Why I Started Young Body | Our Story

It started with a shopping trip.

My daughter had reached the age where skincare had become interesting. Her friends were talking about it, routines were circulating, and she wanted something of her own. Fair enough.

So the two of us went looking together. We came home with a very expensive product that never got used.

What was actually on the shelf

Almost everything we picked up was built for adult skin. Anti-ageing, firming, brightening. Ingredients aimed at problems a twelve-year-old doesn't have yet, and in a few cases actives strong enough that I wouldn't have put them on my own face without thinking about it first.

The things that weren't for adults had a different problem. Bright packaging, a character on the bottle, and much the same formula inside as the grown-up version. The packaging had been designed for a kid. The product hadn't.

Then there was the price. Some of what we looked at cost more than my own skincare, for something that would be used twice a day by a girl still working out whether she even liked it.

I kept turning bottles over and reading the back. The ingredient lists went on and on. Not because long lists are automatically bad, plenty of them were perfectly fine, but I couldn't have told you what half of it was doing in there. And if I couldn't, she certainly couldn't.

The question I kept coming back to

Somewhere in that aisle I started asking the same thing about every bottle I picked up.

Does my daughter need to put this on her skin?

Most of the time the answer was no. Not dangerous, not a scam. Just unnecessary. A product doing multiple jobs when she needed one of them done properly.

That question is still the filter for everything we make. If an ingredient can't justify why it's in there, it isn't in there.

Making it was harder than I expected

I'd love to say I went home, mixed something up in the kitchen, and that was that.

What actually happened was months of formulating and a lot of batches that went nowhere. Emulsions that separated. Textures that felt greasy an hour later. Scents that were lovely in a bottle and far too much on a face.

Then there was preserving it. Anything containing water needs a preservative or it grows things, which is why "preservative-free" isn't the reassurance it sounds like on a label. Finding a system I was happy with, that actually worked and that I could explain in one sentence, took a long time to get to.

Then the rules. Australian cosmetic labelling is stricter than most people assume. Every claim on the pack able to be backed up if someone asks.

Then there's ingredients. They go out of stock (of course 🤦‍♀️). One of ours did, partway through, and the choice was to wait indefinitely or reformulate around it. We reformulated, which meant a full relabel because changing one ingredient changes the whole list.

None of that makes it onto a website, but the admin is most of what running a natural skincare business actually is.

Everything is on the pack

One thing I decided early was that the full ingredient list goes on the packaging and on every product page, in plain sight.

Partly because the rules require it. Mostly because the reason we walked out of that shop empty-handed was that I couldn't work out what was in things, and I wasn't going to build a brand with the same problem.

You don't have to understand every name on the list. Most people won't, and that's alright. But it should be there to read, and nothing should be hiding behind a vague catch-all word.

What Young Body is

Uncomplicated products. Naturally derived ingredients, with organic ones where I can get them. Made in Australia. Priced so that trying one isn't a big decision.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A teenager's skin changes, their preferences change faster, and they will absolutely decide in six weeks that they can't stand the smell of something they loved in week one. Skincare priced like a luxury purchase turns that into an argument about waste. Priced sensibly, it's just a swap.

What Young Body isn't

It isn't a fix.

We don't say our products treat anything. We hope they do, but there's no guarantee. A cosmetic that promised to would be a different category of product altogether, and I'd rather be straight with you than clever with the wording.

What we make is maintenance. A wash that cleans without stripping. A moisturiser that sits well under sunscreen. Something that smells good enough that they'll actually use it. That's what it's about.

If your kid has something going on with their skin that's sore or getting worse, that's a conversation with a GP or a pharmacist. It isn't a shopping trip, and anyone selling you one might be selling you the wrong thing.

While we're here: nothing we make replaces SPF 50+ sunscreen, and nothing ever will. If you only do one thing for your kid's skin in Australia, that's the one.

Where we're up to

Summer Sunshine and Native Glow are our launch ranges.

Native Glow leans on Australian botanicals, lemon myrtle among them, and smells like something fresh from the bush. Summer Sunshine is the sweeter one. Both exist because at fourteen how something smells matters more than any ingredient list ever will, and getting them to wash their face at all is most of the battle.

And there's more coming. Jump onto our mailing list to stay in the loop.