I am an addict. I suffer from the same disease most Americans suffer from.  Reckless Consumerism. Like many of you, I work hard to make more money to buy more things, some of which I don’t need. I also have spent good portion of my career helping clients sell products to consumers, some of which they didn’t need.

I have acquired a name over the years in NYC as a copywriter and creative director who can spin desire for all things beauty related and engage women’s emotions – a niche I found myself in after doing a few successful ad campaigns for large beauty brands. I know how to wrap up a claim up in a nice package inside of a big idea, so it moves products off shelves. I am skillful at skirting legal issues with well-crafted copy when it comes to efficacy or health risks associated with “product benefits”. I can get a woman’s attention with beautiful imagery and close the deal in 5 words or less. I’ve hired top fashion photographers and directors to photograph and film models with flawless skin and hair to sell women products full of neurotoxins. Some of these products were tested on animals. I’ve worked with post production houses to retouch models’ flawlessness to make them more flawless. Yes, I’ve done it all in the name of “Beauty”.

This is my Ugly Truth. I am part of an industry and a culture of consumers, sometimes unaware and oftentimes intentionally turning a blind eye to what we are putting in and on our bodies and on what we are perpetuating in society by making unconscious products, purchases and messages – a broken system called Capitalism. One that is consuming our natural resources faster than the earth can replenish them. One that is robbing us of our health. And our innate Beauty.

But in the end, try as I may to right my path, I am not 100%. And far from it. While I fight the urge to shop for things I don’t need on most days, I can, in an off moment, be sucked into a Sephora by the shiny, glimmering displays and a fabulous makeup artist who catches my eye, brandishing the latest shiny eyelash wand and dropping the casual offer for a quick “touch up”. Cut to me with a total makeover minus $327.00, walking out of the store, feeling pretty on the outside and ignoring that hankering on the inside – the one caused by knowing too much and that inevitable crash of a junkie.

Then there’s that tiny black bag – the contents of which seem to burn a hole in it until I get home and feverishly unpack it. I replace all the dusty, fingerprinted, partially unused items in my makeup bag with all the shiny, new powders, creams, shellacs, lengtheners, thickeners, plumpers, bronzers, outliners, highlighters, brighteners, primers, none of which I will finish, and all of which I sample immediately. I find clever ways to justify my purchases to myself (and to my significant other or accountant, if they bust me). One of my favorite justifications is “It’s research I need to do for my business”. While this has a grain of truth to it, most of the time I’m either just bored, curious or I need a quick fix of retail therapy because I’m having a bad week.

While I have a fairly keen internal toxicity radar which scans every label it can find for harmful chemicals, ingredients and toxins like dioxane, dieththyl phthalate, formaldehyde, alcohol, parabens, heavy metals, dyes, etc., I still throw caution to the wind at times, especially when it comes to cosmetics. Let’s face it, it’s nearly impossible to know what’s in most makeup or what can be considered “clean” or “organic” because the cosmetic industry is pretty much self-regulated. If you’re wise and interested, you can investigate products on the Environmental Working Group’s “Skin Deep Cosmetic Database“, but boy does that take all the fun out of shopping when you find out the next new miracle cream is laced with toxic matter.

According to an article in Smart Money, Americans spent $33.9 billion on cosmetics alone in 2010. Things haven’t changed much since then. As well, the cosmetic industry has no problem spending a fraction of that every year lobbying to squelch bills like the Safe Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Act so they don’t get passed. Why do you think the European Union has banned 1200 chemicals from use in their beauty products, and the US has only banned 10? Sound familiar?  Look at Europe’s gun safety laws compared to ours. Washington is being bought on every level, from bullets to beauty. And all of it is killing us – whether it’s an instant taking of human life or a more drawn out death by small dosages of poison daily.

Lipstick Wearers, here’s a helpful tidbit. 400 lipsticks tested positive for lead, according to the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.  But unless you personally take your lipstick to a lab and have it tested, there’s no way to find out if you’re putting lead on your lips, and therefore into your body. Lead is a cheap way to make colors like bright red pop. It’s also a cheap way to give yourself a wide range of health issues.

