10-minutes with founder and CEO of The Beauty Chef, Carla Oates

If there’s a brand taking the health & wellness scene by storm, it’s well and truly The Beauty Chef. Founded by Carla Oates, The Beauty Chef was formulated to help heal inner gut health issues, after personally suffering from eczema and allergies in her teenage years.

Learning first hand that beauty begins in the belly®, Carla became passionate about raising awareness of the link between beauty and gut health.

From creating a number of game-changer inner beauty and wellness products to being editor of the Wellbeing Beauty Book, the natural beauty columnist for Wellbeing Magazine, a Goodwill Ambassador for Australian Organic and winning the beauty category at the Instyle & Audi Women of Style Awards in Australia in 2017 – Carla’s wealth of accomplishment speak directly to the quality of her products.

Keen to know more? Keep reading to learn all about Carla’s inspiring story and to discover every product you’re about to obsess over (if you aren’t already!).

Tell us a little bit about your brand: the backstory? the inspiration?

About 19 years ago, I was working as a beauty editor for a mainstream newspaper and I became concerned with the number of toxic chemicals in skincare. I’ve always been interested in holistic health and wellbeing, so I started researching natural alternatives and the benefits of looking after your skin with clean ingredients and plant compounds that can rejuvenate the skin from the inside, out. I decided to start writing only about natural and organic health and beauty.

I’d also had eczema as a child and as a teenager, I worked with a naturopath who dramatically changed my diet. The effect this had on my skin was profound and from there, I understood the link between what you put in your body and good health – and good skin. Then, around 10 years ago, my daughter experienced similar skin issues so it led me to research what might be causing them. After investigating various studies that looked at the connection between the food we eat, our gut health and our skin health, I put my family on a gut-healing protocol. This included lots of probiotic-rich, lacto-fermented wholefoods and after including these in our diet regularly, our skin and overall wellbeing improved dramatically.

Friends and family started asking me what I was doing differently and why I looked to ‘glowy’ and from there, I began to understand the power of the gut/skin connection. This was the birth of The Beauty Chef, I began Lacto-fermenting foods in my kitchen at home and this eventually led to the creation of GLOW™, the world’s first living, bio-fermented, probiotic inner beauty product and created a whole new category of ingestible beauty products. The Beauty Chef was the first beauty brand to focus on cultivating good gut health for healthy skin – pioneering the philosophy of ‘Beauty From The Inside Out’ and ‘Beauty Begins in the Belly®’.

How would you describe the brand in 3 words?

Innovative. Efficacious. Authentic.

What do you hope people experience/ benefit from taking the product?

Just like you have a daily outer beauty routine, The Beauty Chef products are designed to work synergistically together as a complete Inner Beauty Routine™ to promote gut health and beauty from the inside, out. They are also intended to be products that fit seamlessly into your lifestyle to support your skin, health and wellbeing long-term. My philosophy – beauty begins in the belly – is at the heart of our brand and aside from promoting radiant skin, all of our formulas work to nourish your gut health. This means that long-term users of The Beauty Chef report clearer, firmer, more glowing skin, balanced digestion, more energy and healthy, strong hair and nails.

What’s a fun fact about the brand nobody knows about The Beauty Chef?

The Beauty Chef’s COLLAGEN Inner Beauty Boost™ doesn’t actually contain collagen but has been scientifically formulated to help increase collagen production! Collagen has undoubtedly become a buzzword in the health and beauty industry and there are now a myriad of collagen supplements available – including animal protein, marine collagen, collagen powder, hydrolyzed collagen, collagen peptides. What is distinctive about our COLLAGEN™ however, is that it is a totally plant-based, vegan collagen supplement which is designed to support our body’s natural production and synthesis of collagen to boost skin health. We don’t use collagen as an ingredient, instead, we employ ingredients that help to both boost collagen synthesis and protect collagen from degradation. The vitamin C and ellagic acid from bio-fermented berries, papaya and pomegranate alongside grape seed extract, zinc, and probiotics, are all-powerful ingredients that help with collagen health.

When it comes to the health of our skin, this is incredibly important as while our bodies naturally produce collagen, our ability to do so declines as we age. The skin is also made up of 75–80 percent collagen – which is the protein that keeps our skin smooth, firm and plump. Traditionally our bodies produce collagen by combining amino acids – found in protein-rich foods – with essential vitamins and minerals such as vitamin C, copper and zinc and its these essential nutrients which are found in abundance in The Beauty Chef’s COLLAGEN™.

Talk to us about the production of the product: Where are you based? How do you test/trial the product?

All The Beauty Chef products are manufactured within Australia and we are proud to support local businesses. There are some great local producers that we partner with for example, the papaya in our ANTIOXIDANT Inner Beauty Boost™ is grown organically in Far North Queensland and our legumes, seeds and grains on a bio-dynamic farm in Australia.

I also work with a team of leading microbiologists, naturopaths and nutritionists who help me to develop our inner beauty formulas using cutting-edge science and new ingredients. As a brand, we are constantly looking to improve our bio-fermentation process and we are always delving into the latest research into the correlation between gut health, certain strains of bacteria and how they can impact not only the health of our skin, but our overall health and wellbeing too.

Shop The Beauty Chef here

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the beauty chefhealthy lifestylecollagenhealthy lifegut healthhealth benefitsinterviewhealth