This Brooklyn brand is making vegan beauty chic
Imagery: Courtesy of Alder New York
Words: Sarah Tarca // @tarca
Alder New York Black Obsidian Face Roller, $55 and Gua Sha Tool, $40
Clean beauty has come a long was since the patchouli-laced potions of the ‘90s. But, despite the meteoric rise of clean and green brands its group aesthetic has often left a lot to be desired.
Alder New York , however, was not having a bar of that. Launched in 2016 by former fashion designers Nina Zilka and David J. Krause, every one of their products is a sleek, minimalist delight of monotones, glossy black accents, sans serif fonts and black obsidian –the kinds of things that beg for an artsy flat lay on instagram.
But here’s the thing: they’re also vegan. And actively genderless. And free from a range of “dirty” ingredients including propylene, parabens, polysorbates, formaldehyde, silicones, phthalates, synthetic dyes or fragrances, mineral oil, retinyl palmitate, oxybenzone, coal tar, PEGs, SLS, SLES, EDTA, BHA, BHT, hydroquinone, triclosan, and triclocarban. All of which you may expect from a green brand but not from something that looks as sleek as Alder New York. The brand has singlehandedly proven that “clean beauty” and “chic” are not mutually exclusive.
Their latest launch is a facial cleansing brush, with gentle vegan nylon bristles designed to stimulate the skin and increase blood flow to boost the efficiency of your cleanser, turning even the most mundane of tasks (cleansing) into a mini self-care ritual. This sits alongside their other sleek beauty tools including a black obsidian gua sha tool and face roller, and an all-purpose comb made from 100 per cent post cosumer recycled plastic.
We grabbed five minutes with CEO and Co-Founder Nina Zilka recently to talk about our new favourite brand, and how they managed to marry clean beauty, and a clean aesthetic without compromising on their conscience – or efficacy.
Tell us a little about your former life as designers, and how it led you to Alder New York:
David and I have always been drawn to each other’s aesthetic, and we had a clothing clothing line together for over a decade. During this time, we both became passionate about clean personal care, after learning about the lack of regulation in the cosmetics industry and the harmful chemicals that are so often used. We saw that while there were a lot of crunchier looking clean personal care products we could buy, none matched our sleek aesthetic, or had the ease of use and functionality we wanted. So, in 2016 we launched Alder New York as a truly clean, vegan, genderless skincare and haircare line that is as chic as it is effective.
What comes first aesthetics or efficacy?
Efficacy comes first without question, because good design is always about the functionality of the product. It doesn’t matter how nice a product looks, if it doesn’t work, you’re not going to use it – and then we’ve just created more waste. So for us the way a product feels and works is always the first thing we focus on and then perfect.
“Efficacy comes first,without question, because good design is always about the functionality of the product”
facial tools are having a bit of a moment. How did you decide which ones to launch?
Our goal is always to create a product that can seamlessly integrate into our customer’s daily experience. With the facial tools we’ve launched- our gua sha, facial roller, and facial cleansing brush – we were drawn to the incredible benefits they impart in sculpting your face, improving lymphatic drainage, and helping to boost collagen.
With the facial cleansing brush, we launched it because our Everyday Face Cleanser is one of our hero products, so we wanted to provide a tool that would help to elevate and enhance our customer’s cleansing routine. We created the Cleansing Facial Brush as a sleek, beautiful object that can both sit out on your shelf, and also help to boost product efficiency as well as massaging the skin.
Alder New York Cleansing Facial Brush, $26 (USD)
Why did you choose black obsidian in your roller and gua sha?
Our reasoning was two fold. One is that black obsidian is a beautiful looking stone. Black obsidian is also believed to be a protective stone, excellent at clearing cosmic fog, which drew us to it as a material. We also consciously chose not to offer the roller and gua sha in other stones as our goal is to streamline your skincare routine.
Why was it important for you to be a vegan brand?
Beyond the obvious choice to avoid animal cruelty, we believe that living a vegan lifestyle is one of the best things one can do in their everyday life to reduce their CO2 emissions and help curb climate change. The way we see it, there isn’t a reason to have animal products in your skincare and wellness routine – there’s no benefit to it. Yes, there are (many) other vegan brands on the market, but we have a much more stringent list of dirty ingredients we don’t use than many other brands, and we’re constantly updating that list based on the latest science. One of the benefits of being a smaller brand is that we have nimbleness to adjust and continue to make our product formulations the cleanest they can be. Other brands don’t have the knowledge or ability to keep being the cleanest on the market.
