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

Carlene Higgins (0:01)

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Welcome to Breaking Beauty, the podcast all about the breakthrough people, products, and moments in beauty.

Jill Dunn (0:14)

We're your hosts, Jill Dunn and Carlene Higgins.

Carlene Higgins (0:22)

Welcome back to Breaking Beauty Podcast, everyone. I'm Carlene Higgins. I'm here with my lovely co-host.

Jill Dunn (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.

Carlene Higgins (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 Toskin, Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier, Dr. Shareen Idris. So many products and brands to discover. And we have a new one we're serving up for you today.

Jill Dunn (1:04)

That's right. Our guest is founder of Kat Burki Skincare. Kat Burki. Hi, Kat.

Kat Burki (1:09)

Hi.

Carlene Higgins (1:10)

How are you?

Jill Dunn (1:11)

Good. How are you? Thanks for being here.

Kat Burki (1:13)

Thanks for having me.

Carlene Higgins (1:14)

This is awesome.

Jill Dunn (1:15)

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 going to share a little bit more. We're going to hype you up a little bit before we get into the all of our chat.

Carlene Higgins (1:27)

Yes. So if you're not familiar, Kat Burki's products, they can be found backstage at Fashion Week to prep model skin, most recently at the Chloe show in Paris, and also to prep for the red carpet.

Jill Dunn (1:39)

Yeah, like makeup artist Hung Vanngo, 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.

Carlene Higgins (1:56)

And Kat Burki 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.

Jill Dunn (2:10)

And Kat Burki, 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 lightbulb moment.

Carlene Higgins (2:26)

In 2013, Kat launched her eponymous skincare line at Henry Bendell. And today you can find Kat Burki at really cool retailers like Pronten that opened last year in New York and Liberty London, both with cabins offering Kat Burki 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 love it.

Jill Dunn (3:02)

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.

Carlene Higgins (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 skins microbiome and learn about the best selling Vitamin C product and why it's different from all of the other serums on the market.

Jill Dunn (3:38)

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 to Breaking Beauty.

Kat Burki (3:47)

Well, that was really nice.

Carlene Higgins (3:49)

Thank you.

Jill Dunn (3:50)

Of course.

Carlene Higgins (3:51)

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?

Kat Burki (4:02)

In 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. And we were really looking at why is there so much more autoimmunity happening, especially in the US. 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.