What Comes After “Clean” Beauty? Kat Burki on How-to Shop For Skincare Beyond What’s *Not* On the Ingredient List

Breaking Beauty Podcast

In this episode of Breaking Beauty Podcast, founder Kat Burki discusses the evolution of her skincare brand from its 'raw beauty' roots to a science-driven,

Key takeaways

• The skin's microbiome plays a crucial role in inflammation control and overall skin health, similar to the gut microbiome.
• Live probiotics in skincare are often ineffective because they don't survive long enough to be beneficial.

Main topics

• Evolution of Kat Burki Skincare from 'raw beauty' to science-backed formulations
• The role of the skin microbiome in health and inflammation

Notable quotes

"We really meant how we're formulating is different. No alcohol, there's no fillers, there's no dimethicone..." - Kat Burki

Conclusion

Kat Burki's journey from law and health administration to founding a microbiome-forward skincare brand

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Welcome to Breaking Beauty, the podcast all about the breakthrough people, products, and moments in beauty. We're your hosts, Jill Dunn and Carlene Higgins. Speaker 5 (0:21) Welcome back to Breaking Beauty Podcast, everyone. I'm Carlene Higgins. I'm here with my lovely co-host. Speaker 6 (0:27) I'm Jill Dunn, everybody. And it's Wednesday, so that means we are back in your feed with another wonderful episode. Like we have been for nine years now, over 450 episodes. And we are two longtime magazine beauty editors turned beauty podcasters. Speaker 5 (0:43) Yes. And I don't know how many of you have discovered new brands through our show. We have interviewed so many founders, for example, everyone from the founder of MAC Cosmetics, Frank Toscan, Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier, Dr. Shireen Idris, so many products and brands to discover. And we have a new one we're serving up for you today. That's right. Our guest Speaker 6 (1:05) is founder of Kat Berkey Skincare, Kat Berkey. Speaker 5 (1:08) Hi, Kat. Speaker 6 (1:09) Hi. Hello. How are you? Good. How are you? Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. This is awesome. We're here in New York and we've been here to learn a little bit more about your brand. So thank you for inviting us here. And we're Speaker 3 (1:22) going Speaker 6 (1:22) to share a little bit more. We're going to hype you up a little bit before we get into the. Speaker 3 (1:25) Yes. Speaker 6 (1:26) So if Speaker 5 (1:27) you're not familiar, Kat Berkey's products, they can be found backstage at Fashion Week to prep model skin, most recently at the Chloe show in Paris, and Speaker 6 (1:37) also to prep for the red carpet. Yeah, like makeup artist Hong Van Gogh, who's a friend of our show, and he's like... one of the most iconic makeup artists on the red carpet. He used Kat's products to prep the skin for Rose Byrne most recently. I believe it was at the Oscars this year, which is very cool. And Speaker 5 (1:56) Kat Berkey is all about supporting the skin's microbiome and in general, calming inflammation. And as somebody with rosacea myself, whenever I hear anything about calming inflammation or inflammation, I am listening. Speaker 6 (2:10) And Kat Berkey, she holds a law degree and a master's in health administration. And her years of designing preventative health programs and studying chronic disease alongside scientists and epidemiologists is what led to her light bulb moment. In 2013, Speaker 5 (2:27) Kat launched her eponymous skincare line at Henry Bendel. And today you can find Kat Berkey at really cool retailers like... Printemps that opened last year in New York and Liberty London, both with cabines offering Kat Berkey facials, which we both experienced at the Hotel Chelsea yesterday. So if you notice, I have a bit of an extra glow. My skin is super plumped and it just feels so like calm. And I truly loved the experience. Oh, my gosh. The aromatics just like put me in another zone. I really Speaker 6 (3:02) love it. Yeah. So Kat is going to rewind today back to 2013 and she's going to share with us how she developed her brand and how it's kind of managed to surpass its roots in the height of the raw movement. Speaker 5 (3:16) Yes. We're going to talk about the. evolution and we'll talk about why none of her ingredients start with aqua aka water unlike a lot of other skincare brands. We'll get a master class in skin's microbiome and learn about the best-selling vitamin c product and why it's different from all of the other serums on Speaker 6 (3:37) the market. And we get a sneak peek of a new innovation that we got to see yesterday. We're going to share it with all of you. With all of that, welcome officially. Hi, well, that was really nice. Thank you. Of Speaker 5 (3:50) course. So take us back to your early days in health administration. What did your day to day look like? And what made you think, I need to start my own skincare brand? In Speaker 4 (4:02) working in disease management, it became very apparent how important the microbiome is to the gut and health and disease, inflammation, disease states, your ability to not. roll into a disease state, a negative state, has a lot to do