I try to buy cosmetics from small companies that I’ve read up on that are for the most part mineral and/or plant based, but I can sacrifice my standards when I must have things like the bright purple Chanel mascara. That said, I’m more discerning than most shoppers because I’m neurotic and constantly devour anti-establishment health articles, which keeps me in relative check. And yet, I STILL have an addiction to trying new things and a lack of patience when it comes to finishing my old things.

So what’s a junkie to do? Faced with this paradox of the beast within, and the business and lifestyle I’m out to promote, I hereby declare myself on an official BEAUTY FAST. As part of this fast, I’ll be using every beauty and personal care item in my cabinet before I buy another to replace it. Could be a couple of years before I go through it all, but that’s my commitment. The only caveat, if I discover one of these products contains ingredients I can’t abide by, I’ll find a way to properly dispose of the toxic waste rather than use it. Funny, there’s a guide for disposing of CFL lightbulbs and mercury thermometers, but no guide for disposing of carcinogenic makeup.

Stay tuned for future blog postings in this new series entitled:  Confessions of a Beauty Junkie. 

And please do share.

Photo sourced from: http://thestylepundit.wordpress.com/

What if there were more brave and visionary titans of transformation as inspired as Ray Anderson, Founder of Interface Carpet, who unfortunately passed in 2011, and Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia?

If even 5% of CEO’s of the Fortune 500 top companies followed in their footsteps, it may just cause a tidal wave of good will for our environment and society that has us reach the tipping point that so desperately needs to happen to sustain life on earth. The window is closing fast. Who will be our next Hero?

Both of these men felt a moral imperative to make their respective businesses work in ways that were most compatible with our natural environment, society and their employees. Both men were inspired to meet all the challenges of a whole and complete transformation of their companies from the inside out. Both men totally re-scaled and re-invented their companies, including the sourcing and production of their products, their manufacturing, their supply chain, the types of products they offered, their corporate culture, the delivery of their goods to the consumer and the communications strategy behind their consumer facing ad campaigns. Now that’s TRUE branding from the inside out. Both of these men have testified that while the choice to change everything took some risk, experimentation and investment in the short term, that it paid off in spades financially for their companies over the long term.

While Ray Anderson is no longer physically with us, he left behind a legacy and a company known as mavericks of sustainable business. In his 2009 book, “Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose–Doing Business by Respecting the Earth“, he says since 1994 Interface has:

• Cut greenhouse gas emissions by 82 percent
• Cut fossil fuel consumption by 60 percent
• Cut waste by 66 percent
• Cut water use by 75 percent
• Invented and patented new machines, materials, and manufacturing processes
• Increased sales by 66 percent, doubled earnings, and raised profit margins

Yvon Chouinard fortunately is still at the top of his game and keeps on pushing the envelope in the business world using Patagonia as the vehicle for positive change. His branding takes an anti-consumerism and anti-fashion approach, and embodies his philosophy. It’s not about buying more, it’s  about buying smarter. So that’s what he tells consumers in the ad featured above: “Don’t buy this jacket.”  If you really need to buy outdoor wear then gosh darn it, Patagonia will make sure it multitasks and is made to last. And if it breaks, we’ll fix it. And btw. we’ll recycle your used Patagonia jackets. (The fleece in it was made of recycled plastic bottles to start with.)

Patagonia has seen 25% growth annually throughout the recession, and one of Yvon’s struggles has been to keep scaling back and staying small enough to be able to control the output and environmental impact of his business. But as he imparted in a recent interview at a greenbiz.com forum, he can take this kind of risk. It’s his company. He doesn’t have to answer to stakeholders who are pushing for growth at the expense of our planet’s natural resources and the well being of life on earth. Yvon only has to answer to his own conscience.

If you are a visionary entrepreneur and/or CEO and you have a moment between meetings and tweets to check out these men and what inspired them, including reading Paul Hawken’s book, “The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability“, which Ray Anderson sites as his inspiration (and which I also read and which inspired me to start my company) please check out these links below and spend a few minutes to experience firsthand what conviction combined with courage can create.

On Friday, March 8, Whole Foods Market became the first retailer in the US to require labeling of all genetically modified foods.

