How much do you think about what goes into your beauty and skincare products? Even if it’s often, we bet it’s not as much as Tata Harper. The founder of her eponymous luxurious skincare line has brought non-toxic beauty to another level, proving that it can be just as effective and as beautiful as its traditional counterparts. But the innovator always wants to do more. That’s why she is introducing her Supernaturals 2.0 collection.
“We’re always tweaking the products, really trying to make them better and incorporating the latest technologies around new things and swapping raw materials that we find better alternatives for,” Harper says. “And that’s exactly what happened with our Supernaturals collection. This collection not only got a complete packaging upgrade, but it got a complete reboot in the technology and all the ingredients inside. This took three years to completely change the formulation and research every single formula and every single ingredient here, which is very different from starting from a base and adding vitamin C or adding just one ingredient.”
But whatever you do, don’t call it a reformulation, because for Harper, it’s so much more than that. “We like to call it technology upgrades because reformulation really speaks more about if you’re trying to make a product cheaper, and that’s not the case,” she says. “[Updating formulas] is basically something that happens behind the scenes for us all the time. And this collection is our most targeted. This is really for people that are looking for very specific results in their skin.”
The Supernaturals 2.0 collection is broken into three different families. First there’s the Concentrated Brightening Duo, including the Concentrated Brightening Serum and Concentrated Brightening Essence, to tackle hyperpigmentation and dark circles, with 74 ingredients from 24 countries. Then there’s the Elixir Vitae Duo, with Elixir Vitae and Elixir Vitae Serum, with anti-aging neuropeptides to help smooth even the deepest wrinkles with 98 ingredients from 28 countries. Finally, there’s the Boosted Contouring Duo, with the Boosted Contouring Serum and Boosted Contouring Eye Balm, to firm, lift and tighten sagging skin with 77 ingredients from 33 countries.
What makes the Supernaturals 2.0 standouts is that they utilize the most cutting-edge advancements in skincare. “We want to showcase what technology in skincare really looks like today because if you look at a lot of the blogs and ingredient focuses today, you’re still talking about the same ingredients that were alive in the 1980s—the same vitamin C, the same vitamin A, the same hyaluronic acid—when really the technology of natural skincare has gone beyond that,” Harper says. “It’s at another level today and I really want to showcase what the new generation of ingredients look like.”
Not only are the new ingredients more advanced, but they’re also safer for your skin. For example, hydroquinone is a very toxic chemical that has been banned around the world, but it’s still commonly found in the U.S. in beauty products that are meant to brighten and reduce dark spots. Instead of relying on hydroquinone, the Concentrated Brightening Duo takes a more advanced and healthier approach to treating dark spots. “Now a lot of the technology around hyperpigmentation not only focuses on just lightening the skin, but going to the target area where the brown spot is and really making that lighter,” Harper says. “How is that brown spot created in the first place? It targets the whole process of creating a dark circle, from creating melanin, how the transportation of that melanin functions inside of the skin, and how you block it and inhibit it in the first place.”
Tata Harper also has a lot of new technology very similar to what injectables are for, including fillers and Botox. “We get injectables for volumizing the skin, so nowadays we’re going to see a lot of the ingredients that help re-densify your skin to make the skin thicker, because as we age our skin loses a lot of fat and our fiber density diminishes,” Harper says. “We lose a lot of nerve and how the nerves interact, which is called neuroaging. And the other technology that’s really, really interesting is the other thing we get injections for, which is Botox. Botox has a totally different mode of action; it paralyzes the whole muscle. Topical ingredients go in and basically block the nerve to muscle connection so that the skin gets smooth and relaxes and you get a similar effect.”
The Supernaturals 2.0 collection looks different from the outside, too. All of Tata Harper’s products are in green glass bottles with a yellow font, but these are housed in yellow glass bottles in a green font. “All of our bottles are custom made because we don’t like to use plastic,” Harper says. “We like to use glass because glass is recyclable and our customers are recycling our bottles. Glass provides that circular packaging and it can always be in use. A lot of plastics can only be recycled a number of times.”
To ensure the highest quality and traceability, all of Tata Harper’s products are made from scratch on the brand’s 1,200-acre organic farm in Vermont, where many of the ingredients are also grown. “What we grow is what you see in that garden; it has a lot of productivity,” she says. “We harvest it almost every other day.” For the ingredients that can’t be grown in Vermont, they source from the best all over the globe.
“We focus on wherever the ingredients come—we’re world class—and where we can get the best sources for each material,” Harper says. “We’re getting ingredients from a total of 46 countries; this whole collection has a total of 155 active ingredients, so it’s not just one or two, which is another thing that’s really special about our line. We don’t focus on just the single active formulations, with one or two ingredients. We’re really about the power of nature so that less is more in the sense that you would need to buy less products to get the same effect because when you buy single active formulas, you have to buy so many to get something that is really hard working. It’s like taking supplements—you can buy a vitamin C pill, a vitamin A pill, but what if you just buy an amazing multivitamin so that you don’t have to do a skincare diet where you don’t have to buy so many things. That’s the approach we have to all our products. They are very, very concentrated and have a lot of active ingredients in them coming from every corner of the globe.”
