Seaweed Skin Care

I remember hanging up a piece of seaweed outside my grandmother's house so that we could predict the weather during our summer holidays.


Freshly picked off Bonchurch beach, our wonderful slimy strands of 'octopus legs' seaweed adorned her front porch. Each morning we'd hope to find it crisp and dry indicating a hot sunny day ahead - and I'm sure we were never disappointed. Why were summer holidays always longer and hotter than they seem to be now?

Seaweed has always been close to my heart (and no, not just because I love to eat sushi!). We use it in several of our products in the form of kelp and spirulina. It's nourishing, exfoliating and can colour and texture. It has an aroma which if I'm kind, I'll call it oceanic, but on other days I'll call it downright stinky and we have fun finding essential oils to mask the aroma.

A couple of my private students are planning to start up a new handmade skincare range for their salon - one of the treatments they currently use is a caviar body scrub. They are looking to replace it with a fresh seaweed body scrub.

I read an article yesterday that said certain seaweed extracts can slow down the signs of ageing by inhibiting the skin degrading enzymes – enabling the skin to remain plump, firm and wrinkle-free for longer. A study showed that skin tone, firmness and elasticity showed an improvement of 67.6% over a 12 week period and reduced skin dryness and roughness by 92.1%. Now that’s good news!

Seaweed is also rich in minerals and has proven antibacterial qualities so it makes the perfect ingredient for certain skincare products.

For those of you not lucky enough to live near a beach or rockpools in order to harvest your own seaweed, grab yourself some powdered kelp and have some fun with our seaweed mask recipe. Who knows, perhaps it will bring the sun out at last!