They are no longer just about being a destination where consumers can purchase a wide variety of WHOLE foods but they are about ensuring consumers have access to the WHOLE story about what’s in the foods they buy.

I project this will go down in history as one of the most successful and important brand initiatives of 2013, and perhaps of this century. Whole Food’s choice to zig against the zag of its very own industry, putting an internal policy in place to help protect consumers, will not only cement the trust and loyalty of its customer base but will win over a lion’s share of new customers hungry to stand alongside them in this fight for consumer protection and public health (even if they have to pay more to do so). This will inevitably cause a ripple effect that will impact all grocers and the entire food industry, and will surely trickle up to Washington policy makers. And we’ll get to watch this delicious scene play out over these next few years as Whole Foods puts their stand in force.

Whole Foods has given food companies 5 years to get their act together, or to be evicted from their hard won shelf space. Even in the face of consumer criticism about one of their own private label products. Whole Food’s 365 cereal came under scrutiny as it contained genetically modified corn (as do most cereals). But before the press had a field day with this, they quickly re-formulated this cereal to remove the GMO corn. Ok, so no company is perfect. But how quickly the consumer is willing to forgive and forget when they see a company that has the big picture in mind.  Big Food, Big Pharma and not even Big Government will be able to hold on to their justification much longer that it’s really ok to feed Americans genetically modified ingredients without them knowing about it.

88% of corn and 94% of soy crops were genetically modified in the US in 2011. Soy and soy derivatives are in most breads, crackers, chips, cookies, candy, canned tuna fish, processed sauces, salad dressings, condiments, and this is only the tip of the soyberg. Many restaurants use soybean oil to cook with because it’s inexpensive. Soy lecithin is used in many vitamins and supplements, and it’s even in most chocolate. Holy Godiva! If you look on the back of many Trader Joe labels (and labels across the board), you’ll often see a note that says “Made in a facility that processes Soy, etc.”.  So there’s almost no escape from soy. Or the negative health effects soy produces on the human physiology, apart from the genetically modified variety. Of course, we all know how pervasive high fructose corn syrup is in our food and beverage supply, especially with all the negative press it’s gotten in recent years that it’s one of the leading contributors to diabetes and obesity in America. Thanks for your help on this one Mayor Bloomberg and others who have waged effective campaigns to get the word out on this issue. But have we yet grappled with the concept that nearly all this corn syrup is coming from GMO corn?

No wonder PepsiCo and Coca-Cola spent millions last year lobbying against the hard fought GMO food labeling ballot in California. What’s scarier is that they won (with the financial help of the biotech industry). They actually succeeded at convincing voters that mandatory labeling of GMO foods would spread unfounded fear among Americans, would raise food prices and would have a negative impact on farmers.  To help seal the deal on this argument and put this ballot to rest (at least until now), our own Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association piped in and told Americans that genetically modified foods aren’t proven to have a negative effect, when in fact there is plenty of evidence that points to the opposite perhaps being true. But the real truth is, the amount of research done in the area of GMO food testing on human beings (or even lab rats) is insufficient to make any argument for GMO labeling stick in the face of multimillion dollar smear campaigns conducted by giant corporations. So even though we don’t have the research or the voters or the policies to force change at this time, we’ve now got a rebel game changer in Whole Foods.

So kudos Whole Foods for living up to your brand name in a WHOLE new and powerful way that makes a difference for the WHOLE of America.

Source for photo:

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/478435/eu_votes_for_labels_on_nano_cloned_and_gm_food.html

THE CHALLENGE:

Cocina Verde, the only on-line raw, vegan, gourmet meal delivery company in Buenos Aires, hired Truth Beauty Now to help re-position itself in a meat eating culture and grow its business.  This is a culture where the organic, wellness and nutrition movement is just at the beginning.  Additionally, we were challenged with creating a 360 brand identity campaign that works in both English and Spanish, as many customers are expats and speak English only.

