100% Natural, Australian Made Vegan and Cruelty Free
After discovering the incredible healing powers of Australian Wadi-Wadi Jojoba, Vicki Engsall Co-Founded The Jojoba Company with her father in 2008. While most skincare attempts to overwrite the natural functions of our skin, Jojoba is made just like your skin’s oil, so it helps skin behave as it was always designed to do. Since the brands inception, Vicki has worked with expert formulators to ensure every product aligns with her own personal ethos of being safe, sustainable and efficacious, and contains only the purest Australian Wadi-Wadi Jojoba grown on the family farm, Beresford in Yenda, South Western New South Wales.
Now a member of the Australian Society of Cosmetic Chemists, Vicki is an expert in her field with an intrinsic knowledge of the way skin works, how certain ingredients interact with the skin and the specific formulations required to deliver results without causing irritation.
As the main ambassador for The Jojoba Company and an industry expert, Vicki is often called upon by top beauty and lifestyle journalists for editorial commentary. Her expert advice and The Jojoba Company products have been featured in Body + Soul, Mamamia, Vogue, ELLE, Grazia and Vogue.
We spoke with Vicki and gained some insights into her daily skincare rituals and what’s next for this iconic Australian skincare brand.
My dad had been growing a unique strain of jojoba called Wad-Wadi on his Beresford Farm in Yenda in South Western NSW since the Year 2000. In 2008 he harvested his first crop. It was this first crop that was the driver to creating a skin care range based around this amazing ingredient. Jojoba is an amazing ingredient for skin care products as it works as a carrier to carry other active ingredients deeper into the skin, provides a great skin feel and is rich in vitamins, omegas and is teeming with antioxidants. Jojoba is the only plant in the plant kingdom to produce liquid wax in its seeds rather than oil. This unique liquid wax is the closest botanical match to our skin’s own natural oil so it is able to help the skin to help itself and activate the skin’s natural intelligence. It suits any skin type at any age or stage of life. In fact it suits 1 billion different skin types.
Clean beauty has been at the core of our business since it began 12 years ago. To us, clean beauty means using only safe, sustainable and green ingredients in our formulations with no nasty chemicals or fragrances and certainly no animal derivatives. It also means creating packaging that is making a minimal impact on our waste by creating packaging that is recyclable or even compostable or re useable. For us though, it starts at our farm where we have always and continue to strive to improve the sustainable practices from the growing of the actual plant to the harvesting process, through to protecting the soil to ensure that the quality and life contained within the soil maintained through to our water use. Being clean is very important to us and one of our core values.
The biggest challenge for us so far would have to be when we first started out, educating people on firstly how to say jojoba (ho ho ba) and secondly what exactly it is and why it is so unique. Although jojoba has been around for centuries and was used by the native Americans in the Arizona Desert as well as being an ingredient used in skin care for years, many people were still unaware of the benefits of jojoba and its wide variety of uses for so many different skin types and conditions. This was a challenge I readily accepted and today I very rarely meet anyone who hasn’t heard of jojoba or actually even tried it.
My proudest moment at The Jojoba Company would have to be just 2 months ago when we moved into our brand-new premises for our office and warehouse. Looking back to 12 years ago when our office was my loungeroom with just 3 of us working to create our brand to today with a large lovely modern office and warehouse with an expanding team of over 30 people. The office is beautiful with pops of yellow and grey to represent our brand colours with natural timbers and it is a symbol to me of how far we have come and I am just so proud.
My morning skin care begins with cleansing my skin in the shower. At the moment I am using our new activating cleansing oil because I am addicted to it but I do interchange with our jojoba bead cleanser as well. When I get out of the shower, I towel dry my face and body and then apply our pure Wad-Wadi jojoba all over my body. At that stage I then apply the ultimate serum to my face. Once my serum has completely disappeared, I apply the youth potion then eye balm and then ultimate day cream and finally our Multi defence Moisturiser SPF 15. I love my morning regime so much and my skin feels so soft, hydrated and protected all day.
The one night-time beauty essential I can’t do without is the Ultimate Night cream. I look forward to it every night. It is thick, lush and is full of anti-aging benefits such as actually thickening your skin as you sleep to decrease deep vertical wrinkles and fine lines and wrinkles. I love the way my skin feels in the morning after using this night cream.
Ultimate Night Cream
The advice I would give my younger self would be to start using jojoba as young as possible. One of the best ways to maintain youthful skin is to maintain the lipid ratio in the skin. From the age of 22, the skin begins to lose its wax ester content and the ratio of lipids in the skin can go out of balance. Skin that lacks wax esters or is out of balance from a lipid perspective is skin that is going to age prematurely. Keeping skin hydrated in with the correct lipids is something I have learnt to be key in defying aging in the skin. Between keeping my skin moisturised with good quality, well balanced lipids and keeping out of the sun, would be the best advice to give my younger self when it comes to skin care.
There is always something new at the Jojoba Company and we are always either reformulating existing products to make them even better or adding new, relevant products to our range. This year, we have just updated our Ultimate Serum, already a best seller, to include a sustainable, vegan collagen which is human identical and outperforms retinol in its ability to stimulate collagen in the skin. We have another reformulation coming out in a couple of months as well as the most amazing eye product that I am just so excited about. As well as these new products, we have expanded our farm, planting and additional 10 hectares of new baby jojoba plants to keep up with the demand. We are so busy here at the Jojoba Company and there is always something new to get excited about.
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