Food & Drink
13 June 2023
This article first appeared in our Earth Day 2025 issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 22 April. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Main image: Neve and Julie with their first beehives
Neve Macken was nine when, during a house viewing, she spotted a large stack of jars and discovered the owner’s bees made considerable quantities of honey, wax and propolis – as well as pollinating flowers and trees.
Entrepreneur Neve was born: ‘I think we should live in that house with those bees’, she told her mum, Julie. ‘I’ve spoken with Grandad Jim and I’ve asked him to get me a beehive for my birthday.’
Neve and Julie enrolled on the Oxfordshire Beekeepers’ training course, got their own bees and ‘learned along the way’. Julie also spent time with a traditional apothecary to learn the generations-old skills and practices that enabled her to start formulating their first products.
Julie and Neve decided to use the products from their beehives to create a range of skincare products that are both natural and beneficial.
‘Neve and I suffer from dry skin and eczema’, Julie shares. ‘Even with the most cursory research, it was apparent that the chemical additives in most high-street skincare were not doing us any good.’
Julie’s lightbulb moment came when she discovered these additives are only required in water-based skincare. ‘We simply couldn’t find any products without ‘aqua’ (water) and these additives’, Julie tells us, ‘so we started to make our own!’
A chemist by training, Julie worked for Unilever, GSK and various healthcare companies before launching Neve’s Bees with her daughter in 2017.
‘In my opinion, the UK’s £3bn skincare industry has vastly overcomplicated the market with many products that do the same thing – or even cause the problems the products claim to fix’, she tells us.
Most high-street face creams, body lotions and hand creams are 50-90% water (labelled ‘aqua’), which is generally added to dilute the products and make them cheaper.
But adding water means you need to include processing additives such as preservatives, emulsifiers, thickeners and stabilisers, too.
‘These ingredients can actually make your skin drier or disrupt its natural microbiome’, Julie explains. ‘This risks creating the very problems you might be trying to solve in the first place!’
For Julie, effective skincare means keeping things natural – and also ensuring that every ingredient has a role to play in keeping the skin healthy and protected.
Unsurprisingly, beeswax is used as the base for many of Neve’s Bees products – from the solid deodorants and hand salves to the facial cleansers, moisturisers and lip balms.
The wax is blended with natural plant oils such as rosehip, borage and apricot, many of which are pollinated by bees.
‘Beeswax is one of nature’s best moisturisers’, Julie says; ‘it leaves your skin soft, supple and hydrated and is suitable for even the most sensitive skin. We’re delighted all our products are certified COSMOS 100% Natural Origin.’
Neve’s Bees uses wildcrafted local Oxfordshire beeswax; ‘Certified organic beeswax tends to be imported from China, Kenya or Mexico and I personally think the beekeeping practices in these countries can be unethical’, Julie tells us. ‘The air miles also make it less sustainable. This is why we opted for natural certification rather than organic.’
Roughly one in three mouthfuls of our food is pollinated by bees, yet the UK has lost 97% of its wildflower meadows and 150,000 miles of native hedgerows in the last 50 years. This is a big reason behind the vast decline in pollinator numbers.
‘We donate 10% of profits to charities bringing back meadows, hedges and trees’, Julie shares. ‘We’ve planted and maintain a six-acre wildflower meadow just outside Oxford and we give away thousands of packs of wildflower seeds to create mini-meadows all over the UK.’
The team also volunteers for hedge-planting, meadow restoration and campaigning. It’s all crucial work to help support the bees we rely on for global food supplies – and that inspired this beautifully circular approach to natural skincare.
Your shampoo is still full of plastic – here’s what you can do about it.
New online resource can help everyone to create bee-friendly habitats.
Buglife launches a network of B-lines to help pollinators move across the landscape.