THE TRUTH:

There is a small, but growing audience of nutrition-conscious urban Argentinians interested in healthy eating and organic, raw, vegan and gluten free foods. But there is very little access to this kind of food on the go, and virtually no other company making quality gourmet level foods of this type, much less delivering them to people’s doors fresh weekly. While Cocina Verde jumped on this business opportunity at the right time and built the biggest raw, vegan, gourmet meal delivery company in Buenos Aires with DYI blood sweat and tears, the business itself was not generating the number of orders to grow it to the next level.

THE BEAUTY:

In addition to providing consulting on a wide range of things from isolating key business challenges, brainstorming new business partnerships, exploring new offerings, like juicing, and recommending sustainability practices to incorporate in Cocina Verde’s day-to-day operations, our first task was clear.  We needed to get to the truth of why the Founder, Kara Bauer, moved to Argentina from America speaking no Spanish at the time and knowing not a soul there, to start Cocina Verde from scratch. What inspired her to make such a radical move?

What would keep her inspired to fulfill her mission?  What crystallized after several important interviews with the Founder, Kara Bauer, was that she founded Cocina Verde as a way to manifest her dream to transform lives through nutrition, great food and education, and that she literally had a dream one night that Argentina was the place to do it.  A key insight that surfaced in our discussions was that LIFE itself and BEING ALIVE to enjoy it was cause for great celebration for all human beings. This key insight also relates to the type of food Cocina Verde is committed to making and delivering daily to Argentinians. Raw food is considered by the nutrition movement to be “live”food as it’s loaded with active enzymes, nutrients, minerals, antioxidants and vitamins. A brand tag line and graphic oeuvre was born out of these discussions:  It’s Great to Be Alive. Or in Spanish: Es Genial Estar Vivo.

An entire 360 bi-lingual campaign was then developed around this sentiment. And a wood cut logo was created and recommended to convey the raw and home made brand virtues.  While good food photography was recommended to communicate gourmet and taste appeal.

The woodcut logo and tagline is stamped on the front of it’s delivery bags as well a stamped company promise: “Raw, Vegan, Gourmet Meals Delivered Fresh to your Body Daily. www.cocinaverde.com” and in Spanish: Comida Raw Vegana/Gourmet Llega Fresca A Tu Cuerpa. www.cocinaverde.com. 

From there we created woodcuts of individual raw food ingredients that are used regularly in Cocina Verde raw dishes, from a cantankerous carrot to a blithering beet. This concept along with its wood cut raw, homemade look and it’s talking veggies and fruits were applied via letterpress to achieve that raw home made look as well.  Ann Lemon, the Art Director, not only came up with and hand cut all the wood cuts herself out of linoleum blocks, but she also enrolled her alum design teacher and cohort, Ray Nichols, to use his old letter press in Delaware, www.leadgrafitti.com to hand make the business cards, stationary and posters.  The papers used are all made of post consumer content and the posters are hand letter pressed on old Argentinian newspapers dating back to the 60′s.

These graphic elements will grace the meal delivery packaging and newly overhauled website which are still in development.

During our project there was a re-branding launch party at a swank Buenos Aires club, catered by Cocina Verde, complete with branded table tents, porta-banners and gift bags containing Cocina Verde branded peelers, recipe booklets, refrigerator magnets, etc. that Truth Beauty Now created as part of its identity package.

THE RESULTS:

After the re-branding effort Cocina Verde’s delivery orders doubled. Cocina Verde is in the process of investigating a new business delivery infrastructure that’s being rolled out and tested over the course of this year to determine next steps. This will be applied to a beta version test site using the web site graphic template elements Truth Beauty Now developed.

I heard a woman being interviewed on the news one night shortly after the Newtown shooting. She raised an interesting question.  Why is it that she had to go through federal and state background checks to adopt her children, but a criminal can buy a gun in America without a background check?

Later that week I saw articles that Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, announced it will NOT be pulling the type of weapon used in the Newtown school massacre off its shelves. Now there’s some effective branding, if your target audience is Ted Nugent. Btw, I just now pulled a screen grab of Walmart’s site, the one you see above.

