Veteran Beauty Editor Olivia Falcon And Former Model Andre Condit Join Forces To Scale Spectacle Skincare

When it comes to skincare, most seasoned beauty editors are jaded from years of being inundated with the latest serum, scrub, salve and spritz launches. If a product manages to break through the noise, an editor can become its most passionate champion.

For Olivia Falcon, the London-based former beauty director of Tatler Magazine and beauty editor at British Vogue, Spectacle Skincare’s Performance Crème made such an impression that she decided to join forces with the Santa Fe-based brand’s founder Andre Condit. Now, the pair is rolling out Spectacle Skincare in a major way in the United States and Europe. The brand’s first product, the 1.2-oz Performance Crème, is available for $87 at spectacleskincare.com. Last week, Performance Crème also debuted at British e-tailer Cult Beauty for 76 pounds.

Falcon was introduced to Performance Crème in 2018 by an aesthetician in Los Angeles. She tried it, loved it and added it to a small e-commerce website she runs as part of a service she established called The Editor’s List with information on cosmetic procedures and practitioners. “People from all over the world come and see me when they want to know where to go for great treatments, be it non-invasive or surgical. I do programs for them and hook them up with the best of the best. I’m not being paid by anyone, so I can give honest, impartial advice,” she explains. “At the end of every consult, the conversation inevitably always turns to skincare.”

The under-the-radar facial moisturizer Performance Crème was outselling popular products Falcon carried from brands like NeoStrata and Dr. Levy Switzerland. However, Falcon was unable to reorder because Condit had run out of raw materials as he was trying to keep up with surging demand. Falcon recounts, “I said to him, ‘Can I finance the next round with you?’’’ In 2019, the international partnership was officially born. 

Prior to Falcon’s involvement, Condit had worked on the formula for nearly a decade, self-funding the operation and studying formulation at the Institute of Cosmetic Science in Australia to buttress his lifelong passion for skincare with technical prowess. The former Ford model, who’s appeared in Ralph Lauren campaigns, seeded the American market via aestheticians and medical professionals who not only sold Performance Crème, but also included it in their back bars. Condit says, “This really was formulated and designed for the diehard beauty gurus like myself who scour the ingredient decks and are quite critical.”

“This really was formulated and designed for the diehard beauty gurus like myself who scour the ingredient decks and are quite critical.”

When Falcon came on board, she helped finalize the formula. It contains the key ingredients copper amino acids, niacinamide, bio-fermented squalane and gallic acid, an ingredient Condit notes is bioengineered using green technology and featured at the maximum concentration of 4%. On top of the formula, Falcon helped develop Spectacle Skincare’s logo, build the brand’s website and support its social media efforts. Thus far, she and Condit have invested roughly $200,000 in Spectacle Skincare. 

Another large initiative Falcon oversaw was the overhaul of the brand’s packaging to improve sustainability. Performance Crème’s tube is constructed from a spruce wood byproduct of the carpentry industry and a low-impact sugarcane compound with a carbon footprint the brand reports is 40% less than the carbon footprint of a conventional cosmetics tube while maintaining European Union cosmetic and food-grade quality standards. The processed spruce sawdust byproduct originally comes from certified forests monitored in the EU. Previously, the chippings were thrown away.

The pump is still plastic, but Falcon plans to upgrade the component as soon as financially feasible. “We have to have an airless pump because of the formula. However, most airless pumps have this metal spring that makes them unrecyclable, this one does not,” she says. “When you’re done, you can just snap it off, throw it in the recycling. It’s fully recyclable. We’re very small and humble. We were looking into doing custom caps and custom airless pumps, but it’s like 150,000 pounds [or about $212,000]. We’re doing our best and, as we go forward, we’re going to do even better.”

Performance Crème’s box is made from acid-, chlorine- and chemical-free hemp paper stock produced in the U.S. Half of the fiber is sustainably sourced from European hemp fields. The other half is post-consumer recycled waste. Spectacle Skincare plants two hemp seeds for every box it creates. For every 1,000 of the brand’s boxes made from hemp, it estimates it saves 16 pounds of trees, 36,000 BTUs of energy, 20 gallons of water, 2.5 pounds of solid waste and 4.5 of greenhouse gases from entering the environment. Spectacle Skincare relies on soy ink, notable for producing 80% less volatile organic compounds or VOCs and being more than four times more biodegradable than standard petroleum-based inks.

Falcon says Spectacle’s retail strategy will start with independent specialty retail and medical and aesthetic distribution. Projected sales goals are $500,000 for the first 12 months post-launch. She’s already leveraged her relationships with some of the UK’s top doctors to get Spectacle into their offices. “We have signed up some of the top clinics in the UK to retail it,” she enthuses. “I have had the most amazing reaction.”

Direct-to-consumer e-commerce is also a first year focus. The brand ships globally from its green fulfillment center in Idaho. About the operation, Condit shares, “They run completely on local green power, solar and wind. They operate on electric forklifts and 99.9% of all material used in the facility is recycled. They do carpooling in…I could go down the list of all the initiatives they’ve taken. We’re so pleased to have partnered with people that share our values.”