Days of Confidence, Frederique Labadie
Introducing Days Of Confidence with founder Frederique Labadie
The Bared curators are continuously seeking out and personally testing a variety of leading clean beauty products from around the world. So, it was with some sense of occasion when there was universal agreement among the team that we had something special in our hands and on our skin when we discovered Days of Confidence, our newest brand addition from Paris.
Days Of Confidence ticks so many boxes for us. There is both a unique founder story grounded in vision, ambition and a pursuit for products of the highest efficacy. Moreover, a general sense that what we were hearing, reading about and seeing in our skin is surely part of the future narrative of clean skincare for the conscious consumer.
Days of Confidence advocates for an ethical and holistic approach to wellness and beauty by focusing on effectiveness, sustainability, transparency and sensory experience. Their complementary ranges of bio-active skincare and supplements are highly concentrated in organic active ingredients and integrate the highest-quality plants, flowers, minerals and trace elements. Their range provides symbiotic supplements and skincare that truly make you glow from the inside out.
What makes DOC so special? The Bared asked founder, Frederique Labadie to share more about her journey and how DOC has come together.
Fred, thank you for chatting with us. We’re thrilled to have DOC join The Bared curation. As you know we really felt we both connected with one another’s philosophy of clean beauty and business purpose. Tell us a bit about your journey and the origins of DOC.
In 2018, I left the multinational where I had a marketing role in beauty, because after having witnessed so much greenwashing, I wanted to created a trustworthy brand that lived up to my standards of quality, sustainability and aesthetics. The first step was to assemble a top-notch team including my co-founder, Philippe, who has years of design experience, as well as a degree in naturopathy and our medical expert, Dr. Nara Nairi, who has a PhD in micro nutrition. It then took us more than 2 years to conceive, test and retest the formulas for our skin care and micro nutrition product range to meet our exacting standards. The pandemic slowed down production and our supply chains, but on the plus side, it gave us more time to ensure that we brought to market a product that was as good for the skin as it was for the environment.
Clean (Ingestible) Beauty is increasingly getting visibility and preference amongst consumers. What is DOC’s definition of clean?
DOC goes beyond clean and offers conscious beauty. Indeed, clean beauty defines itself by what a product doesn’t contain the ‘nasties’, the phthalates, silicones, etc. This is a great first step but, to us, it is simply not enough. A consumer has a right to know what is IN their product and Days of Confidence focuses on exactly this. We believe consumers are owed the highest quality products; products that contain at least 80% organic ingredients but also at least 80% active ingredients. Why this focus on active ingredients? Because this is how we guarantee truly efficacious products. That is why we use only cold pressed vegetable oils, that’s why we replaced regular water with fruit activated water (a sustainable process that recycles all the nutrients and vitamins in the water used for juice production) and that’s why we used only clinically proven ingredients in our supplements.
What is it about DOC that appeals to the more conscious consumer?
Conscious consuming is about taking the environment into account when we purchase something. For Days of Confidence, selfcare should not be selfishcare, that's why we put such an emphasis on sustainability. While it is true that nowadays everyone is talking about sustainability, for us it is a real pillar of the brand and conditions all the decisions we make. For example, we use recycled and recyclable glass for our bottles and jars, our caps are made of thermodure, a mixture of urea and cellulose, which has a 70% smaller carbon footprint than plastic, and the only plastic we use is that of our pumps, which today does not exist in any other material. Our boxes are made from FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) cardboard and we print with vegetable-based inks. We are also a B-corp pending company. While this is already more than most small brands do, it's not enough for us. We are now looking at rechargeable packaging in order to further reduce our carbon footprint.
Tell us a little more about your approach to formulation and your partnership with Dr Nara Nairi? How did you arrive at the different product groupings: Protection, Vitality, Serenity, Radiance and Detox? What problems were you trying to solve for in developing these?
