Before I went on holiday I was contacted by The Nature's Co to do a review of some of their products. On first impressions I thought it wasn't really applicable to me, but after looking deeper into some of the products they sold, I was interested.
The company is based in India and uses natural ingredients (as the name would suggest) as well as being vegan and environmental friendly. It reminded me a lot of the Indian equivalent of the Body Shop, but with quirkier and more specialised ingredients.
Now I'm not usually that fussed about a product's cruelty-free/vegan-ness but I've come across a lot of people and customers who take this seriously. What interested me was the concept of using the "five purest forms of nature", namely air, sun, forest, earth and water.
And their products are categtorised into each of these- Atmospure, Starrize, Foressence, Earthborne and Aquaspark consecutively.
After having at each range I decided that Earthborne looked the most appealing to me; the chocolate-mint lipbalm and hazelnut lip butter sounded yummy but what pulled me in the most was the oral care section where I found the "herbal clay toothpaste".
This toothpaste was no ordinary mint toothpaste, but made with Miswak, "toothache tree" (Thomar), Clove and Tea Tree. Now for those who aren't Muslim, or know about "Miswak", it's rated and recommended highly in oral hygiene, so to find this as one of the ingredients in a toothpaste was really interesting to me. My mum had also used Cloves for tooth pain, so this is a very traditional medicine-type of toothpaste that I would have loved to try. I don't think it would have tasted as nice as a standard Colgate toothpaste, but the antibacterial benefits would probably have beaten it.
Anyway, after mentioning that I was particularly interested in the lipbalms and toothpaste of the Earthborne section, I was disappointingly sent a Walnut foot scrub (of the Earthborne body range) and Lemongrass foot spray (of the Foressence range) to review:
Walnut foot scrub
I have a lot of scrubs and have tried many, so I was keen to see how this one would measure up.
Packaging: outside of the cellophane packaging, you see that it has a "know your ingredients" brown label attached by string (tying in the "nature" theme very well) to the product with information of the key ingredient in the the particular product, which I found cute and factual and quite a nice concept. This label had information about walnuts & peppermint:
The back of the product had more information on how much of the main ingredients were in 100g of the product, but no actual ingredients list unfortunately.
Key ingredients in this product include: Peppermint, peppermint extract, walnut grits, neem extract, kokum butter and made using natural hill spring water. However, at most was the walnut grits (per 100g), which was at 6%, so I wondered what the rest of the product was made up of.
The vegan and cruelty free signs are clearly stated on the packaging which is great and also the fact that it's recyclable.
Smell: On opening the product, a strong smell of wet soil/wood wafts out, which is the general scent of the product- very earthly! I couldn't personally smell the peppermint, but on applying the product on my hand you can certainly feel the tingling sensation of mint.
spread out:
Consistency/texture: The product has a fairly creamy consistency and is cooling/tingling on the skin. It has a metallic cream sheen to it and lathers a little but not too much. I thought the granules were a little too large, but the product contains enough granules to get a decent scrub.
Overall review: After washing off the product I noticed my feet were white! Maybe I hadn't washed the product off thoroughly enough but there was a definite white residue left on my skin which looked like dried on white facepaint, so that was a turn off, however my feet did feel smoother.
Scent-wise this isn't my sort of smell at all.. I like sweet-smelling products and this falls under earthy/fresh scents which I'm not too fond of.
If I could give this product a rating from 1-10 it would be a 2 or 3 at best.
Lemongrass foot spray
Packaging: the packaging is very basic and simple but in a clean way, giving visibility of the product. Again, the brown "know your ingredients" label is on it, this one being about lemongrass:
Again, the back of the product only states the key ingredients, namely lemongrass oil, patchouli oil, tea tree oil and vegetable glycerin:
Smell: this product reminds me strongly of lemon and honey Lockets (the throat soothers), whilst also smelling slightly like Dettol! It definitely smells antibacterial and medicinal clean, that's for sure.
Consistency/texture: The foot spray is light and aborbs surprisingly well, so after my disappointment with the white residue from the foot scrub, this one left a much better feeling and look. It isn't at all greasy, but moisturising too.
Overall review: this product fared a lot better than the foot scrub, it absorbs well and most probably does its job in the "banishing odor and bacterial growth" department!
The scrub is sold for £6 on The Nature's Co online shop, whilst the foot spray is sold for £7, so they do ship to the UK (and other countries).
I wouldn't mind trying the lip balms (at £3 a pop), but as far as body products goes, unless it smells absolutely nice I don't think I'd go for any more!
I hope this review has been useful to you and may have introduced this brand to those who have never heard of it like myself. They have an interesting and fun theme and concept and I hope to see more of their products in the future.
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