One big concern for me is the excessive use of plastic in the beauty industry. Plastics have improved life for us in so many ways — from lifesaving pacemakers to increasing the longevity of many stored foods. But as is often the case, there’s been an abusive level of consumption without attention to balance. As an industry, we are already making strong moves to reduce the unnecessary use of plastics, but people still buy from companies that use tons of plastic, and until that changes, the industry won’t really change either. We only use plastics when there is no other viable option. For example, the pumping mechanisms that dispense our products are plastic, but the bottles themselves are made of glass and metal, and the vast majority of our packaging materials are made from FSC certified, sustainably sourced papers.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Agatha Luczo and Kim Walls of Furtuna Skin.
International model, author, speaker and Founder of Furtuna Skin and Bambini Furtuna, Agatha Relota Luczo has been immersed in the beauty industry her entire life. Starting her modeling career at age sixteen, she has had access to world-renowned celebrity makeup artists and skincare experts from a very young age.
The Manhattan-born head-turner has graced the pages of Vogue, W, L’Officiel, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and the runways of Ralph Lauren, Chanel, YSL, Oscar de la Renta and Terry Muglier. She has been the face of numerous campaigns for Patek Phillippe, Chanel, YSL, Hermes, Nina Ricci and many more. Her poise, confidence and extensive knowledge of beauty and wellness have made her a sought-after expert for speaking engagements, editorial interviews and podcasts.
Agatha and her husband are landowners in Sicily, where they built an organic farm and co-founded Bona Furtuna, an organic olive oil brand produced on their Estate. When Agatha met Kim Walls, a clean beauty pioneer, the stars aligned and so did their like-minded dreams of creating an organic skincare line that was cleaner and higher performance than the rest. The wealth of wildly potent plants on Agatha’s private Estate in Sicily led to the creation of Furtuna Skin. Agatha has always gravitated towards an organic lifestyle believing that whatever you put on your skin is just as important as what you eat. When she became pregnant, she became increasingly aware of the products she applies topically.
As Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Furtuna Skin, Agatha oversees the creative aspects of the luxury natural Italian skincare brand and is involved in developing the products to create the ultimate aesthetic experience and performance. Additionally, Agatha’s natural beauty radiates as the face of Furtuna Skin showcasing the brand’s transformative effects on the skin.
Kim Walls is the CEO and Co-founder of Furtuna Skin and Bambini Furtuna and a clean beauty pioneer who lives with her family in Los Angeles, California. Born into beauty as the daughter of a renowned skincare founder, she grew up learning how to formulate topical healing remedies.
After graduating from the University of California Santa Barbara with honors, Kim joined a wellness tech startup as their skincare guru. She then pivoted to starting skincare companies of her own, carrying on the family legacy as a founder of natural brands that garnered international recognition. She expanded her beauty repertoire as the former General Manager of Lime Crime Makeup, working with the team to turn it into one of the most rapidly growing indie cosmetic companies.
Named one of New Hope Media’s “9 Wonder Women of the Natural Industry”, Kim has been at the forefront of the clean beauty movement, galvanizing brands to remove unsafe ingredients and create more eco-friendly standards. A skincare innovator with broad experience as an educator, esthetician, nutritionist and formulator, she has worked with doctors, nurses and lab chemists to research and develop breakthrough clean beauty products that lead the industry forward. She combines her commitment to wellness and organic living with expertise in clinical skincare and nutritional science to provide resources and guidance for men and women worldwide. In the non-profit sector, Kim has served as leader of the Retail Advisory Committee for the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
An industry advisor and authority on safe, natural ingredients, Kim has lent her voice to beauty and empowerment podcasts such as Gloss Angeles, American Made Beauty, Support is Sexy and countless others. Kim and her brands have appeared on numerous morning news programs including CBS Early Show and Good Morning America with interviews from major publications including Vogue, Allure, Refinery 29, Poosh, Maisonette and WWD. Kim has contributed to Real Simple, Skin Inc, Huffington Post, Kidsinthehouse.com, StrollerTraffic.com, Natural PregnancyPros.com, MomTrends.com and more.
