Design Bridge

We’ve built a significant and moneyed industry around looking good. We talk quite freely about grooming, nourishing, moisturising and spritzing. We’re encouraged to prime, invigorate, exfoliate, pluck, shave and buff in an attempt to rewind and renew, because we’re anti-age. We’re getting blow-drys and blow-outs. We look to volumise, mesmerise, energise. Bronze, whiten, perfect, repeat. And we rarely give the ridiculousness of words like dewy, electrify and wonderglow a second-take because we see them so frequently. This is the new norm.

But strangely enough, we rarely hear that good old-fashioned word: clean. All this excess chatter sometimes smudges the actual truth: the outside makes us feel good inside. Cleanliness is confidence.

For those living in hygiene poverty, from the unemployed to those with little to no disposable income, true, everyday toiletries and hygiene essentials like soap, razors, shower gel and tampons, are, quite simply, luxuries. Those illuminating, shimmering extras that have become part of our desperately beautiful narrative? Well they may as well be the stuff of fiction.

And so, Beauty Banks. This is the brainchild of journalist Sali Hughes and publicist Jo Jones. Disillusioned with the waste they were seeing in the beauty industry, they founded Beauty Banks to help those who live below the poverty line to clean and care for themselves and their families. Hygiene poverty is debilitating: preventing people getting to that job interview, going to school or simply getting through the day, dignity intact.

Here at DB, we’re keen to help out. After all, we count some of the biggest names in the beauty and hygiene industries amongst our clients. This isn’t life or death – but these essentials are the tools of modern life.

Our small but devoted Beauty Banks team is made up of Holly Kielty, (me, Caroline), Beth Stone, Jonny Bateman and our dynamite, dazzling D&AD New Blood Shift recruit Kieran Ahmed. We’ve created a campaign that’s deliberately upbeat and all about the essentials of feeling good because being clean and feeling confident is more than skin-deep.

BEAUTY SPOTS have been placed around our London Studio on every floor. The idea is that if you’ve got unused products or you’re buying those Boots’ 3 for 2s, we want people to consider donating that extra essential.

We’ve been collecting since Tuesday 24th of April and will continue to for the next couple of weeks. So if you’re based in our London Studio and this is the first you’ve heard about it (where HAVE you been?!), or indeed if you happen to be visiting us in the next few weeks, please have a forage for any unused products and let’s get this collection going – we’ve even created a list of the items that are most needed:

Let’s help every body feel like a somebody.

You can find out more about the project in Sali’s article on The Pool, and follow Beauty Banks on Instagram to keep up to date.