As part of our 10 Mins With … series, we sit down with the beauty entrepreneur to talk about this trending beauty category and why Vida Glow is at the forefront of it
Anna Lahey started her brand Vida Glow ten years ago, but she still remembers the name of her first customer. That’s how passionate the founder of this Australia-based ingestible beauty brand is, whose flagship product, the Original Marine Collagen, is said to “sell every four seconds”, according to Lahey.
Lahey’s introduction to ingestible beauty came from a personal experience. Having suffered from hair loss, Lahey tried almost every supplement available in the market in her search for a solution. On a whim, she tried marine collagen while travelling to Japan and the results were so transformative that within a few years Lahey launched Vida Glow, which has now become a leading name in ingestible beauty supplements and is available across Asia, Australia and Europe.
Tatler caught up with Lahey at the House of Sephora in mid-March, where she talked about how she built her brand from scratch and why she thinks the popularity of ingestible beauty supplements will continue to grow.
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Vida Glow is one of the leaders in the ingestible beauty supplements segment. What do you think contributes to this success?
The reason we’ve done well is our products give you results. It’s one thing to get the products on the shelf, it’s another thing for those products to move off the shelf. And then it’s yet another thing for the customer to come back and repurchase.
The consumers today are so discerning, they read the back label, they do their own research and I applaude them for that. That’s why the product needs to have integrity. And we ensure integrity and credibility through proven results. For example, with the Radiance line [that targets dark spots and pigmentation], clinical studies in Mauritius showed that there was a 60 per cent decrease in sunspots and melasma trials among study subjects within one month of trials.
What are the benefits of using ingestible beauty supplements over topically applied beauty products?
Even the most avid ingestible beauty consumer, like myself, will still use a topically applied product. I use a moisturiser, sunscreen, and serum every day. It’s a bi-directional approach to beauty, one doesn’t replace the other.
But the main difference is when you’re applying a topical product, you’re applying it to that the top—or epidermal—layer of the skin. The top layer only makes up three per cent of your skin, so with ingestible products you’re working the other 97 per cent.