Before organic beauty became a category, it was a conviction. Most beauty brands talk about ingredients. Very few can show you where they come from.

What does it actually look like to build an organic beauty brand from the ground up, sell it, and build again?

I was first introduced to Karen Behnke at a fashion event in San Francisco, where she was speaking on a panel about clean beauty. We happened to be seated across from each other during hair and makeup, a moment that offered an early glimpse into her presence and perspective before understanding the full scope of what she had built.

A few years later, I was invited to visit her Beauty Vineyard, in Healdsburg, where she hosted a group for an immersive tour of the property. At the time, the Beauty Vineyard was harvesting grapes for Juice Beauty, the brand she built over 19 years. Walking the land, it became clear that Karen doesn’t just build brands based on ingredients, but on systems designed around sustainability, transparency, and long-term stewardship. Today, the vineyard, owned by Karen and her husband, is dedicated exclusively to her fourth company, Beauty Crush.

We were introduced to the vineyard and the proprietary Sagrantino and Falanghina grape varietals, grown and harvested directly on the vineyard and used in formulations for Beauty Crush. Seeing how these ingredients move from soil to product offered a level of clarity that is rarely visible in the beauty industry.

Throughout the visit, we sampled a range of products, explored the property, and spent time in an outdoor beauty space where the full collection was displayed, including collaborative lines developed with figures such as Kate Hudson. We also saw details that reflected the brand’s history, including a large “OG (original green)” display, a legacy marker reflecting Juice Beauty’s earliest brand identity along with moments that connected the brand to a broader cultural footprint.

More than the setting, it was Karen herself that defined the experience. Her presence and attention to detail reflected a founder deeply connected to every layer of what she had built.

That visit offered a clear view into the foundation of a company she spent nearly two decades developing, one that helped define the organic beauty category before it became mainstream. I’m proud to share the launch of Karen’s new company, Beauty Crush Skincare.

Voices Shaping Culture: Karen Behnke

Let’s start with what’s top of mind. Can you tell us about your new company, Beauty Crush?

I’m proud to be launching my fourth company, Beauty Crush Skincare— I have been dreaming of so many elevated beauty inventions and patents, and since I own this stunning Sonoma Beauty Vineyard, I just had to continue to follow my passion and start another skincare venture!

Beauty Crush is built on regenerative biotech skincare, integrating sustainability, clean crushing, and vineyard-powered luxury. We harness the exceptional antioxidant power of rare SuperGlow Falanghina and Sagrantino grapes, combined with advanced technologies like proprietary vineyard plant exosomes, biomimetic peptides that act as vegan collagen, niacinamide, and Vitamin C.

This fusion delivers glowing visible results at every stage of an adult’s skin by supporting cellular renewal, helping to boost collagen, and improving elasticity appearance. Rather than temporarily masking concerns like fine lines or dullness, my approach is now more integrated and preventive—multi-tasking formulas designed to simplify routines and support long-term skin vitality, while rejuvenating and revitalizing the skin.

You were one of the early pioneers of organic beauty before it became mainstream. What conviction led you to build Juice Beauty around certified organic ingredients at a time when the industry was not prioritizing it?

Having entered the beauty industry from the wellness, fitness, and environmental sectors, these passions became the foundation of my former skincare business. It never occurred to me to build a brand any other way than to focus on these values.

With Beauty Crush, I’ve greatly elevated that foundation—combining certified organic ingredients, regenerative vineyard practices, solar energy, and refillable, recycled ocean and land waste packaging to create high-performance biotech skincare rooted in sustainability.

Utilizing organic ingredients is not just a philosophy—prioritizing organic ingredients is critical for skincare performance as well as protecting the earth. Unlike conventional crops, certified organic farming avoids synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers that can potentially harm your skin barrier and pollute soil and waterways. Instead, organic farming nourishes the land, protects biodiversity, and creates nutrient-dense botanicals that deliver maximum skincare benefits through higher antioxidant levels than similar ingredients grown conventionally.

