People often ask me why apple & bee feels and smells a little different to other off-the-shelf skincare. The honest answer is that everything I make comes from nearly thirty-five years spent working with skin, and with the plants and oils that heal it.
I trained in beauty therapy in the early 1990s, one of the last intake to qualify through City & Guilds before it became NVQ, studying at Lincoln College of Art & Design between 1991 and 1993. I loved the science side of it so much that I nearly went off to medical school instead. That pull towards the sciences never really left me, it just found its way into a different kind of laboratory: my kitchen, and later my little workshop, mixing and testing formulas by hand.
After qualifying I worked in salons, learning prescriptive skin and aromatherapy massage the old-fashioned way, hands-on, treatment after treatment, client after client. I can still smell the surgical spirits today! Ten years with Clarins followed, where I saw the very best of the beauty industry up close: exacting standards, beautiful textures, and a real respect for the customer's skin. A few years later, with my children still little, I caught an illness from them that affected my immune system, and my skin began reacting to things it never had before. Patch testing showed allergies to preservatives, along with other synthetics, and that was the turning point where I started making my own formulas for family and friends.
That's why every apple & bee product is waterless and preservative-free, it's not a marketing angle, it's the reason the brand exists at all.
My aromatherapy training shapes how I choose every oil that goes into a formula, not just for how it smells, but for what it actually does for the skin. My background in cosmetic science means I understand the how and why behind an ingredient, not just the folklore around it, so you'll always find real botanicals doing real work in an apple & bee bottle, nothing there just to look good on a label.
Even the packaging carries that same thinking. I choose materials that protect the formula, keep it stable without preservatives, and sit gently on a bathroom shelf rather than in a landfill.
Every jar and bottle carries thirty-five years of training, salon experience, corporate know-how, and my own skin's hard lessons. That's why I choose apple & bee, and I hope, once you've tried it, you'll understand why you might too.
With love, Clare x