UK green beauty brand Dr Craft is harnessing ground avocado seeds in its beauty products as a replacement for plastic microbeads.
After three years of research, development and product testing, South African avocado supplier Westfalia Fruit’s UK business is supplying the seeds for use as a part of a range of cosmetics.
These include a Dr Craft body scrub using avocado seeds as the exfoliant, which will launch in this autumn, with additional products currently being developed.
The project has involved several UK universities, including Leeds and Kingston, to verify and validate the use of avocado seeds.
“The extraction process is very complex, but with perseverance a perfect particle size and process was discovered to work within a cosmetic body scrub as the replacement for microbeads,” said Johnathan Sutton, Group Safety & Environmental Executive at Westfalia Fruit.
Dr Craft said the inclusion of avocado seeds in beauty and cosmetics opens a new, higher value alternative.
“With a focus on green chemistry, our previous research looked at extracts from wine industry grape waste and citrus peels in a number of different products, but the more we studied avocados the more interesting and exciting it became.” said Professor Richard Blackburn, co-founder of Dr Craft.
The new Avocado Dr. Craft range has demonstrated proof of concept that the versatile fruit can be used not only in food but also as a replacement for microplastics within cosmetics, with a plethora of other workstreams in the process of development for use within a wide range of industries, the brand added.
