Dr Hauschka Skincare for Face and Body

Dr Hauschka has a special place in my own journey into natural products because it was one of the first natural skincare brands I ever used. In the early 2000s, when I first became properly aware of what was hiding in the ingredient lists of conventional cosmetics and started questioning what I was putting on my skin every day, I discovered Dr Hauschka at my local Fresh & Wild store in Clapham Junction. Back then, natural beauty wasn’t the enormous industry it is today. There weren’t hundreds of brands calling themselves clean, conscious, green or botanical. Finding a genuinely different skincare range felt like discovering another world. I had to travel some ways to find one and spend a small fortune to buy it.

The skincare range was launched in 1967, but its roots go back to WALA Heilmittel GmbH, founded by chemist Dr Rudolf Hauschka in Germany in 1935. Hauschka had developed methods of producing plant-based medicinal preparations without using alcohol as a preservative and established WALA to manufacture natural and anthroposophic medicines.

The company itself has an extraordinary wartime history. Unlike the uncomfortable Nazi-era connections I found when researching Weleda, WALA was banned by the National Socialists. Rudolf Hauschka and his future wife, Dr Margarethe Stavenhagen, were imprisoned and interrogated. The company was forced to relocate repeatedly before eventually establishing itself at Bad Boll/Eckwälden in southern Germany in 1950, where it remains today.

The cosmetics came later. Hauschka had been considering skincare as an extension of WALA’s medicinal work when he met Elisabeth Sigmund, a Viennese cosmetologist who had spent years studying medicinal plants and developing her own approach to skin health. Together they developed what became Dr Hauschka Skin Care, launched in 1967.

That origin explains why the range has always felt different from conventional beauty. The underlying philosophy isn’t about forcing the skin into submission. Dr Hauschka talks about supporting the skin’s own rhythms and its capacity to regulate and regenerate itself. The products grew out of anthroposophic medicine, medicinal plants and a holistic understanding of the body rather than conventional cosmetic manufacturing. Nearly sixty years later, that philosophy remains remarkably intact.

There is another thing I particularly like about the company today: nobody sold it to L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, Unilever or a private-equity fund. Since 1986, WALA has been owned by the WALA Foundation. The foundation exists specifically to protect the purpose and independence of the company. Its structure prevents the business from simply being inherited or sold off as a private asset, and profits are treated as a means of supporting the company’s purpose rather than the sole reason for its existence.

Dr Hauschka remains principally a skincare and makeup company, although its relationship with WALA means it sits within a much wider tradition of natural and anthroposophic medicine.

Facial skincare includes cleansing creams, cleansing balms and milks, toners, facial oils, moisturisers, serums, eye care, masks and intensive treatments. Individual ranges aren’t simply divided into the usual beauty-industry categories of anti-ageing, brightening and blemish control. Many products are designed around different skin states and the idea of helping the skin restore its own balance.

Some products have become natural-beauty classics. Rose Day Cream, introduced in 1967, remains one of the best-known products in the range. It combines rose extracts and rose water with ingredients including shea butter, avocado oil, marsh mallow and beeswax.

The Cleansing Cream is another long-standing product, using almond meal and medicinal-plant extracts rather than conventional foaming detergents.

Body care includes body oils, lotions, bath products, hand care, foot care and deodorants. Medicinal plants such as rose, blackthorn, birch, lemon, lavender, sage and rosemary appear throughout the range.

There is also a substantial natural make-up collection covering foundation, concealer, powder, blush, mascara, eyeliner, eye shadow, lipstick and lip gloss. I like seeing make-up included within the same natural-cosmetics philosophy rather than treating colour cosmetics as the category where ingredient standards suddenly stop mattering.

Dr Hauschka has been making genuinely natural cosmetics since 1967. There was no clean-beauty market to exploit. No Instagram wellness industry. No consumer rush towards paraben-free skincare. In fact, there wasn’t even an independent natural-cosmetics certification system capable of verifying what Dr Hauschka was doing. The company eventually helped create one.

Dr Hauschka was one of the founding companies behind NATRUE, established in 2007 to create meaningful international standards for natural and organic cosmetics. Today every Dr Hauschka cosmetic product is independently NATRUE certified. That certification excludes synthetic fragrances and colours, silicones, mineral oils, PEGs and synthetic preservatives such as parabens. It also places restrictions on how natural ingredients can be processed.

This is clearly more impressive than a brand creating its own list of “banned ingredients” and then awarding itself a clean-beauty badge. I have seen so many of those and I smell the rat from a mile away.

Dr Hauschka grows medicinal plants at WALA’s Demeter-certified biodynamic medicinal herb garden in Germany and obtains additional ingredients from organic, biodynamic and ethically managed projects around the world. Biodynamic cultivation approaches the farm as a living ecological system, paying attention to soil fertility, biodiversity, natural cycles and the relationships between plants, animals and the land. The same principle appears at both ends: don’t isolate one part of a living system and pretend it exists independently of everything around it.

I also love that medicinal plants aren’t decorative additions here. Witch hazel, anthyllis, calendula, rose, marshmallow and numerous other plants are integral to the formulations. The company’s expertise in plants grew out of WALA’s medicinal preparations long before Dr Hauschka Skin Care existed. There is a world of difference between a cosmetics company discovering calendula because consumers currently like botanical ingredients and a company that has spent generations cultivating and processing medicinal plants.