An animated speaker, she educates and entertains audiences for events like Create & Cultivate, the Girl Cult Festival by Galore, and the Albright, an international women’s club. A member of the Female Founders Collective, CEW, Hey Mama in NYC and The Jane Club in Los Angeles, Kim mentors women on how to grow their business. Having been an early leader in international eCommerce and a business partner to such retailers as Whole Foods, Target, Ulta and Sephora, Kim has been tapped to speak on new trends at conferences like Shop.org and led the Retail Advisory Committee for the Environmental Working Group.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Sometimes I feel like the luckiest person on earth when it comes to my career. I was born into the beauty business as my father founded a luxury skincare brand shortly after I was born. I was obsessed with helping him from as far back as I can remember. One of my favorite memories is sitting on the kitchen counter while he blended together novel ingredients that had never been used in skincare before. I hung on his every word about biochemistry and took his lead — eventually creating my own products. His library was always overflowing with original research about skincare ingredient performance and new methodologies. I could never get enough, and I still can’t. The opportunities to create new products, using wildly potent plants from La Furtuna Estate, combined with techniques like our trademarked Soundbath Extraction Method, has made me more appreciative of my career than ever before.
— Kim Walls, Co-Founder and CEO of Furtuna Skin
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Before breaking into the beauty business I was an international supermodel. At the height of my modeling career when I was gracing the campaigns for Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Nina Ricci, to name just a few and was given the opportunity to be cast in a movie, and then tragically my lung collapsed 3 different times which led to 2 different emergency surgeries. One day during recovery, I turned to my mom and weakly scribbled on a paper that I thought I was going to die. I felt my life slipping away. While on the edge of consciousness I could hear the voices of the nurses calling me to stay with us. I went from CCU to ICU and by the grace of God and amazing health professionals, I made a full recovery. My career was interrupted on-and-off for a few years as a result and it was a long road back to the top of the fashion world. Because of this experience I always keep life in perspective and count each day as a blessing. Now, more than ever, I strive to seize every opportunity and make the best of every situation.
— Agatha Luczo, Founder and CCO of Furtuna Skin
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
I’ve always loved what I do, so in that way, I feel like I’ve been successful since the beginning.
By the same token, I’ve learned a lot the hard way — by making mistakes. I don’t know that
I make fewer mistakes now than before, but I do learn faster. The problem with loving what you do is that it doesn’t feel like work, so it is easy to go and go and go. One day I realized that money matters more than I realized, and that my time and experience have value and decided to stop working for free. I committed to myself that I would only donate about five hours per week of doing work for free, and that would be mostly donated to young entrepreneurs who are just finding their way. Once I made that decision I still did the work I love, but I started making more money doing the same thing. Go figure.
All that said, there was definitely a tipping point in my ability to conceive of and execute on creating products that performed far better than anything in my past. This all began when I met Agatha. She had a huge vision, enormous confidence in us as a team, and plants on her farm that were so powerful they seemed magical to me.
A great example of this is our Anchusa Azurea, which we debuted into the skincare world. The Anchusa Azurea is a wildflower that grows on the farm and has super high concentrations ofVitamins C and E, polyphenols, flavonoids, and fatty acids, which shield skin against environmental stress with the highest antioxidant activity of any wild edible Mediterranean plant. This powerful plant helps heal surface inflammation and blur imperfections as it restores skin, and it’s at the heart of our Splendore Anchusa™ complex, which is in many of our Furtuna Skin formulas.
Learning how to work as a true team member instead of a solo flyer completely changed my life, and was my biggest tipping point.
— Kim Walls, Co-Founder and CEO of Furtuna Skin
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
When I was in high school, I was stopped on the street by a modeling scout and agent to become a model. My parents weren’t a hundred percent behind the idea and they had me go seek advice. When I shared my story with Sister Catherine, a nun and my high school guidance counselor, she told me, “Agatha, go, run and take the opportunity and never look back”. Her advice gave me the confidence to go and take a chance which brought me to where I am today.
I am forever grateful to her.
— Agatha Luczo, Founder and CCO of Furtuna Skin
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. The beauty industry today has access to technology that was inconceivable only a short time ago. Can you tell us about the “cutting edge” (pardon the pun) technologies that you are working with or introducing? How do you think that will help people?
We use a trademarked Soundbath™ Extraction Method to extract wildly potent bioactives from the plants on our farm. This particular technology was adapted from the pharmaceutical industry because it delivers the most consistent and reliable results. In previous years, other companies couldn’t get reliable results from truly natural bases because the industry was using old fashioned methods like ethoxylation or leaving things in the heat or sun to extract too slowly over time. Now that we’ve incorporated higher-performance methods, we are able to reach new levels of benefits for skincare aficionados.
