After paving the way for conscious luxury fashion since 2001, Stella McCartney is preparing to release a new vegan skin-care line, titled Stella. The news of McCartney’s evolution comes a month after Idris and Sabrina Elba’s release of their simple, three-part vegan beauty brand S’able Labs. McCartney’s new range – which she’s called a “responsible alternative to luxury [skin care]” – also includes three products – a cleanser, a serum, and a cream – and will be released in September.
The fashion designer is mostly known for her fur- and leather-free clothing and accessories, so it’s no surprise that her new skin-care range is vegan and cruelty-free.
McCartney herself is a lifelong vegetarian and has a “no animal” policy when creating her fashion items, which likely comes from the influence of her parents, animal rights activist Linda McCartney and Paul McCartney of The Beatles. As you’d expect from a member of the environmentalist McCartney family, every Stella product is sustainably produced. The ingredients, including organic rock samphire, biotechnological lingonberry extract, wild organic birch sap, and wild harvested dulse algae extract, are naturally sourced.
The packaging, from the bottle to the pump, has been created using recyclable and recycled materials. There’s also a refill system in place, giving you the option to top up your stash at a lower cost without buying totally new packaging. To put into context how beneficial this is for the environment: the first refill lowers the product’s environmental impact by a third, and the second refill lowers the impact by half. When the refill is used on its own, the impact on climate change is two-thirds lower. Sustainable and cost-effective? That’s a combo we love to see.
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It’s not McCartney’s first foray into the realm of beauty. She launched the organic skin-care line Care in 2007, which has since paused production and has created a string of fragrances since 2001, but Stella marks a fresh new direction for her. Scotland is an important thread in the brand’s DNA too. McCartney was influenced by memories from summer holidays as a child in Kintyre, Scotland (yep, that Kintyre from the Wings song “Mull of Kintyre”). “At the very start of the process, I asked myself, what was the cleanest, freshest, purest-feeling moment of my life? And I kept returning to how I felt every time I dove into the loch in the Mull of Kintyre. Whenever I was there, I knew something good was happening,” McCartney said. She added, “It was probably a challenge, but I wanted Scotland in a bottle.”
And Scotland in a bottle is what we got, even down to the smell. Infused with an uplifting and refreshing clove leaf, pine resin, and mentholated eucalyptus scent designed by renowned perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, a whiff of the products will surely transport you to the scenes of McCartney’s youth.
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Although the products aren’t what we’d call a bargain, the designer-turned-beauty-brand-owner has also committed to donating one per cent of net sales from Stella to the conservation organisation Wetlands International, which helps to protect Scotland’s peatlands. The peatlands make up 23 per cent of Scotland’s land mass, but almost 80 per cent of them are in a state of degradation right now. This long-term partnership hopes to reverse these figures.
Stella will be available to purchase from early September online and at the flagship Stella McCartney store on Old Bond Street in London. It will also be sold at Space NK from mid-September. Keep reading for a closer look at each of the products.
