Sabrina Dhowre Elba on Business Growth, New Launch and Okra
LONDON — Sabrina and Idris Elba gave guests a taste of what’s in their latest launch for their beauty brand, S’able Labs on Tuesday evening.
The couple hosted an intimate dinner at Ixchel, the newly opened Mexican restaurant on King’s Road in London where the food menu fused African and Mexican cuisine with a helping hand from one special ingredient: okra, also known as lady’s fingers, a key element of their Okra Face Serum.
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The specially curated menu included trout tostado; tempura okra with macho sauce and herbs salad; a selection of Birrio-Suya wrapped in banana leaf, and roasted banana with corn ice cream and buñuelo for dessert.
“I’m East African and Idris is West African, so they all have a very different notion of okra and how it’s used in cuisine. When I was getting married, my mother-in-law was like, ‘You better get this okra stew right or this isn’t happening,’” Sabrina Elba said jokingly.
“Okra is a huge part [of my life] and culture. We try as a brand to highlight the beauty of how strong African botanicals are,” she added.
The fragrance-free serum is meant to attack hyperpigmentation, calm inflammation and improve skin clarity.
It’s the sixth product in the S’able Labs lineup joining the likes of the Qasil cleanser and exfoliating face mask, black seed toner, baobab moisturizer and rooibos micellar water.
Sabrina took okra to her product formulators to explain its health benefits as it is also used medicinally for joints in East Africa.
“When we looked into it on the skin, it does wonders because it’s such a powerful antioxidant and it acts as a natural botox, where it decreases muscular activity at the cellular level,” she said.
The other primary ingredient in the serum is the African resurrection plant, which is not so dissimilar to tumbleweed and can survive in the harshest conditions for almost two years, but as soon as it touches a drop of water, it will blossom in four hours and become green.
“We want to show people that we don’t just use African ingredients because it’s a trendy thing to do, but because they have these resilient properties,” Elba said.
Even though the brand has its core collection in the five products, the serum is a natural next progression to target other problem areas of the skin and it’s a personal one for the cofounder as she couldn’t find products that cater to her skin tone and type.
She admits that the lack of products in the market forced her into the knowledge of skin care and she made it her mission to figure out why her skin wasn’t responding in the right way.
“I took an aesthetician course and now I’m a trained facialist — learning about skin and how it responds to products and what causes the problems that do arise has been game changing for me and it has really informed the brand,” Elba said.
S’able Labs is a family run business with her husband, and without any white labeling or outside investors. Seventy percent of the brand’s sales come from the U.S. and 30 percent from the U.K.
“There’s a very strong identity around Black-owned brands in the U.S., where they want to support these brands and actively search out for them. In the U.K., it’s getting there, but there’s more to go when it comes to visibility,” Elba said.
She’s not completely closed off to outside investors, but said she’s cautious and wants to maintain the way the brand sources raw materials from communities and farmers in Africa, helping to build infrastructure to help them fill out DHL forms and get their goods on the European portal.
“It’s a huge undertaking and it really affects margins. We don’t want anyone to come in and start changing the way we do things because we really believe in supporting rural people and small farmers. A lot of the conditions that these people farm ingredients on are so harsh and unsafe with such low wages,” she said.
“We [as a society] talk about fair-trade food and where our clothes come from, but we don’t talk about who farmed the ingredients in our beauty products,” she added.
The husband-and-wife duo have taken a strategic approach with S’able Labs — their names don’t feature on the packaged products despite accumulating a following of more than 10 million on Instagram.
“We created something that we feel that didn’t exist and I don’t want people to then take us out of that unique category and put us into an oversaturated category like celebrity skin care,” she said.
“I tell people, ‘I don’t want you to buy Black-founded because it’s a nice thing to do, but do it because it works.’ Darker skin is the most sensitive skin type because we lack ceramides and are more prone to aggressors [such as UV rays, blue light and air pollution],” she added.
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