Beauty Needs No Sacrifice- First Georgian Organic Makeup Products
The human skin wraps and protects our bodies. It constitutes a living, dynamic tissue system. It has the remarkable ability to absorb applied products, partially or completely, into the bloodstream. In fact, up to 60% of the products we use on our skin as makeup are absorbed and deposited into the circulatory system. What’s more, chemically reactive beauty products may not only ruin your physical appearance and cause painful allergies, they can go so far as to interfere with your respiratory system, causing serious breathing disorders.
With this in mind, two Georgian girls from Batumi, Nini Resulidze and Mariam Ghlonti, who study at the Business Administration faculty of the Georgian-American University, decided to make the first Georgian 100% organic makeup products.
“A year ago, we visited Bulgaria to attend a conference and saw huge number of rose-fragrant cosmetics, produced locally, being sold next to traditional souvenirs. That’s when we realized that creating Georgian cosmetics could be attractive in many ways and from that moment we started to work tirelessly on the best formulas for our products,” the girls told GEORGIA TODAY.
The pair studied cosmetics, the compositions and the risks involved in not using quality ingredients.
“Our product has more advantages compared to exported brands: the first thing is that this is a purely Georgian product, the second is that it is organic and no chemical impurities are used. Local honey wax, shea butter, castor oil and coconut oil, and other organic pigments are the main ingredients of our products. Our main mission was to create organic products which would not harm human beings, because beauty should not cause damage or require sacrifice,” Resulidze said.
They named the cosmetics line ‘Gisheri,’ which comes from the Georgian 12th century epic-poem ‘The Knight in the Panther's Skin,’ in which the beauty of a woman is told using the same word. ‘Gisheri’ is metaphor for refined taste.
“At first, we had three products: nail polish, matte lipstick and lip gloss. We created 50 pieces of each. We were excited since we did not know how customers would react to cosmetics made in Georgia. We were surprised when they sold over a weekend,” Ghlonti told us.
The girls are planning to set up a sales-desk in Batumi City Mall and later visit Tbilisi and offer the products to Georgian and international visitors to the capital. After gaining recognition around the country, they want to open a shop. Their long-term goal is to export the products to Europe.
Mariko Natsarishvili