How a disease changed everything
By SARA WERNER
(Co- Founder of Cocunat)
I have seen how the simple perfume of a store asphyxiated my mother, or how the dye of a T-shirt made us run to the hospital.
Generally, the first approach to toxic ingredients and awareness
of their effects usually comes from the field of chemistry and medicine. In my case, it was something more real and hard.
My mother has Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, a strange disease that those who suffer from it, detect all the toxic substances that are around us. At first I thought it was an allergy that my mother suffered from.
But as a result of getting in touch with doctors, scientists and researchers I was able to understand that everything that my mother experienced happens to all of us, too, but only years later.
This is how we get to the second engine that has governed my life: my soul as an activist.
I have always been the typical one who defended unjust causes at school, the one who staged protests at the institute... so through the research of great scientists* and hundreds of studies subsidized by the European Union I was able to verify that we are surrounded by toxic substances.
That the annual cost on diseases related to endocrine disruptors** is 150 billion euros in Europe and $370B in the United States and that although Europe’s regulation*** is one of the best, it is not enough because it does not correctly regulate the ingredients that are found in 4 places. One of them is cosmetics.
There are three things that have marked my life. The first is my mother.
And this is when we come to the third leitmotif of my life, entrepreneurship.
If you add that activist part to all the knowledge about toxic substances and their effects on our health and the environment,
I only had one option left, and that was to TAKE PART.
A concept that stops focusing on the origin of the ingredient and focuses on the safety of the substance. Contrary to all beliefs, I’ve learned that a synthetic ingredient can be as safe as a natural one, and an organic one can be as harmful as a toxic one.
And so, we focus on the best of both worlds: using only ingredients that have been scientifically proven to be safe to formulate cosmetics.This concept today has more than 2M searches per month and is used all over the globe to frame the new cosmetics, one that is safe for everyone and for the environment.
This is how we started, and after 5 years we are already selling in more than 70 countries, we have changed the lives of millions of women and our innovative formulations with clinically proven results have won more than 15 international beauty awards. Because we wanted not only to change the world, but to become the icebreaker of the industry and show that we could create better and more innovative products.
And so I created, together with my co-founder Ignasi Faus, Cocunat, the very first toxic-free cosmetics brand in the world.
All under a very simple but groundbreaking idea:
the TOXIC FREE concept.
*Some of the scientists on whom the European Union research is based: Dra. Philippa Darbre, Dr. Andreas Korternkamp, Dr. Nicolás Olea, Dr. Polyxeni Nicolopoulou-Stamati , Dr. Christopher Exley
**What is an endocrine disruptor? Endocrine disruptors are chemical substances capable of mimicking our hormones and, therefore, of altering the correct functioning of the body and negatively affecting our health, increasing certain types of cancer, obesity, infertility, diabetes, asthma and neurodevelopmental problems. For more information Link EU.
***We refer to the European regulations, although insufficient, at least it eliminates 1,300 ingredients. In contrast, in the United States the list is 13.
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