You’ve heard of intuitive eating — meet intuitive skin care

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This article was published 05/04/2022 (1662 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tiffany Masterson went from being a stay-at-mom of four in Texas to starting one of the buzziest brands in skin care today. Ever heard of Drunk Elephant? That’s her. She’d never planned on being an entrepreneur, she says, but around the age of 40, she started getting antsy. “I was looking for things to do.” She tried her hand at a few different ventures: a catering business, a pantry cleaning service. At one point, she started selling a bar cleanser from Malaysia.

Unfortunately, she later found out the product wasn’t as wonderful as it’d been marketed to be (Beautypedia found the formula didn’t support the claims). But the experience would wind up sparking her interest in skin care ingredients. She began reading anything she could find on the topic, testing myriad products, asking people about their routines, how their skin reacted to different things.

Drunk Elephant founder, Tiffany Masterson

Out of that came a list of ingredients she deemed could be disruptive to skin’s health: essential oils, drying alcohols, silicones, chemical sunscreens, fragrances/dyes and sodium lauryl sulfates (SLS). She wrote down what her dream product formulations would be and found somebody who could whip them up. “The chemist thought it was really strange. She was like, ‘Are you a chemist?’ And I said, ‘No, but I’ve studied ingredients for so long, I know what I want and what I don’t want.’”

Turns out it was what a lot of people wanted. Since launching at Sephora in 2012, Drunk Elephant has become one of the retailer’s most popular skin care brands. (It’s now available at Shoppers Drug Mart, too.) The name comes from a myth that elephants love to eat fallen Marula tree fruit — an ingredient that features prominently in the line — which then ferments in their stomachs and makes them tipsy. In 2019, it was sold to the Shiseido group for $845 million (USD).

Drunk Elephant Virgin Marula Luxury Face Oil, $89, sephora.ca SHOP HERE

“I never thought that my philosophy that I had created, you know, avoiding the six categories of ingredients, was not something that could help people. I was very positive about that. And so I just worked as hard as I could and learned as much as I could.”

Avoiding “the suspicious six” isn’t the only thing that sets Drunk Elephant apart. For one thing, there’s the bright, cheerful packaging and brand image, which made it something of an anomaly at the time of its debut. Then there’s Masterson’s refreshingly liberal approach to building a skin care regimen. She doesn’t believe in using the exact same stuff day after day. Instead, she encourages consumers to switch it up, mix things together, experiment.

“It’s just a matter of getting to know your skin and getting the consumer to understand that they’re the boss — this is your routine,” she says. There’s no one-size-fits-all road map because not only is everyone’s skin different, but your own skin behaves differently from day to day depending on a million things, whether it’s the weather outside or how stressed you’re feeling, what your hormone levels are, how much sleep you’ve had, etc. “There are so many factors that come into play when you’re trying to decide what to use on your skin.”

She likens it to someone standing in front of their refrigerator and figuring out what they want to eat. It’s a bit like intuitive eating in that regard, the idea of trusting your body to make food choices that feel good for you. Only instead of the fridge, it happens in front of your bathroom mirror: What does your skin feel like having today?

Drunk Elephant Beste No. 9 Jelly Cleanser, $42, sephora.ca SHOP HERE

The food analogy doesn’t stop there. “We think of our skin care routines as smoothies,” reads Drunk Elephant’s website, which even includes suggested “recipes” (i.e. products to combine). For example, Masterson’s night routine starts with a cleanser, either Slaai, a balm, if she’s wearing more makeup, or Beste, a gel, otherwise. A bit of Erase, a micellar water, afterwards gets rid of any last bits of mascara. “Then, I mix whatever I feel my skin needs. If it’s summertime, I usually go a little bit lighter and if it’s wintertime I go heavier.”

Drunk Elephant A-Gloei Retinol Oil, $95, sephora.ca SHOP HERE

Lately she’s been mixing a pump of TLC [a glycolic resurfacing night serum] with a drop of A-Gloei [a retinol oil] and a pump of F-Balm [a hydrating overnight mask]. If she feels like her skin is particularly dry, she’ll smooth on Lala [a whipped face cream] or, as she’s been doing lately, she’ll top things off with a slick of her newest product, Wonderwild, an intensely nourishing salve perfect for slugging, i.e. sealing in moisture with an occlusive.

Drunk Elephant Wonderwild Miracle Butter, $51, sephora.ca SHOP HERE

All these steps can seem a bit overwhelming, but it’s really quite simple, insists Masterson. “We have a lot of products, but they can all be lumped into categories: cleansers, moisturizers, serums, exfoliators, masks, sunscreens. So pick one [of each] that you think will address your needs, or pick a couple.”

Masterson holds that by removing the six potentially disruptive ingredients, skin functions optimally so it’s less likely to be sensitive or reactive, thus allowing you to experiment freely. Because contrary to popular belief, sensitive skin isn’t actually a skin type, but rather a condition that occurs when the skin’s barrier has been compromised.

That said, you can experience sensitivity (i.e. redness or flaking) from overusing certain actives like retinol or glycolic acid. “That’s a natural response, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use these things,” says Masterson. “A lot of people will stop using a product forever because they think, ‘I just can’t do it.’ But the truth is, it’s just a signal that your skin is telling you to slow down.” Instead of swearing off a product and missing out on its benefits, she suggests using it twice a week and then slowly increasing the frequency as you build up tolerance, or adding just a drop of it into your “skin smoothie.”

Masterson is all about mixing serums and treatments rather than layering them one on top of the other. “The reality is your skin can only absorb so much and it only needs so much. So when you’re mixing, you only have to use one pump of each product and the mixture will cover your whole face and neck.” That in turn means you’re not using as much of each product, your bottles last longer and your face isn’t getting more than it can handle.

“I think it really remains true that when you go to your sink, just like when you go to your refrigerator, you don’t pick the same thing every day. Some people do, but I don’t. I reach for what my stomach craves and it’s different all the time — same with my skin.”

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Katherine Lalancette is the beauty director of The Kit, based in Toronto. She writes about beauty and trends. Reach her on email at kl@thekit.ca or follow her on Twitter: @kik_tweets