Beauty Of 5: KLUR Is The Black-Owned And Sustainable Skincare Brand Making Way For Diverse Representation In The Clean Beauty World

Being one of KLUR’s most innovative products, Thornton shared that Skin Soil was one of the first ideas she had to help the brand start a conversation around sustainability. When she developed the product around five or six years ago, the mass usage of microbeads – spheres of plastic often found in skincare products like scrubs – was even more popular than it is today.

Skin Soil proves itself as a more sustainable alternative to microbead-based products because people can use it with a cleanser they already own and create a “fully customizable” experience for themselves no matter what their cleanser’s base is. Thornton suggests using it once a week so you don’t over-exfoliate the skin. If that advice is noted, the product should last anywhere from six months to a year.

“This is a blend of rice bran, dry herbs, refined grains, and MSM that you mix with your cleanser,” she shared. “It can be an oil cleanser, it can be a gel cleanser, it just needs to be something that can really absorb all the ingredients. Instead of cleansing and then using a separate scrub, you’re literally cleansing with something the skin already agrees with, because you already know your cleanser.”

“The idea was to give you something fully customizable. You don’t have to use a physical exfoliator every single day, but when you do, it can be a customizable experience with the cleanser you’re already using so that you’re introducing less products to your skin.”

“We’re basically using these ingredients to cleanse the skin without any extra additives on top of that. This is strictly all the exfoliating particles you would need to get a mechanical, physical exfoliation of the skin. You don’t really need all of the other ingredients that come in a ‘typical exfoliator’ except the actual particles.”

Telling me more about MSM, which is one of the product’s key ingredients, Thornton described it as “so skin-strengthening” and “such an underappreciated ingredient.” It’s an organic sulfur compound that’s naturally found in our bodies, in places like our knees, in our joints, and in our hair. Speaking to the ingredient’s detoxifying properties, Thornton said, “A lot of people focus on collagen, but think of MSM as collagen’s sister. It facilitates pushing waste out of the cell so it’s actually the only thing that can detoxify the skin. MSM is the only ingredient that can remove waste out of skin cells.”