I brought my adopted daughter Betelhem to New York from Ethiopia in October of 2011. The process took about 2.5 years. And yes, much of this time I spent applying and waiting for federal and state background checks to clear, while I had to procure several other types of “clearances”. I visited the USCIS to get fingerprinted, the NYC Police Department to get a letter of good standing, had two visits from a social worker to get a home study, got a notarized letter from my then employer verifying my salary, from my Dr. verifying my medical condition, from my accountant verifying my financial standing, from the Department of Health in Galveston, Texas verifying my birth certificate, 3 character reference letters, a list of every address I’d ever lived at dating back 28 years. All this and more went into a “dossier”. Once completed, it was taken by special courier in DC, and by “special” I mean I paid a man in DC to hand deliver my dossier to the desk of the Secretary of State for her signature and get the signed original dossier back to me. Yes, Hillary Rodham Clinton actually sat down and signed the cover of my dossier in front of a notary, before I shipped it off to the adoption agency which then shipped it off to the government of Ethiopia to consider whether I was fit to parent one of their 6 million orphans. This all, of course,  preceded my two trips to Ethiopia to meet my beautiful daughter for the first time and to appear in court there. Twice.

So ALL this is required simply to LOVE one child, yet NO mandatory background check is required to buy any number of guns or ammo in the U.S.  How difficult we make it to give an orphan a life, yet how easy we make it for a criminal or someone mentally ill to take a child’s life away. Or multiple children’s lives away, in a matter of seconds.

It’s mind boggling how many orphans there are worldwide compared to how few are adopted annually. And how many guns there are in the world compared to the percentage of those that are owned by private citizens of our great country.

It is estimated there are between 143 million and 210 million orphans worldwide (a recent UNICEF report.) Yet, approximately 250,000 children are adopted annually. http://www.orphanhopeintl.org/facts-statistics/

Of the world’s 875 million firearms, the U.S. buys about 275 million. And roughly 75% of those go to private citizens.  In the U.S. there are about 90 handguns per 100 people. That’s three times what you find in Germany, France or Sweden. And 2.5 times what you find in Iraq. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662850/infographic-of-the-day-does-the-us-really-have-that-many-guns”

Bottom line, the government makes potential adoptive parents jump through hoops for years before they allow them to give an orphan a home, a family, an education, a support system and opportunities they would never have otherwise, yet if you’re a potential child killer and you want to purchase a semi-automatic assault style weapon to spray a classroom, it’s as easy as strolling into your neighborhood Walmart and buying a can of peas.

A few things you can do:

• Sign open letters to Congress, vote in the primaries and support any politician brave enough to take a stand on gun control.

• Join forces with organizations like http://www.momsrising.org/

• Start or join a youth commission like this one in your town to engage youth and get their perspective, http://www.phila.gov/youthcommission/

• Don’t shop at Walmart or any retailer that sells military style assault weapons.

• Help my friend Misha meet his goal of raising $1,000,000 for the Worldwide Orphans Foundation at http://www.mishalyuve.com/music-areweready-game

• Listen to your child, talk to them about this issue (if it’s age appropriate), and watch what they watch on TV, at movies and on the internet.

• Contact us with ideas and resources to help shift public policy.

• Share this.

Truth Beauty Now is looking to support projects and causes we are passionate about, from women’s issues, to public awareness campaigns to helping shift public policy in the right direction.

This film was the result of a personal project undertaken by Deb Lucke, a director, art director (and now prolific children’s book illustrator and author, www.deblucke.com) and myself, writer (and now Creative Director, Founder of Truth Beauty Now) in a time when there was no such thing as crowd source funding platforms like Kickstarter. Little did we know it would win the 1995-1996 NY EMMY for Outstanding PSA.

We started with no client and no money, just the passion to do something creative that made a difference. We agreed we didn’t think scare tactics were the way to go, standard course for many PSA’s. We wanted to take a lighthearted, positive approach that was based on a human truth and that all women could relate to.

THE CHALLENGE

How do we engage women effectively in a new way on the topic of breast cancer and prevention and strike a universal chord among all women without using typical PSA scare tactics.

THE TRUTH

We lit on a couple of contrasting human truths about females and their breasts.  First, before girls grow breasts and while they are developing them they are often focused on them and preoccupied with these changes in their bodies. Conversely, once women have breasts they often take them for granted and forget to do monthly self-breast exams.  We decided this was good fodder for an interesting commercial.

