How clean are your beauty products? With skincare co-founder Natalia Monnard - Episode 61 | English

The Heidi Hauer Podcast

For many of us, a major part of our health and wellbeing journey involves 'cleaning up' our food. But what about our skincare? This is an area that often gets missed or undervalued, even though our skin is our body's biggest organ.

For my guest Natalia Monnard (known as Nats), her passion for creating beauty products all began with an unlikely product... deodorant. What started as a personal need to find a great toxic-free option turned into a business mission to create the product that was missing from her search.

With true entrepreneurial spirit, Natalia saw a problem and sought to find a creative way to fix it. This purpose led her to transition from her very successful corporate career in banking to team up with co-founder Sarah to create their natural beauty company SQIN Ø.

And they didn't stop at deodorant! SQIN Ø produce a range of 100% natural, chemical free beauty products that include moisturises, oils and balms. But their recent success in securing crowdfunding means that a new batch of products will shortly be revealed.

In this episode, Nats shares a wealth of guidance and wisdom on everything from natural skincare and starting your own business, to the pitfalls of positive thinking and the limitations of approaching 'work-life balance' as if our career and personal lives are in competition with each other.

She warns us of the lack of transparency in the natural beauty industry, how toxins hide even in the products that claim to be organic, and why we must avoid anti-perspirant and reach for deodorant instead.

We also delve deep into her personal entrepreneurial journey. She shares her top lessons learned after one year in business, the number one thing that helped her leave behind a traditionally successful career, and the two 'sources of courage' she regularly leans upon when she's having one of those days where everything feels hard.

Whether you're curious or passionate about natural skincare, or want some inspiration about starting your own business, this episode is for you. Nats shows us that purpose and vision are not just things we do or work towards, but are a system of beliefs that can offer us incredible support and motivation through both the joys and challenges of creating something new.

Natalia Monnard is CEO and Co-Founder at SQIN Ø (SQIN ZERO), a Swiss startup working in natural skincare and sustainability. The company was founded in December 2020 and launched its first product only 5 months later in May 2021. Since then, the company has developed an entire facial skincare line in addition to its initial core product, natural deodorant cream. Before that, Natalia spent a decade working in financial services, specifically in Wealth Management.

Quotes

“On average, women use about 12 beauty products per day. This is almost a 160 different chemicals on a daily basis going onto the largest organ of our body.” – our skin.

“Today we have developed more awareness about what we eat, but still put a lot of chemicals on our face, some of which have been proven to have a negative affect on our health.”

“Natural skincare is an important topic because it’s about consistently in our wellbeing choices. Holistic health is not just about diet and exercise, but what we put onto our body.”

“I feel our society today is a bit obsessed with positivity, which is a lot of pressure and is quite unhealthy. It’s nice to be positive most of the time, but you also need to learn to embrace that sometimes you will not be positive, and that’s OK. Embracing your bad day is how we find ways out of it.”

Links

www.sqinzero.ch