Skin Care Industry Opportunities

MYFOXNY.COM -- The recession has taken a toll on several high-profile beauty brands, names like Max Factor and Prescriptives, but there is at least one company that has been able to expand in the last year. Fox 5 News met with the founder in the company's newest location in SoHo.

Some believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Others, that's it is only skin deep. One person who prefers not use the word at all is Jane Wurwand.

"We call ourselves skin therapists rather than maybe people would refer to us as estheticians," she says.

Jane is the founder of Dermalogica, one of the best-known skin care companies in the world. She and her husband invested everything they had to start the company more than 20 years ago.

"An esthetician is a French word, it's someone who appreciates beauty and what we believe, we're all about is getting skin in its optimum health and condition," she says.

Dermalogica products are free of artificial colors, fragrances, and irritants commonly found in other cosmetic brands.

"You can actually take off your eye make-up, keep your eyes open and thoroughly remove your makeup," Jane says.

Even the packaging is no frills.

"It's got a, we think, a very American personality," she says. "Very direct, very straightforward, very hardworking, energetic."

And what's in these bottles means more to women around the world than just good skin.

"Ninety-eight percent of skin therapists in the profession are women," she says. "So this is an industry dominated by women. We put more women into business as an industry than any other industry in the world."

In 1983, three years prior to starting Dermalogica, Jane created the International Dermal Institute. Since then, the institute has trained more than 90,000 skin therapists around the world, giving many women opportunities they would not have had otherwise...

"We can tell a lot by feeling the skin as well as looking," Colleen Lamoureux, a skin therapist. "The women that come into skin therapy just like myself, I went from high school to beauty school. I have a business but I don't have an MBA. I didn't go to college, I never went for a four-year degree. I went to beauty school."

LINKS:

• THE INTERNATIONAL DERMAL INSTITUTE
• DERMALOGICA