the things I’ve been more aware of this year is carcinogens, and trying to remove them,” she said. “Slowly editing out things in my home that aren’t safe for my family is a process we’re going through.” The first Beautycounter products she acquired, she said, were products made for kids.
Alex doesn’t wear much makeup; on Sunday, she said she had applied some moisturizer and a lip tint made by Beautycounter. (She sported a neutral shade, Twig, while Yolanda wore Petal.) She also wore mascara, a difficult product for natural companies to master, in part because they often use agents to prevent bacteria growth near the eye. “I haven’t given up mascara,” Alex said. (Yolanda chimed in that there are some companies that manage to produce a serviceable mascara without undesirable chemicals.)
Neither sister exclusively uses Beautycounter products. Alex has an app on her phone called Think Dirty, which scans barcodes of beauty products and rates them based on the safety of their ingredients. Yolanda also has a similar app made by the Environmental Working Group called SkinDeep, which is a database the nonprofit has compiled of thousands of beauty products with ratings also based on ingredients.
On Sunday, Yolanda grabbed a nearby sunscreen made by Neutrogena that was sitting in the Pine Cone and typed it in. On a scale of 1 (the safest) to 10, it scored a 5. Not bad, but not great.
Many eco-conscious beauty products often announce their credentials—No parabens! No phthalates! No animal testing!—in brash packaging. Beautycounter products, on the other hand, look sleek, understated and high-end. A bottle of “Rosewater Uplifting Spray,” made with organic rosewater, or a small tub of “enlightening treatment pads,” made with a mixed fruit acid complex and a flower extract meant to counter lines and wrinkles, do not overtly reveal the strict standards that the company adheres to.
Yolanda likes the aesthetic. Applying and removing cosmetics, she said, “is a ritual we do twice a day. Enjoying that ritual is really important.”
The two sisters spent a lot of time together after Ezekiel was diagnosed and Alex’s husband passed away just a few weeks later. Yolanda helped with childcare and went with Alex to the hospital. Now that Zeke’s 54 weeks of treatment are over, they wanted to find a new way to remain close. It is also giving Alex—who has a master’s in education and worked as a coordinator for a school readiness program until it lost funding a few years ago—a flexible way to work while raising her kids.
Most Beautycounter consultants, who throw socials to educate potential customers on the products, strike out on their own, but Alex and Yolanda wanted to be partners. At their event on Tuesday, wine and snacks will greet attendees, who can listen to a short presentation on the company and why they became consultants. Attendees can also ask questions and test out the products.
Last Sunday afternoon, Alex, who was wearing a pink and orange flowered blouse, gave herself a few more spritzes of the Rosewater Uplifting Spray. Was she uplifted? She was.
The two agreed that most other parts of life—sleep, exercise and healthy food—are the big players when it comes to beauty and wellness. Makeup, Alex said, is the fun part. “I wanted some lightness in my life right now,” she said.
Alex and Yolanda Porrata’s first event starts at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 14, at the Pine Cone Diner. They will hold another social at noon on April 19 at Birba, a wine bar in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. For more information, visit alexporrata.beautycounter.com.