This new beauty brand has transformed my acne-prone skin and I can’t stop talking about it
IMAGE VIA @CAITEMMABURKE/INSTAGRAM
WORDS BY CAIT EMMA BURKE
“Over the last month and a half, the hormonal acne I regularly get on my chin, jawline and neck has all but disappeared.”
Working in editorial, we receive countless PR packages every week. And while this is a perk of the job I’ll simply never tire of (receiving a package is always exciting) it does mean it takes a lot for a brand or product to stand out. This is particularly the case with beauty brands. Even someone with a passing interest in beauty will know that the market is oversaturated.
Almost every day there’s a new brand being announced, often ones that provide products for parts of your body you didn’t even realise needed skincare. I don’t think I’ll be able to take it if another male celebrity – particularly one who’s never publicly spoken about skincare, makeup or anything of the sort – announces his misguided foray into the beauty space.
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So when you’ve had the privilege of trialling such a breadth of brands and products, what makes something stand out? For me, the packaging is a big one. While we shouldn’t judge a product by its casing, I’m much more likely to reach for something if it’s housed in a pleasing bottle. When it comes to PR packages, I don’t gravitate towards over-the-top, ostentatious packaging – if anything FJ prefers brands to send items in as little packaging as possible, to minimise waste.
So when a small, mysteriously heavy package arrived in the office from a new botanical beauty brand, Raaie, I was intrigued. Inside, there was a travertine stone tray (hence the heaviness) and two skincare products, the Morning Dew Vitamin C Serum and the Yellow Moonbeam Retinal Elixir. The packaging was so exquisite that we all huddled around to take it in in all its sculptural glory.
For the last six weeks, I’ve been trialling the products that reside in these refillable vessels. They have pride of place on my mantelpiece, sitting pretty on their tray (a true testament to the power of aesthetically pleasing packaging). There’s no way to write this without it sounding wildly hyperbolic, but Raaie’s products have literally changed my skin. I use the Vitamin C Serum every morning and the Yellow Moonbeam Retinal every second evening and over the last month and a half, the hormonal acne I regularly get on my chin, jawline and neck has all but disappeared.
As someone who’s struggled with acne for most of my life (albeit in a much more manageable, low-key way since taking Accutane as a teenager), this is obviously a huge development. The simplicity and efficacy of these products – there’s also been a noticeable reduction in redness and hyperpigmentation and an overall improvement in my skin tone – have made me a full-blown, fanatical Raaie convert.
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The brand’s founder, Katey Mandy, spent her childhood re-wilding her family farm in New Zealand, so is intimately familiar with the country’s native botanicals. After years spent working in London and New York building beauty brands for other people, she returned home to her family farm and found herself surrounded by the plants she’d grown up with, which sparked the idea for Raaie.
Katey tells me she wanted to create “… a beauty brand that combined everything I’d learned abroad with all the richness that we have down here. A brand that used our unique botanicals – plants that thrive despite extremely high UV levels and produce extremely high levels of antioxidants as a result – with the latest in cosmeceutical science”.
I’m not the only one who’s raving about the brand, either. The reviews on Raaie’s website are overwhelmingly positive and are predominantly five stars. So what sets these formulations, and more broadly this brand, apart? “Through research, I found that a lot of actives were either unproven or in such small quantities that they don’t make any difference to your skin. I wanted to make products with proven efficacy so I leaned on ingredients with years of data behind them,” Katey tells me.
“Another thing that sets us apart is that we have a minimal approach to skincare, as reflected in our packaging, and our simple AM/PM treatments. The beauty industry as a whole encourages conspicuous consumption with overstacked ‘shelfies’ and multi-step skincare regimes. But we believe in conscious consumption. That means less packaging, less waste, and less time and effort.”
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Katey explains that this ethos fed into the design process, too. “I wanted the bottles to feel like vessels that you might keep sacred potions in. Then, as the process continued we started feeling the pull of nature and we ended up with these minimal vessels that feel almost like pebbles or stones. The minimalism works well with our minimal approach to skincare and the bottles blend into any decor and don’t scream at you from the vanity.”
Creating skincare packaging that consumers want to have on display is no small feat, but it was a necessary approach when creating a beauty brand that offers refills. While I’ve yet to run out of either product, I’m interested to hear more about how it all works.
“I’ve tried to make the process of returning bottles easy so that as many people as possible do it. You just email us your address and we will send you a pre-paid courier collection label for you to print out. Attach it to any box, put your old bottles in and let us know when you want them collected. The courier picks them up and brings them back to us for refilling. And we even send you a 20 per cent off code as a thank you,” Katey explains.
And while Raaie is still a relatively new brand, it’s already gaining global recognition and in 2022 became the first New Zealand brand to win gold in the UK’s Pure Beauty Awards. I’m not surprised. Over the last few weeks, I’ve received more compliments on my skin than ever before and keep catching myself admiring my glowy visage in every reflective surface. If my wildly impressive results and the hundreds of effusive customer reviews are anything to go by, Raaie’s a brand to keep your eyes on.
Find out more about Raaie and shop the range here.
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