Better Skin, Brighter Life: Inside the World of Clean Beauty Club.
Meet Emma & Aminah, the creative and compassionate founders of The Clean Beauty Club a UK-based skincare brand redefining beauty with a 100% natural, joy-filled approach rooted in self-care, creativity, and community. Lifelong friends who met over two decades ago at Glasgow School of Art, they’ve transformed their passion for design and wellness into a lifestyle movement that nourishes both skin and spirit. Hand-blending every product in the UK, their curated range—from the cult-favourite Wonder Balm to the glow-boosting Serums, Mist, and Mask—is made without fillers, preservatives or synthetic additives, offering potent, holistic skincare that’s as kind to the planet as it is to your face. In this interview, Emma and Aminah share how their love for balance over perfection, and laughter alongside lymphatic massage, has built a brand that helps others feel better in their skin—naturally.
Your brand is deeply rooted in holistic well-being and joy. How did your backgrounds in art and design influence the way you approach skincare formulation and branding?
From our experience, art and design tend to be about the way people feel. The reason we create art and seek out beautiful design is because we want to be in an environment that makes us feel a certain way. So, we looked at our skincare branding, formulation—really everything to do with the business—from that same perspective. What is it we want people to feel? What is it our products are capable of making people feel? And then, of course, the best design functions incredibly well – otherwise, it’s just something pretty to look at. We wanted to make sure the products we make feel incredible because they work, and you can rely on them.
Many skincare brands focus on clinical results, but The Clean Beauty Club emphasises a more emotional and joyful connection to skincare. Why was this philosophy so important to you, and how do you see it resonating with your customers?
For us, you can look at skincare as something that’s there to fix a problem, but we feel like most of those problems don’t exist. Your skin is not a problem; it’s something to be celebrated, something we want to care for and look after. When we present our skin as a problem, then we must find a solution, and that, I think, goes deeper into everything we are. As women, we are done with that story. Instead, we focus on that emotional, joyful connection to skincare in the same way we focus on emotional, joyful connections to ourselves, to self-care, to love, to happiness, and to having a beautiful life. That’s far more important to us than altering the way we look for some external validation.
Your products are 100% natural, hand-blended, and free from fillers or synthetic additives. What were some of the biggest challenges in maintaining these high standards while ensuring effectiveness?
When we were developing the products, the biggest challenge was reminding ourselves constantly that our job wasn’t to create an alternative to every product out there on the market. What was important to us was to make products that we could create in a 100% natural, free-from-fillers, and synthetic-additives way, while still being incredibly potent and powerful. If we’d tried to make all the products on the market to deal with every single skin type or address every single issue someone might have with their skin, we would’ve ended up creating products that didn’t meet the standards we demand from our range. So, for us, it’s all about making a core range that is truly, truly transformational rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
You mentioned that stress and joy impact the skin. Can you share some insights into how lifestyle factors influence skin health and how your products support overall well-being?
We’ve always loved looking at skincare from a holistic perspective because skin is the largest organ in your body, and if we just look at it as skin, we miss so much. What we discovered was that we were developing something incredible to put on the outside of the skin to help nourish it and make it the best it can be. However, when you’re experiencing very high levels of stress, those impacts are coming from the inside out. So, we’ve looked at lots of ways to help from the inside too.
We got particularly into EFT, hypnotherapy, and facial massage—things that support reducing your body’s cortisol levels so your body can be able to repair itself naturally. When we’re in very stressful situations, that excess cortisol stops our body from repairing and maintaining itself the way it otherwise would because it essentially turns off those repair and maintenance jobs within the body, deeming them less important than everything else. If we can help you from the outside with our skincare and from the inside with processes like tapping, hypnotherapy, and massage, then that really excites us.
Sustainability is a key pillar of The Clean Beauty Club. How do you ensure your brand stays eco-friendly while delivering high-performance skincare? Are there any future sustainability initiatives you’re particularly excited about?
Sustainability was very important to us because, when we had a bath and body range before The Clean Beauty Club, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to keep filling plastic bottles. It was something that made us very uncomfortable. When we moved to The Clean Beauty Club and decided to focus on these really incredible core products, it wasn’t enough for us to just be as eco-friendly and sustainable as we could be. We wanted to take it one step further.
So, if something can be very recyclable—like an aluminium tin—then it will be. But we also made the decision to take it even further and plant a tree for every single order. We wanted to, first, do as little harm as possible, and then also put something back into the world to make it an even better place.
What’s really important as well is the number of, for example, makeup wipes and other harmful skincare solutions that people might have used but no longer need thanks to Wonder Balm. It’s extraordinary. One small tin of Wonder Balm will last someone an entire month, and a big one will last three months. Over those 90 days, someone might have used three or four makeup wipes a day, and we’re eradicating all of that, which is incredible. It’s about not doing harm and also putting more good into the world because we have children, and we want them to live in a place where the earth is being looked after and is a lovely place to be.
For more information visit The Clean Beauty Club here.
Lilly Light