Days of Confidence at its inception a meeting of the minds. After having given birth to my 4th child I wasn’t feeling my best and was referred to Dr. Nara Nairi, I loved her approach to functional medicine and asked her whether she would consider working with me to bring her knowledge and expertise in micronutrition to a larger audience. We focused on the main issues her patients (mainly women from 30 to 55) were consulting her about: lack of energy, too much stress, not enough sleep, dull skin, etc. We decided to structure our range to give solutions to these issues, thus: Vitality (energy but also hair and nail strength), Serenity (stress and sleep aid), Radiance (skin health), Protection (focus on immunity) and Detox ( clearing toxins from the body and skin). Nara then formulated all our supplements using patented adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that were all clinically tested. We wanted to make sure to have the highest quality supplements on the market which was no mean feat.
What sort of guidance would you give to The Bared’s customers about how to choose the right DOC product for them?
I think most women clearly know what they need according to their lifestyles. We made sure that all the supplements could be mixed together because let’s face it in our very stressful lives we often need more than one benefit. I have many consumers that pair Radiance with either Vitality or Serenity depending on their stress level and workload and that when the weather turns will add Immunity in the mix. And after the holidays it is a perfect time to integrate Detox to reset our metabolism after Christmas excesses. In terms of skincare, we have a minimalist range of products that allows you to focus on the essential steps, serum, two creams (for mixed and dry skin), an oil for the night time and a luxurious hand cream.
There’s a special symbiotic pairing between your ingestible supplements and skincare creams and complexes. If you had to explain this approach to someone who’s never considered the complementary nature of inner health and outer glow, how would you describe the benefits?
Our skin’s health is 80% dependent on what we eat and 20% on external causes. Someone who has nutritional deficiencies, who lacks sleep or who exposes their skin to sun, big city pollutants or even the blue light emitted from screens will likely not be in his best shape or have great skin. Micronutrition’s purpose is to globally strengthen your metabolism thereby improving your skin’s health from within. Working hand in hand with micronutrition, bio-active skincare aims to reinforce this process naturally by protecting, nourishing, energizing and soothing your dermis from external aggressions. It’s a dual action that ensures lasting and convincing results. Indeed, a cream, on its own, no matter how good, will not be able to hide the effects of a sleepless night or a bad cold. This is why at Days of Confidence we advocate for a holistic approach that takes wellness into account as a crucial factor in beauty.
What we also love about your brands is the way you educate us about comparing different products. You mentioned for example that ‘A cosmetic product can be labelled as organic as long as it contains a measly 20% of organic ingredients’ and that ‘It is for this exact reason that brands rarely choose to advertise the percentage of organic ingredients on pack’ - why do we see this lack of transparency in the industry and what does it mean to us, the consumer?
I think that many traditional brands have spent their trust capital with consumers. How many headlines talking about greenwashing or scandals with dangerous ingredients can we as consumers see before we decide that something needs to change? Consumers have the right to demand more from their brands, efficacy clearly, but also real transparency about how the products we put on our skin are made, with what ingredients and where they come from. Today's niche brands were conceived with these concepts of sustainability and transparency in mind, so we have it in our DNA.
The very name of our brand, Days of Confidence, includes the word Confidence. We wanted to create a brand that consumers can trust first and foremost for its outstanding efficacy guaranteed by the maximum amount of botanical organic active ingredients in its formulas but equally as important is our focus on sustainability in everything we do (packaging, formulas, local sourcing). We always say that we don’t want people to have blind faith in us but to rather educate themselves to be able to ascertain the quality of the products. This is why transparency is one of the founding pillars of the Brand; on our packs we write the exact percentage of organic ingredients, the percentage of organic ingredients and our quality guarantee: vegan, gluten free, Cosmos Organic certified, etc.
What's next for DOC? My husband is asking actually, have you thought about something specifically for men?
I’m sorry to let your husband down but a men’s range is not in the immediate future. Rather we are looking into a couple of products that our consumers have been asking us about, body care, an eye contour, a digestion supplement. We are still deciding which will be the next launch but don’t worry whatever it is it will be as efficacious and sustainable as the rest of the range!
Days of Confidence is exclusively available at The Bared in Singapore.