BEAUTYCAMPAIGN

Continuing Dame Anita Roddick's legacy, The Body Shop recently launched a more holistic approach to beauty treatments in tandem with a revamp of its stores and the naming of actress and model Lily Cole as a brand advocate.

Thailand’s first Pulse Store is designed to inform consumers about the range of products and from where their ingredients are sourced.

Located on the second floor of CentralWorld, Thailand's first Pulse Store aims to make customers look good, feel good and do good _ the three objectives of the firm's Beauty with Heart campaign.

"We are focusing on giving a beauty experience that is much more than skin-deep," proclaimed Narumol Chunhakorn, managing director of the company in Thailand. "Through the Beauty with Heart movement, we're putting a very human stamp on beauty, empowering consumers to not only look good, but to feel good through using our products.

"It's this powerful combination that gives everyone the confidence to express themselves with attitude and infectious energy."

Founded in 1976, the British brand is known for natural products with ingredients sourced from the four corners of the globe. Its new Pulse Store is designed to inform consumers more fully about the range of products and ingredients, many of which come from so-called "fair trade" community programmes.

Besides taking pleasure in the sensual textures of the products themselves, the feel-good factor comes from using cosmetics that are billed as 100% vegetarian and whose use provides income for poor communities such as the villagers in rural northern Ghana who make shea butter and aloe vera farmers in El Progreso, Guatemala.

Supporting these community fair-trade programmes can be viewed as a way of doing good, comparable to taking part in various Body Shop projects on animal welfare, human rights and environmental issues.

Animal-welfare activist Lily Cole has lent her name to the firm's Cruelty-Free make-up collection that is guaranteed to contain no animal by-products nor any finished products that were tested on animals.

"Animal ingredients used in make-up include a typically red colourant extracted from insect shells and shimmer extracted from fish scales," Narumol noted. "The Body Shop uses non-animal alternatives for colourants and mineral mica to create our beautiful shimmers.

"In addition, many brands use a clam-shell extract to make the outer casing of product capsules, whereas we prefer to use vegetable materials for our casings, like that for the Lily Cole Pearl Radiance Primer."

Used on its own or before applying foundation, this limited-edition primer is marketed as containing "light-diffusing pearls" that are supposed to give the complexion a soft focus and radiant look.

You can heighten the level of radiance with another new product called Puff on Radiance which is swirled on with a boudoir powder puff to highlight one's complexion and add shimmer to decolletage.

Cole's favourite item, Lip & Cheek Dome, is an easy-to-use creamy gel packaged in a dome format that can be directly applied to cheeks and lips.

Other products in the Cruelty-Free range include the Shimmer Cubes eyeshadow quartet, liquid eyeliner, hi-shine and fruity lip glosses plus make-up brushes made from synthetic hair instead of animal hair.