THE BEAUTY

After approaching several large cancer foundations with a storyboard to get sponsorship and funding for the project and getting nowhere, we chose to co-produce the commercial ourselves doing whatever it took. Deb invested not only a great deal of time but her own money in the project. Paula invested her time and enrolled some of her contacts in donating part of the post-production. During the many months it took to complete the project, Deb found an organization willing and excited to put their name on the end of the PSA and run it on TV.  That organization was SHARE – Self Help for Women with Breast and Ovarian Cancer, http://www.sharecancersupport.org/share-new/. They bought into the idea making no changes, and came to the shoot.  They were the perfect client. Of course, they were thrilled to get a free spot to promote their organization and further their cause.

THE RESULT

We were both surprised the spot won a New York Emmy for Best PSA that year.  But we were more surprised when we were told years later by SHARE that the spot did so well for them and the subject matter was treated with such positivity that they kept running it for years on donated cable commercial time.  We will never know the number of women it reached or impacted over time. But if it helped save even one woman’s life over that time, mission accomplished.

Film Credits:

Director/Producer: Deb Lucke   Writer/Producer: Paula Dombrow   Line Producer: Deb Jeffries    Music: Gordon Minette  Music Producer: Jeanne Look   Editor: Robin Burchill   Editorial House: Consulate   Director of Photography: Claudia Raschke

The Challenge:

Re-brand a fledgling hair care line with flat sales and a shoestring budget, and put them on the map in the all natural and organic beauty category. Re-name the entire product line and re-package it. Literally, and sustainably.

The Truth:

The truth about Yarok?

Yarok means “Green” in Hebrew and it lives up to its  name as each product is made from the purest, most sustainably harvested botanicals and essential oils.

Yarok’s product story and sustainable commitment was not coming through in their previous branding, and sales volume was low.

The truth about consumers?

People are using their heads and their hearts when they shop for beauty products. It’s not just about the packaging anymore, it’s about the story, the commitment, the transparency, the ingredients.  Women in this growing target audience of conscious shoppers want products that nourish their spirit as well as their hair.  And they want to feel that when they buy a beauty product for themselves they are not taking away from the beauty of our planet, but contributing to it.

The truth about the category?

There are quite a few organic and all natural shampoos out there and new ones being introduced regularly by small hair care companies as well as by the big ones.

Many “natural” and even “organic” hair care products say they are “sulfate free” or “paraben free” but they contain other chemicals that are buried in the ingredients list.

To compete in the  beauty category as well as in the “green” category, your product benefit needs to be front and center, (nothing like putting it in the name of each product) and you need to do and say things differently than everyone else but in a way that’s more arresting visually and more meaningful than the next brand.

The Beauty:

Convention isn’t our forte. And thankfully, it’s not our clients’ either. We stepped out holding hands together with this risky, wrap-around logo and label design to defy typical beauty packaging rules with a clean, post modern look that invites the shopper to take the product off the shelf, and turn it around to find out more about the Yarok story.

We sourced and managed the print production of the packaging in partnership with Natural Source Printing, a sustainable printer that offers FiberStone®  labels. These waterproof labels are made from limestone (not paper), one of the most abundant natural resources  on earth.

We photographed the whole product line on a shoestring budget (thank you Larry, Eric and Joey of GrandArmy) for use in on-line stores, catalogues, magazines and for Yarok’s new branded web site.

This was a 360 effort which included providing some initial top-line creative direction on the web site design. We directed Yarok to keep the imagery focused on healthy hair and natural ingredients.  The clean, post modern graphic tone we set in Yarok’s brand identity package was integrated beautifully by a talented web designer, Avigdor Susana, www.avigdor@shopy.net.  We are very happy with the outcome and that much of the copy we’d written was included on the site.  www.yarokhair.com.

We consulted with Yarok on the creation of its sustainable hair salon and showroom in Chelsea which opened in December of 2010, and our salon name suggestion was taken: Yarok Beauty Kitchen. The new salon name ties in well to the product line being vegan and super nutritious. As well, it supports the the tag line we wrote which is on every package: Yarok. Food for your head. Good for the Earth.  Which  further ties into each of the benefit driven product names we also created:  Feed Your Roots, Feed Your Ends, Feed Your Volume, Feed Your Hold, Feed Your Shine, Feed Your Youth, etc.

