With the LOHAS boom in full swing, more and more consumers are taking notice of what’s in their food and in their beauty products. Now the latest thing is to combine the two: beauty products that are made from all natural food stuffs.
While retailers, like the Girls’ Walker produced Cosme Kitchen, a select shop for imported natural beauty products, play up the idea for marketing, another company, Hiina is offering the real deal.
Hiina, a company staffed by all women, has introduced a face-mask made from 100% soy milk, or more specifically yuba, the sheet of soy milk that forms at the top when the liquid is heated at a low temperature.
Each face-mask is made by hand and, because it is 100% additive free, delivered frozen. While we’ve seen chilled cosmetics before, produced in medical quality labs, the Hiina face-masks are made of foodstuffs and thus produced in a food manufacturing plant, with the equivalent hygiene standards, and frozen immediately for preservation. Thanks to all this, a set of 5 masks retails for ¥6,000.
Like sake brewers (the inspiration for the famous SK-II skin care line), tofu makers often have noticeably bright and smooth skin on their hands. So Hiina applied this observation to where women are most concerned, the face, claiming that soy milk, which contains saponin, has the power to exfoliate dead skin and draw out pore-clogging debris.
Another, albeit unlikely, participant in this edible cosmetics movement is Tokyo Gas, which features an article on home kitchen made beauty treatments on its Food Lifestyle #110 Q&A website (110 is the Japanese 911).
Specifically, treatments that can be made from typically Japanese kitchen products, like sake, seaweed, and rice bran, making this just one more example of the “back to Japan” trend in beauty care.
