Last week, I watched a 66-year-old man demonstrate he could drink hairspray.
The man was Horst Rechelbacher, the Austrian-born natural products guru who founded Aveda. (He sold the company to Estee Lauder in 1997 for $300 million.) Rechelbacher now runs a new beauty and wellness brand he founded called Intelligent Nutrients, and he performed the stunt--quaffing a cocktail of hairspray, rose petals and Pellegrino for a gaggle of beauty insiders--to prove the purity of the line. Intelligent Nutrients is just one of the growing number of beauty brands--Belegenza and Befine are two others--offering food-derived products so wholesome they're (well, technically) edible.
Many of Intelligent Nutrients's ingredients come from Rechelbacher's own 580-acre organic farm in Osceola, Wisconsin. The centerpiece of the brand is a blend of five antioxidant-rich seed extracts (grape, raspberry, cranberry, cumin and pumpkin), which is pumped into everything from styling products to lip balm. Pumpkin seed oil even showed up in the salad served at lunch, prepared by fellow Austrian Kurt Gutenbrunner.