Realizing a brand is only as sustainable as the commitment and actions behind it, at TBN we ask a lot of questions to get to the gold and to help brands articulate their vision to make a difference globally.  One of the questions we asked was if Yarok could take on a bigger problem than an unhealthy, dry scalp or brittle, limp hair, what would it be?   Which lead us to another question. Why can’t Yarok contribute to the beauty of the planet  while it makes people look and feel fabulous? The products are made from plants, so why not give back to plants. Truth Beauty Now recommended Yarok donate a portion of its annual profits to support the Pachamama Alliance, an amazing non-profit that helps empower the indigenous people of Ecuador and Peru to help protect one of the earth’s most valuable resources, the Amazon Rain Forest.

The Results:

Yarok has experienced growth of 200% in sales both from its own shopping cart and from retailers between 2010 – 2012. Yarok’s Founder confirmed that only after Truth Beauty Now re-branded the line, did Yarok begin to get on-line orders on www.yarokhair.com as well as requests for orders from retailers, web stores, spas and salons across the US and worldwide.   Yarok is now available at 40 retailers in the US and 17 stores worldwide, including Japan, Australia, China, Singapore, Amsterdam and now in each room of the chic Oslo, Norway hotel, “The Thief”. Sales volume is expected to move steadily north and this is also in large part due to the amazing Yarok Team, including Janet Mick of IT Management Global, www.Itpublicrelations.com, one of TBN’s lovely strategic allies.

Also, now 3% of Yarok’s annual profits are contributed to he Pachamama Alliance, www.pachamama.org, and consumers can read about it on every Yarok product, brochure and on the Yarok website.

Video of how NIF works, NIF and Photon Science

Here’s some bright news this Earth Day.

There’s a maverick technology being developed in Northern California (surprise) called nuclear fusion. Not to be confused with nuclear fission.  In nuclear fusion, hydrogen nuclei are fused together to form helium nuclei, emitting the kind of massive energy the stars make, including our good old Sun.  This is super good news for our future. And not too distant future it appears, thanks to the hard work and dedicated commitment of a bunch of mad scientists that took Albert Einstein’s E=MC2 seriously. They’re based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Ignition Facility (which btw. is a program of the The Department of Energy.  The Gov has apparently seen the light on this issue.)

So let’s talk practicality. When will it be here and how much is it going to cost?  Good news it seems on both fronts.  Because so much massive energy is created from just fusing together a few hydrogen nuclei, the energy is probably going to be dirt cheap, or nothing compared to oil today. And this technology fuses nuclei together as opposed to splitting nuclei, otherwise known as nuclear fission. The latter is the kind of energy made at nuclear power plants. We’ve seen how stable that is (poor Japan, poor fish, poor oceans, poor contaminated global food supply).  Fusion energy is much safer. It’s also totally sustainable, and runs clean, unlike coal or oil.  As to when will it be a reality, looks like it well may be in our lifetime, maybe even before we run out of oil, which some project at 40 years from now.

So as far as good energy is concerned, looks like sunny days ahead.  Happy Earth Day.

This is one of the most exciting and important new fields of study and innovation of this century.  Biomimicry brings together biology and design with the goal of helping us learn “how humanity can live on this home, that is not just ours” gracefully, as said by Janine Benyus, the keynote speaker in this TedTalks video. Imagine lowering the number of infections in hospitals, the leading cause of mortality in these environments, because the walls are lined with a material inspired by the design of shark skin to prevent bacteria from lodging and growing. Could there be a building with a system of capillaries instead of energy eating pumps that move water up through the building, like trees pull water from the ground up through their leaves? Yes there can. And yes there is. Nature is teaching us and inspiring a new realm of design and invention. Biomimicry asks a key question,”How would Nature solve this?” as stated on the website, www.asknature.org,a database and an ongoing project that organizes all biological information by design and engineering function. Contributing scientists involved are asking: “What can we learn from this organism?” Access to the answers is being made available to inventors on this exciting new site, so they can apply this learning to product design, packaging innovation, new building materials, revolutionary medicines, transformational operating systems, renewable energy mechanics, sustainable architecture, urban development, you name it. Nature is helping us solve design problems today that it solved well before human beings ever existed. It’s showing human beings how to build and create with minimal waste and graceful efficiency.  Nature is our mentor, and the sooner we get this, the better off we all are.

