We are so pleased to have had the opportunity to include Matakana Skincare inside our October Glow Boxes. The Face Polisher is an all natural, beautiful product that we have received a lot of feedback about so far. It includes carefully selected ingredients, its a soft exfoliation, refining dead skin and opening pores with rice flour. This is gentle yet really effective and totally awesome for sensitive skin. There is also rosehip oil, so its loaded with Vitamin C and antioxidants. One comment that keeps coming back to us is the scent, it is enriched with Manuka honey, aloe vera gel and has olive oil, avocado oil, which makes this product one that will uplift your morning routine, and give your face a perfect level of exfoliation for this time of year.
We love Matakana, and have been lucky enough to be working with Lara over the last couple of months while she prepares for being included in our boxes. Matakana skincare is literally handmade, Lara doesn't have giant mixers, or commercial equipment, each ingredient is chosen based on its healing, nourishing, cleansing, hydrating, exfoliating or nurturing abilities, carefully combined with just the right amount of this and that, then the product is carefully mixed and blended and packaged, all in the heart of her home. It's totally natural. For someone who makes all of their products at home you can imagine that sending 1600 jars to us was quite the undertaking. Lara has done herself and her brand proud however, by delivering a product that not only works really well, but is beautiful to look at too, and with environmentally friendly packaging in a cute glass jar we love this brand and know that it will go far. Her goals for the brand would be to have everyone know about Matakana skincare “I want people to know what it is and talk about how delicious it is, I want to keep it affordable so people know they can have beautiful effective reasonable skincare that is good for you”. We have already had customers asking us if we are planning to include more in the future, but more on that later…
Lara juggles her family life around her growing business, and is regularly seen attending markets to promote her beautiful skincare range. Lara has a degree in health science majoring in acupuncture - she practices acupuncture in 2 clinics, two days a week and absolutely loves it. She has been using Matakana Skincare for a while but she only took on the company in April this year, she brought the business from Paula Friis, who developed a good foundation of skincare recipes, a range which Lara has built on and expanded to over 20 handmade products. Lara is s a super busy business woman who juggles 2 boys, a household, hand making beautiful skincare in her own kitchen, working as an acupuncturist and in any spare time, and juggling markets, stalls and events to promote her natural products. She has a wonderfully supportive husband who works behind the scenes on the website, and Lara says he is the “IT person”. We get approached by a lot of emerging brands, and will sit this one aside was that when Lara sent us her samples we try them immediately and could instantly feel a difference to our skin, I had the opportunity to try the face polisher first and was really pleased with the results and also as a massive lover of natural products, this one ticked all the boxes and I really wanted to include it for our customers.
Exfoliation is so important, and if you can sneak this product into your routine every couple of days you will notice that your skin feels smoother and softer. Part of the reason exfoliating at this time of the year is a key to your pre-summer beauty routine, is because overwinter our skin dries out. Even though there is often moisture in the air, we experience environments with heating and then the harshness of the cold, which means our skin takes a lot through the coldest months. Exfoliating will help renew your face, by gently scrubbing away dead skin, to reveal a shiny, healthy, beautiful you.
The glow box was all about products to leave you going from the inside out, and the face polisher is the perfect accessory to a box to help preview for the warmer months. Lara says its important to make sure your exfoliants aren’t too rough for the face, its different to the body. If you do want to get your hands on some of the face polisher, you can head on over to Matakana Skincare and check them out for yourself.