La Base founder Sarah Leclerc<\/a> sought to find a natural alternative to help heal his nappy rash.<\/p>\nHer midwife suggested trying breast milk. Inspired, Leclerc combined her experience as a pharmacy technician and her studies in cosmetic chemistry to blend her breast milk with other key ingredients to use on her son.<\/p>\n
At the time, few recipes existed online and the ones that did had a limited shelf life. Her testing ground was applying the formulas to her husband. Six months later, Leclerc landed on her final formula and a year after that turned it into a kit.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy son\u2019s nappy rash would take a few days to heal using Sudocrem, but when I used the formula I made, it would heal his skin within a day,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Originally, consumers would send LeClerc their breast milk, and she would blend the formula for them, but this process felt complicated and clunky. Instead, she turned it into a kit for at-home use.<\/p>\n
![\"When]()
When her son Remy developed severe nappy rash, Wairoa pharmacy technician Sarah Leclerc developed a DIY kit for mothers to make a soothing skincare cream using their own expressed breast milk.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of baby skincare, there\u2019s nothing that\u2019s more adapted to your own baby than making your own skincare using your breast milk,\u201d Leclerc says, adding consumers will get the best result by using breast milk expressed throughout the day to get all different levels of everything.<\/p>\n
The La Base Lait Labs cream has fewer than 10 ingredients, and Leclerc says each ingredient is included to amplify what breast milk already does, only making it nicer to use.<\/p>\n
\u201cBreast milk is very runny. If you\u2019re going to put it on the skin, not a lot is going to get absorbed before it runs off. So putting it in a thick cream like this ensures that it stays on the skin long enough to absorb the benefits, and it\u2019s not going to be as tacky or sticky as breast milk can be,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
A mother of two myself, I was already familiar with the healing properties of breast milk \u2013 including its feedback loop between mum and baby depending on their needs (like having higher fat content in the evening to allow baby to fall asleep, or producing antibodies when baby is sick). Historically, I\u2019d made milk baths using it for my eldest son, and applied some to my youngest during a bout of conjunctivitis.<\/p>\n
While my breastfeeding journey ended long ago, my interest in La Base was piqued after spotting it on Georgia O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s Instagram feed following the birth of her son, Louie, with All Black Damian McKenzie. <\/p>\n
Lait Labs started as a nappy rash cream, but its uses cover many skin needs.<\/p>\n
Leclerc says she applies a small dab of cream over a blemish at night, and finds it\u2019s \u201cnot as red and quite a bit smaller\u201d come morning. Her husband plays football and uses it to soothe chafed areas. A former co-worker would apply it to soothe sunburn, while another would apply it to her psoriasis.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no limits to what you can use this for, and everybody has skin. I know everybody\u2019s skin is different, but all of these benefits really work on all kinds of skin [issues] \u2013 any cuts, grazes, mosquito bites, sunburn … it\u2019s a full family product,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
One of La Base\u2019s most loyal clients is based in Malaysia, and uses the Lait Labs cream to treat her daughter\u2019s eczema. While no longer breastfeeding herself, she sources breast milk from a friend and purchases refills \u201cby the truckload\u201d, Leclerc says.<\/p>\n
![\"The]()
The La Base range also includes a Bi-Phase Belly Serum and Le Serum, neither of which requires breast milk to be mixed in. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s currently no alternative to breast milk that\u2019s been tested to use with the kit, and Leclerc adds there\u2019s no guarantee the formula would work or stay stable if blended with cow\u2019s or goat\u2019s milk.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do realise that there is a need for something like this that is efficacious. It sucks to say, but breast milk is just incredible. There have been brands that have tried to replicate it in a lab to create synthetic versions,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
This includes BIOMILQ, , a cellular agriculture company in the United States that uses donated mammary cells and cultures them to secrete milk in the lab, and TurtleTree in Singapore, a biotech company that uses precise fermentation processes to produce human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) to make a commercial formula that claims to be functionally identical to breast milk.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut there\u2019s nothing really that has been able to replace it,\u201d Leclerc says.<\/p>\n
![\"The]()
The La Base Lait Labs Kit. <\/p>\n
DIY formulations like La Base\u2019s Lait Labs Kits speak to the wider movement towards personalisation \u2013 where beauty brands seek to appeal to consumers by highlighting the ritualistic aspect of mixing formulations.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of La Base\u2019s unique propositions, Leclerc says.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot only does it come from you, but you also made it for yourself. All of that love and care is poured into this [product] for your baby, because [breast milk] is originally made for your baby,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the feedback we\u2019ve had is how empowered women feel to make it. You know exactly what is going into the bottle, alongside your own breast milk, and then at the end you get this cream like what you would buy off the shelf at a pharmacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leclerc likens the process to growing your own food for your children \u2013 interacting with the breast milk before it turns into a cream that you can apply topically to your own child.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe second-guess everything we put on vulnerable little babies. So when you see it and develop it yourself from your own body, it has this agency over anything else that you want to use on your baby, or anyone else in the family,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs mums, we go to the ends of the earth to find solutions for our kids. So when you find one, you don\u2019t let go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two weeks after our science experiment, Grace shared her honest thoughts about the cream with me over text.<\/p>\n
\u201cFull transparency \u2013 I haven\u2019t used it on Franco\u2019s eczema as he\u2019s having a bit of a flare at the moment. I didn\u2019t want to introduce anything new while his skin was already reactive. But I\u2019ve used it multiple times on myself and my daughter Goldie. With the cold snap and our heat pump being quite drying, she had itchy, dry skin so I used it on her,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really like the consistency; it feels nice and nourishing without being thick. It\u2019s still early days so I don\u2019t have firm results, but emotionally to know exactly what has gone into it and that I\u2019d actually made one of the ingredients myself makes reaching for it feel so much nicer than a random cream from the chemist.\u201d<\/p>\n
More beauty<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s top makeup artists share their favourite lipstick and lip liner combos; how to keep skin hydrated and plump in the harsh winter months and should you incorporate creatine into your wellness stack? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Would you use skincare that contained breast milk? Our beauty editor (and her friend) tried it. \u201cI feel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":513933,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[95,2943,1244,4463,2831,138,56884,46527,32896,29188,12632,16420,78,302,55623,9862,19332,117,111,139,69,3621,1361,223,13920,7188,6730],"class_list":["post-513932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-and","tag-base","tag-beauty","tag-brand","tag-breast","tag-business","tag-contained","tag-custom","tag-editor","tag-formula","tag-friend","tag-human","tag-in","tag-its","tag-la","tag-meet","tag-milk","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-skincare","tag-that","tag-the","tag-tried","tag-uses","tag-would"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513932\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}