— Kim Walls, Co-Founder and CEO of Furtuna Skin
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
At Furtuna Skin, we have benefited from the law of unintended consequences because we have looked first to the land and not the labs for our greatest inspiration. The magic that happens in plant communities may someday be explained in plain scientific terms, but until then, we don’t need to wait until the wisdom of the ages yields meaningful results in our skincare routines. We’ve found divine combinations of plant components that are included in our products like the Splendore Anchusa Complex that are so powerful they can block 100% of free radical formation on the skin.
— Kim Walls, Co-Founder and CEO of Furtuna Skin
Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the “beauty-tech” industry?
- Personalization and the ability to best cater to our clientele.
- Processing methods — cutting edge science.
- Testing methodologies — how to identify the potential of any ingredient to benefit skin specifically. Historically the testing used in beauty was food and nutrient-based testing. Skin is different from the digestive system.
— Agatha Luczo, Founder and CCO of Furtuna Skin
Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to reform or improve the industry, what would you suggest?
1. One big concern for me is the excessive use of plastic in the beauty industry. Plastics have improved life for us in so many ways — from lifesaving pacemakers to increasing the longevity of many stored foods. But as is often the case, there’s been an abusive level of consumption without attention to balance. As an industry, we are already making strong moves to reduce the unnecessary use of plastics, but people still buy from companies that use tons of plastic, and until that changes, the industry won’t really change either. At Furtuna Skin we only use plastics when there is no other viable option. For example, the pumping mechanisms that dispense our products are plastic, but the bottles themselves are made of glass and metal, and the vast majority of our packaging materials are made from FSC certified, sustainably sourced papers.
2. Another concern is the use of new invasive procedures and new skincare ingredients without proper testing. Fundamentally, the skin has been viewed more like a cellophane wrapper than the dynamic body organ that it is. Historically, people didn’t approach skin procedures from the perspective of “How will this affect my overall health and body, not just my look?” In the early 2000s, I was so excited about laser hair removal and had it done myself to save time on shaving. Then, just a couple of years ago, I was doing a deep-dive on new stem cell technologies for skincare and learned that a great deal of our skin’s wound healing abilities come from stem cells that thrive in the base of the hair follicle. By engaging in laser hair removal, I damaged the stem cells in my hair follicles — the very cells that have the greatest healing potential for my skin. I undermined the potential of my body’s entire immune system for the convenience of not needing to shave. My personal experiences of seeing potentially dangerous new technologies come and go has made me, and our entire team at Furtuna Skin, deeply committed to doing the proper testing to prove that our products are helpful, and also not harmful.
3. My last concern is the industry standard for the definition of what “beauty” truly means. There are many factors that go into this concern, but we also need to look in the mirror as individuals and see that we make conscious choices in our purchasing habits, and that those choices have consequences. Marketers will continue to market what sells. So I challenge us all: let’s buy a vision of beauty that reflects the reality we want to see in the world. Vote with your wallet.
— Kim Walls, Co-Founder and CEO of Furtuna Skin
You are an expert about beauty. Can you share 5 ideas that anyone can use “to feel beautiful”? (Please share a story or example for each.)
I wake up each morning counting my blessings and remind myself how special life is and to cherish what you have. Having said that, I do have a ritual and use the below five things on a daily basis that make me feel beautiful in their own way.
- Large Sunglasses
- Borsalino Hat
- Scarves
- Mascara and Eyeliner
- Furtuna Skin Porte Per La Vitalita Face and Eye Serum
— Agatha Luczo, Founder and CCO of Furtuna Skin
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I am honored to be where I am and think if I could inspire a movement I would wish to provide equal access to education to all the children around the world.
— Agatha Luczo, Founder and CCO of Furtuna Skin
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have two life lesson quotes that I follow and are my favorite: “Everything in life happens for a reason” and “Live life with no regrets.”
I believe you should always follow your instincts and your heart. You wouldn’t be where you are today if it wasn’t for the choices you made and the things that happened to you along the way.
— Agatha Luczo, Founder and CCO of Furtuna Skin
How can our readers follow you online? @agatharelotaluczo @kimwallsla @furtunaskin
The Future Of Beauty: “Clean Beauty” With Agatha Luczo & Kim Walls of Furtuna Skin was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.