Influencers have professionalized this form of self-presentation and set standards. They even make good money cultivating a lifestyle and creating trends. More than 95 million pictures are shared on Instagram every day. Influencers fulfill longings and awaken them at the same time. This not only applies to lifestyle, but also to looks.

Even if everything is staged, from the scenery to your own posture, in the end the goal is to make everything look as natural as possible. Consequently, beauty looks that become trends are perfect, but usually more natural. The so-called Instagram face shows perfect skin, high cheeks, large eyes, long eyelashes. Anyone who wasn’t born with the perfect complexion knows how difficult it is to create a natural look. Added to that, we live in a time when psychological stress is an integral part of our everyday life. This can have a large impact on how we look. In addition, there are many external factors and environmental influences that also have a negative effect on our skin.

Gone are the days when such symptoms were simply covered with a thick layer of makeup. This neither looks natural nor does it solve the problem. Modern consumers are not interested anymore in just covering problematic skin, they now know a lot more about their skin. It is important to keep it healthy, when skin is healthy it is as beautiful as it can be and when skin is beautiful we feel good about it. You can learn that too on social media – from beauty influencers, but also from cosmetic brands.

As it is for individual people, social media can be a powerful tool for cosmetic brands as well. Social media is a platform where people not only present themselves, they also want to be part of a community with their cultivated lifestyle, in which they feel comfortable and they want to be inspired by others.

For cosmetic brands, social media can be a great place to present themselves to their target groups and to get into a conversation with them at the same time. Mintel says 50% of Gen Z consumers check their Instagram multiple times per day. 53% of younger teens (aged 13-14) and 66% of older teens (aged 15-17) visit Instagram daily. Now beauty influencers are more important than a personal consultation in a shop. 70% of women agree that they learned about a product or service from a social media account they follow. Spending time on social media channels is the new normal, consumers connect with companies online which match their life stage and attitude.

Creating customer loyalty is not easy, though. Modern consumers are extremely demanding. Especially when it comes to topics such as sustainability, company philosophy, product safety and effectiveness. Consumers expect that the attitude and image of a company is reflected in the company’s policies and ways with which it acts and produces its products. Many consumers see or think to see contradictions between the promises made by a company and its actions. This is in analogy with a well-known phenomenon in the cosmetic industry, ‘green washing’ where products are presented as being ‘natural’ whereas, in reality, they are not.  No matter what, for a company aiming to be successful, authenticity, transparency and honesty are essential in order to connect with a community online. The ‘snowball effect’ of such a connection can be enormous as members of a community are invaluable as multipliers for a company’s message.

It’s not just the brand that has to keep its promises, the products too. The best brand doesn’t work if its products don’t meet the needs of the consumer. Good marketing generates interest, but product performance wins loyal customers. In the cosmetic industry, in order to achieve this, active ingredients are of great value.  On the one hand they help to achieve the desired effects, on the other hand they help companies in meeting the goals they have put in place within their company philosophy.

For us at CLR, the focus has always been on products that are highly effective, safe and natural. Added to these high standards, we also have a clearly defined corporate ethic. We want to deliver quality. This laid down in our ISO 9001 certification, which describes the processes with which we work and produce our products. This is supported by our GMP-certified ways of producing our products. Hygiene and reproducibility are of extremely high importance when making natural active ingredients. Our ISO 14001 certification is immensely important to us. We monitor and improve the environmental consequences of all our actions. This was recently awarded with a gold status at Ecovadis. In accordance with this, many of our products are Cosmos and Natrue-certified. Lastly, social responsibility is a great good for us, not just locally, at our offices, labs and production facilities, but also at our suppliers. Our SA8000 certification helps us in achieving our goals and develop further

The context of everything we do is, what we call, ‘relevant science’. We want to do things right and make no compromises. The science should always be there, but the science should lead to relevant and perceivable effects for the consumer. Our active ingredients are sustainably obtained from natural sources or produced with biotechnological means. Elaborate in vitro cell biological studies are performed to establish scientific proof of efficacy and clinical in vivo studies provide knowledge about both the objective effectiveness of our products as well as our active ingredients’ relevance for the personal care consumer.

Great efficacy and safety can only be achieved based on the latest scientific knowledge about skin and all the aspects associated with it, for instance the skin microbiome. Our innovations are focused on providing health, biological balance and homeostasis to the skin. When skin is healthy, it is attractive, feels good and is immunologically robust.

This makes our active ingredients the ideal choice for strong brands that want to satisfy a demanding community and the ideal choice for modern consumers who always want to present themselves from their best side with healthy skin – whether digitally or in real life.