Expired products. Half-used serums. A lineup of bottles I kept “just in case.”
At some point, tossing another barely used cleanser into the trash started to make my skin crawl. My Toronto condo bathroom was overflowing — cluttered shelves, wasted formulas, and a nagging awareness that beauty was broken.

Having started my career in the beauty industry, I knew what I was really staring at: a fraction of the 120 billion units of packaging waste the industry creates every year. I also knew the secret behind those heavy bottles — most of what’s inside them is just water. Eighty to ninety percent of shampoos, body washes, and conditioners are water. We’re literally paying to ship water around the world, burning CO₂ from trucks and planes carrying bulky bottles that make no sense.

And it gets worse when you look at the labels. Many of those formulas are filled with sulfates, parabens, phthalates, silicones, dyes, and other chemicals that don’t belong on skin. I’d worked behind the scenes long enough to know that beauty’s pursuit of “more” — more foam, more scent, more shelf appeal — came at the cost of both people and planet.

That realization turned into an obsession:
What if skincare could be just as effective — but designed responsibly from the start?

That question became Glow Green Co., the world’s first beauty brand where every formula saves at least 90 percent water, CO₂, or is made with over 90 percent upcycled ingredients.

To make it real, I left Toronto and moved to Brantford, a quieter town where I could focus entirely on building something from the ground up. No distractions, no shortcuts. Just purpose, patience, and a lot of learning.

It took two and a half years to develop our first formulas with the world’s best chemists from France and Italy. There were countless failures — compostable packaging that disintegrated too soon, stability tests that collapsed overnight. There were tears, sleepless nights, and moments when I questioned if anyone even wanted what we were building. But every failed batch was a lesson in resilience.

The first product to make it into the world was the ReNuNü Powder-to-Cream Body Wash.
It started with a simple idea: remove the water, and you remove the waste. Each 75-gram sachet turns into 650 millilitres of rich, creamy, pH-balanced cleanser when you add water at home. By doing that, we eliminate water from production, cut 89 percent of transport emissions, and save two litres of water per unit. The formula itself blends coconut-derived cleansers that gently remove impurities, kaolin clay to detoxify, and natural sugars that hydrate long after you rinse. Packaged in compostable refills with a reusable bottle, it’s proof that performance and planet-friendly design can coexist beautifully.

Once customers embraced that ritual — shaking the powder into a creamy wash — they began asking, “What about my face?”

That led to our second launch, the Full On Hydration Face Moisturizer.
It’s built on a patented Mediterranean superfood formula made with 96 percent upcycled ingredients — lemon, carrot, pumpkin, leek, pomegranate, and orange — some of the most nutrient-dense plants on Earth. We rescue pomegranate peels from juice facilities in Italy, orange rinds and pulp from restaurants, and vegetable scraps from nearby farms, transforming what would have been agricultural waste into skincare gold.

Through a fusion of skin science, food science, and circular innovation, we preserved over 100 bioactives that hydrate, calm, and strengthen the skin barrier. The result is a fragrance-free, dermatologist-tested moisturizer that delivers deep, matte hydration and feeds skin essential nutrients without irritation.

Together, these two products form our belief system: real results, minimal waste.

Building Glow Green Co. has been equal parts magic and mayhem. There were days I thought we wouldn’t make it — when a compostable film failed, or a shipment got lost, or funding ran low. But then came the day I’ll never forget that we went viral on TikTok.

I sat on my couch in Brantford watching the views climb into the millions, comments flooding in from people saying “Finally!” and “This makes sense!” I cried — not because of the sales, but because it felt like proof that the world was ready. Canadians were ready. People cared.

They just needed someone to give them better choices.

Because it’s never been the consumer’s fault that waste exists — it’s the corporations that haven’t provided better alternatives.

Today, when I look at our growing community — people refilling instead of tossing, customers writing to say our moisturizer is the only one that doesn’t break them out — I feel profound gratitude. Gratitude that the quiet conviction I had in that tiny Toronto bathroom turned into something real.

Glow Green Co. isn’t perfect. But it’s proof that beauty can evolve — that science, sustainability, and self-care can live in harmony. My shelves today are nearly empty, intentionally so. Every product earns its space. Every bottle is designed to give back more than it takes.

And that, to me, is what beauty should be: thoughtful, functional, and kind.