Its preservation philosophy is particularly unusual. Dr Hauschka formulations don’t rely on conventional synthetic preservatives. WALA developed specialised processes for working with plant extracts, and the finished cosmetics use carefully designed formulations, manufacturing processes and ingredients such as alcohol and essential oils where appropriate to maintain stability.

The WALA Foundation has owned the company since 1986, specifically protecting it from private ownership interests. Profit cannot simply be extracted by an owner or passed down as inherited company wealth. After researching brand after brand that began with a compelling founder story only to end with “…and then it was acquired by a multinational conglomerate”, this was quite refreshing to me.

Animal testing has never been part of Dr Hauschka’s skincare development. The company states that it has neither performed nor commissioned animal testing for its cosmetics since the range began.

I don’t mind that Dr Hauschka isn’t entirely vegan. Some products contain beeswax, honey, lanolin or silk. I don’t regard an animal-derived ingredient as automatically undesirable simply because it prevents a vegan label being printed on the box. I care much more about why it’s being used, where it comes from and how the animals and ecosystems involved are treated.

There’s something I find interesting about Dr Hauschka’s famous philosophy of not using a night cream. Traditionally, the company recommends cleansing and toning at night but avoiding heavy oil-based night products, based on its belief that skin should be allowed to carry out its own nocturnal processes without an occlusive layer. Instead, Dr Hauschka offers water-based night serums and intensive treatments. I understand the philosophy, and I actually like the idea of questioning the beauty industry’s insistence that we need another expensive product for every hour of the day.

My first issue is alcohol. It appears surprisingly high in the ingredient lists of a number of Dr Hauschka products. The company uses alcohol partly as an extraction medium for medicinal plants and as part of its preservation system, rather than simply adding it for cosmetic feel. I understand why it’s there, but skin doesn’t care about philosophical explanations if it doesn’t tolerate something. Someone with very dry or highly reactive skin may find particular formulations uncomfortable.

Dr Hauschka is very much a sensory botanical skincare range. Rose smells of rose. Lavender smells of lavender. Essential oils aren’t stripped out simply to make every formulation fragrance-free. Essential oils are complex plant substances with long histories of therapeutic use. But that biological complexity is precisely why some people may react to them. Ingredients including limonene, linalool, geraniol, citronellol, citral and eugenol appear naturally within aromatic plant extracts and have to be declared on cosmetic ingredient lists.

I love them personally. But if I had extremely reactive skin, I’d investigate individual products and wouldn’t assume that NATRUE certification meant irritation was impossible.

Price is a limitation. Dr Hauschka isn’t cheap, particularly when building a complete routine. Organic and biodynamic agriculture, specialist plant processing, German manufacturing and independent certification cost money, so I don’t expect supermarket prices. But there are products where the price makes me stop and ask whether the result is genuinely better than a simpler natural alternative.

I’ve been using natural products for more than twenty years now. The market that existed when I first found Dr Hauschka in Fresh & Wild has completely changed. Today there are excellent independent natural brands making beautifully simple formulations at many different price points. Back then there was no choice. But now there are many others. So I’m more careful about spending 50 quid on a minuscule sized bottle of moisturiser.

Every Dr Hauschka cosmetic product is NATRUE certified natural.

Dr Hauschka was one of the companies that founded NATRUE in 2007, but certification isn’t simply granted because of that relationship. The company is audited annually by an independent auditor who examines supplier documentation, formulations and production.

NATRUE has different certification levels depending on organic content. A NATRUE-certified product shouldn’t therefore automatically be described as certified organic unless it meets the relevant organic threshold.

Dr Hauschka uses ingredients from certified-organic and biodynamic cultivation wherever possible, including plants grown at WALA’s own Demeter-certified biodynamic medicinal herb garden.

Demeter certification applies to biodynamic agriculture and goes beyond basic organic cultivation requirements in areas including farm ecology, soil management and biodiversity.

Dr Hauschka cosmetics contain no synthetic fragrances or dyes, mineral oils, silicones, PEGs or synthetic preservatives.

The range isn’t entirely vegan. Some formulations contain ingredients such as beeswax, lanolin and silk. Many individual products are vegan, so this is something to check product by product.

The company doesn’t conduct or commission animal testing for Dr Hauschka cosmetics.

I remember buying Dr Hauschka at Fresh & Wild in Clapham Junction in the early 2000s, when I had only recently started reading cosmetic labels properly and discovering just how many ingredients I didn’t want to routinely put on my skin.

The natural-beauty world was tiny compared with today. Finding Dr Hauschka felt different because it wasn’t conventional skincare with a few botanical extracts sprinkled into the formula so that a flower could be printed on the box.

Medicinal plants. Biodynamic agriculture. Strange cleansing rituals. No conventional night cream. Natural scents. Rose, witch hazel and anthyllis. Products that smelled and felt unmistakably like they had come from plants rather than a fragrance laboratory.

More than twenty years later, I’ve become considerably harder to impress.

There are hundreds of natural brands now. I’ve tried enough products to know that an organic certification doesn’t make a useless moisturiser useful. I don’t buy something simply because it’s biodynamic, traditional, expensive or beautifully packaged. It has to earn its place in my bathroom. Dr Hauschka still does that for me.

It remains foundation-owned rather than having cashed in its heritage by selling itself to a multinational beauty corporation. Dr Hauschka isn’t trying to become the latest clean-beauty company. The clean-beauty industry arrived decades after Dr Hauschka did.

That’s why, despite having far more choice today than I had standing in Fresh & Wild all those years ago, this is one of the old natural brands I still think deserves its place.