with the microbiome. And we're learning so much more about it, but even the actual biodiversity can create autoimmunity. Speaker 6 (4:26) And we Speaker 4 (4:27) were really looking at why is there so much more autoimmunity happening, especially in the U.S.? However, we have a microbiome in our skin as well, which that combination of that biome of the skin and the gut speak. They speak to one another. So that was where I started to think about skincare. I wasn't thinking about skincare from a beauty perspective. Vitamin C is extremely important to skin health. Speaker 6 (4:54) We Speaker 4 (4:55) don't make vitamin C. Our body doesn't make it. So it's essential we get it through some other source. And it's actually one of the most important ingredients in collagen reproduction and also preventatively. So that was when I was like, okay, let me try. Speaker 5 (5:19) Today's episode is brought to you in part by hers. Okay. Your favorite overshare are back on the mic. I'm going to get a blood test on Friday to see if I'm eligible for a GLP one. Yep. That's right. I know a lot of you are really feeling this too. If you've kind of tried everything to lose weight and you're still feeling stuck. Things really can be different this season. Weight Loss by Hers is designed to support people like us in reaching our goals with access to an affordable range of FDA-approved GLP-1 medications, including the Wigovi pill for people who are scared of needles like me and the Wigovi pen. 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So HERS makes it easy to find an approach that fits your needs and your budget if eligible. So if you're ready to reach your goals, visit forhers.com slash breakingbeauty to get personalized affordable care that gets you. That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash breakingbeauty. Forhers.com slash breakingbeauty. Weight Loss by HERS is not available in all 50 states. Wigovi is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS. To get started and learn more, including important safety information, Wigovi clinical study information, and restrictions, visit forhers.com. Speaker 2 (7:28) You have one Speaker 6 (7:29) unheard message. Speaker 3 (7:31) Okay, it's 3 a.m. My shoes are gone. It was there. Speaker 4 (7:35) And my Uber Speaker 3 (7:35) rating is Speaker 4 (7:36) definitely a zero. You are not ready for this story. Speaker 3 (7:40) Hey, I'm Davis Rowe. You might know me from TikTok, where I share little snapshots of my life. But here's the thing. You only see the 30-second version. There's so much more behind the scenes. The nights out, the mornings after, the drama, the men, and even a little wisdom I picked up along the way. Welcome to It's Always Something with Davis Rowe, my unfiltered, voice note-style podcast, where I let you all the way in. Every week, we're talking about everything. College life in the spotlight. Messy stories, hot takes, call-in advice, and all the ridiculous moments that make life fun. And don't worry, names Speaker 1 (8:15) will be said. Speaker 3 (8:16) Because if Speaker 1 (8:16) there's one thing Speaker 3 (8:17) about me, it's always something. And that's the fun of it. So tune in to It's Always Something with Davis Rowe every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (8:37) Now, this was over a decade ago, so your brand has clearly evolved over time. Did you have a tagline at that time that was raw beauty? Speaker 4 (8:46) Yes, we did. In hindsight, you don't want to market a product with what it doesn't have. So we had to evolve into what that science actually is instead of that tagline. The connotation became more food related, which was not what we meant. We really meant how we're formulating is different. no alcohol, there's no fillers, there's no dimethicone, there's no silicones from the very beginning. Speaker 6 (9:11) But what Speaker 4 (9:12) we should have been talking about is the ingredient synergy and the optimization of the biome to deliver. The real importance in our brand and our differentiation is tools to have the skin repair itself, right? And so the Speaker 6 (9:29) tagline for the brand now is biochemistry-backed skincare. So tell us about how that all sort of came to be and maybe also how it differs. So it became really important. Speaker 4 (9:40) It's always been the same from the very beginning of how we formulate. Yeah. Speaker 6 (9:44) But Speaker 4 (9:44) to explain that is kind of, you know, there's a lot involved. It's not just, again, going back to what we don't do. Speaker 6 (9:52) Yeah. Speaker 4 (9:52) It's more importantly what we do do. And how do we communicate that in a way that's easy, bite-sized pieces so that you can have. a measurement tool that shows you a difference. That's what we think is important. Not 100 % of my friends thought blah, blah, blah, but 15 % increase in elasticity or by a tool-based measurement is super important. And even the microbiome sequencing, we can see the health of the microbiome. So for us, it's twofold. It is the biochemistry of how the formula is working together. Called it too simplistically raw beauty, going back to that, but it's really how it's all working together that's super important