Sonia Bainbridge came to skincare from an unusual direction, with a background in pharmacology and a deep suspicion of the word natural, which by the time she started looking properly had been stretched so thin by the supplement industry that it had stopped meaning very much at all. She kept turning over bottles that promised purity and finding them packed with synthetically made vitamins, and somewhere in that frustration the idea for Raw Beauty Lab took shape.
What she wanted was a skin supplement she could actually stand behind, built from whole plant ingredients rather than lab-made copies of them, and so she went and made one. The result was a vegan collagen formula designed to support skin from the inside, and within about six months of launching it a major women's magazine had named it the best of its kind in the country.
The thinking behind the brand is what she calls ageing backwards through wholefoods, drawing on a long body of research into the plants that genuinely move the needle on skin and energy. It is a properly considered piece of work from someone who understands the science well enough to refuse to dress up something hollow as something pure.
She has carried the same care through to the things a brand can quite easily cut corners on, using recyclable kraft packaging and planting a tree for every order that leaves the door, so the environmental cost of looking after yourself stays low.
Raw Beauty Lab earns its place on Women's Work because it is exactly the kind of brand we exist to put in front of people, founded by a woman who knew her subject well enough to call out the nonsense in her own industry and then build the better version herself.