With Project Love Your Skin, Jennifer Rock wants you to feel comfortable in your own skin
Jennifer Rock must be the busiest woman in the beauty industry.
She kicked off with The Cleanse Off Mitt, she is the author of a best-selling book and has another on the way, she created the first online skin consultancy, she has a podcast, she’s regularly on TV, works backstage at fashion weeks and her incredible, fool-proof skincare brand Skingredients has just turned one.
Related: The making of a skincare range with Jennifer Rock, creator of Skingredients
Along with managing the roaring success of Skingredients (1.2 million millilitres of her Protein serum was produced in the last year, 6 million millilitres of cleansers have been used by fans), she’s currently busy focusing on sustainability for the brand going forward and somehow finding time to build a lab.
Before the brand launched last year, Jennifer Rock reached out online to find women that wanted to help their skin in an emotional capacity and not just in a physical way.
“Skincare is self-care,” she says on a video call. “When I was 13 I was teased for being a quintessential nerd, with a fringe, glasses, I used to wear stickers all over my face, I would have teased me. The reality was, my skin was terrible and that was what truly got me down. My mam was really ahead of the times, she brought me for facials every month. Skincare became a large part of my security blanket, where I felt I could control the teasing and feel I was empowering myself to feel literally better in my own skin.”
“What’s really interesting about our social channels is our DMs are insane because skincare is such a personal journey, people won’t publicly say “I have a spot, redness, pigment gets me down,” whereas in our DMs people will message in and say “I hate myself.” Reading that, I just can’t get over how little confidence a lot of Irish women have and how they attach skin to that.”
So she decided to set up Project Love Your Skin, to help put the ‘care’ into skincare. “Project Love Your Skin is for people that didn’t feel confident in their skin, who were allowing their lifestyle to be impacted by it. We asked people online if they align themselves with sentences such as, ‘I don’t like myself,’ ‘I don’t leave the house without make-up,’ ‘my husband hasn’t seen me for years without make-up.’ Hundreds of people applied saying “this is like you’re in my brain, it’s exactly how I feel.”
“So we whittled it down and these women’s stories are what I’d like Skingredients to be known as. We had thousands of women apply and this is why I created Skingredients. I just want people to know that when you use the correct ingredients in the right manner with education behind it, you can feel better in your skin.”
Watch the Project Love Your Skin initiative in action in the video below.
Photography by Anthony Woods.
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