The meaning that has been given to “Race” can be likened to a very effective global branding campaign.  Perhaps one of the greatest campaigns of mankind in its effectiveness to divide.  The first American settlers used it to market the suppression of the Native Americans, who were here first. Then came slavery. Hitler branded “Jews” as a separate “Race” not worthy of living within a Supremacist White Nation.  9/11 was another effectively devastating brand campaign. “Religious Branding” cuts as deeply and as powerfully as “Racial Branding”. Same beast. While racial propaganda has been around for years, this insidious type of branding continues to keep human beings separate from each other as well as hateful, sad, small and afraid.  Clearly unsustainable.

Racism is a form of branding that continues daily for people of color and various minorities in the “United” States and abroad.  Even with Mr. Obama as President, it’s easy to pretend we’ve re-branded ourselves as a nation.  But it’s evident we have not when you still see yellow cabs in Manhattan pass up African American families trying to hail a cab in the pouring rain to pick up the white couple just down the block.  Well branded racial stereotypes are so burnished into the American UNconcsiousness that they persist right here in one of the greatest cities on earth, amidst the bastions of higher thinking and education. Even our own American Museum of Natural History says, “Modern humans were the first hominids to populate the entire globe, after leaving Africa about 100,000 years ago.”  How many white people in Manhattan have spent real time exploring within themselves that that they are African and can identify with what it “feels” like?  Eminem unfortunately does not live in Manhattan.

Racism is so much a part of  our “Human Brand Story” today  that we’ve grown numb to how we quietly reinforce our own “Brand Essence” every time we check off our race on a US Census form, or an application for a job, or a school.  There is the “Other” box we can always check and fill in “American” or “Human” or “Hot” — whatever calls to us, but building our “Brand” today happens without our agreement.  Whether we pretend we’re in a new era where Racism isn’t an issue or we’re the victims or perpetrators of it, Corporate America and the government like to keep us in tidy boxes.  Countless millions are spent on marketing and advertising based on demographics, i.e. the color of our skin.  This reinforces to people that their skin color means they are different in some fundamental way to others.

While we don’t have an answer to this very complex and deeply rooted brand identity crisis humankind suffers daily, there is room for optimism and inquiry.  The good news is our “Brand” perception of ourselves as human beings hasn’t been transmuted into our DNA. In other words, we haven’t been around long enough for a human subspecies to arise as a result, so there is a possibility for us all to begin to re-think these issues regardless of the color of our skin, and to start to consciously relate to each other as equally amazing individuals in our day to day exchanges.  There is the possibility that we human beings can marvel at the beauty of each others physical features, cultural heritage and self expression, and celebrate our differences, rather than quietly denigrating each other whilst shrouding our communications in inauthentic pleasantries. Then there are the common sense facts we can’t ignore.  No biology or science has confirmed that there is any difference between us genetically due to the color of our skin. Two Chinese people can be more genetically different than a Chinese person and a Sudanese person. We all breathe air, bleed blood, eat food, drink water, feel hot, feel cold. We are born and then we die. And all that time in between as human beings we do get the opportunity to create our own “brand story” for ourselves.

We have the opportunity every day to step out and create our individual “Brand” by who we choose to BE, in the face of anything. Whether we are a person of color or not.  We all have the same tools  in our human arsenal that we can share with each other and the world.  WE can BE love, hate, fear, jealousy, anger, compassion, sadness, grief, resentment, embarrassment, success, failure, hilariousness, triumph, bliss, sensuality or joy, regardless of our color or what anyone thinks of us, even the government or Corporate America.  This is our saving grace. We can “Re-Brand” ourselves as individuals at the core of who we are at any given moment.

The beauty of being human as that we have the power to create a world that’s sustainable, where Brand Love and Brand Color peacefully co-exist.