Our rare Sonoma vineyard grapes, for example, tested at an independent laboratory, has shown up to 8.5x higher antioxidant levels than standard organic grapes used in cosmetics. And…organic grapes already can have up to 30% higher antioxidant levels than conventionally farmed crops so we are tapping into the highest antioxidant levels by utilizing our proprietary methods. That translates into more potent formulas that help protect against free radical skincare damage and support a healthy, radiant complexion—while also promoting soil health, biodiversity, and carbon capture.

For the planet, organic techniques mean reduced pollution cleaner water, healthier soil, and stronger ecosystems. Organic and regenerative practices capture carbon, conserve water, avoid toxic chemicals and help restore the earth’s natural balance, creating a more sustainable future for beauty.

We achieve these extraordinary levels through organic and regenerative vineyard techniques, all designed to provide our customers with the most potent skincare ingredients while helping the planet. My goal is to ensure that our products care for your skin while protecting the planet.

At the Beauty Crush Vineyard, you oversee the process from ingredient sourcing through formulation. How does that level of integration shape your approach to product integrity and performance?

The Sonoma Biotech Vineyard is where my innovation originates. It’s where I develop all of my new ideas—like incorporating rare Falanghina grape leaf extracts into advanced delivery systems such as exosomes.

We closely manage the vineyard specifically for skincare performance, not for wine or grape juice taste, which allows us to optimize antioxidant levels for the skin. Together with my husband, Howard Luria, M.D., we carefully manage every aspect of the cultivation, harvesting and crushing to maximize beauty potency.

Clean Crushing protects the integrity of our rare, antioxidant rich grapes, ensuring polyphenols, flavonoids, and skin renewing compounds are preserved at the highest potency. By eliminating harsh mechanical pressure and avoiding oxygen exposure with steam processing, our Clean Crush method maintains the purity, freshness, and bio activity of vineyard grown actives that traditional crushing can degrade. This gentle, low intervention process keeps the grape skins intact, allowing us to extract more clinically meaningful nutrients for skincare performance without contamination or oxidation.

Combined with regenerative practices like planting nitrogen-rich cover crops and gentle filtration methods, this end-to-end control allows us to deliver traceable, high-performance, vineyard-powered actives with uncompromised integrity.

These methods are central to our Beauty Vineyard’s mission: to deliver clean, science backed, vineyard powered skincare with uncompromised purity and measurable skincare results.

Clean beauty is now widely discussed, but standards can vary. How do you define “organic” in a way that goes beyond marketing claims?

My philosophy, greatly elevated with Beauty Crush Skincare, is to make Clean and Sustainable—inside and out– a core philosophy of the entire organization.

“Clean” can mean many things today—for example a company can make a minor single ingredient swap along with a basic packaging claim yet this same product, can still contain many questionable ingredients. With so much green washing, it’s very hard for the consumer to decipher what they are actually buying. My pioneering philosophy has always been to take a more expansive approach: clean and sustainable, inside and out to the greatest extent possible and to create a trustworthy environment for my consumers.

This approach was rewarded when ULTA Beauty executives tapped my expertise to help them form their major Conscious Beauty Initiative and then subsequently another honor when they appointed me to serve as a founding ULTA Conscious Beauty Board member addressing all types of issues including ingredients and packaging.

From a U.S. regulatory standpoint, “Made with Organic Ingredients” requires over 70% certified organic content (excluding water and salt) and prohibits genetic engineering, toxic runoff, and ionizing radiation. Becoming and maintaining organic certification for a property and crops, like we do at the Beauty Crush Vineyard, requires annual inspections and rigorous recertification by USDA approved state agencies. Additionally, there are a few global certifications like COSMOS Organic for products that can provide strong validation for a consumer.

For me, clean and organic are about transparency, integrity, and measurable impact—not marketing shortcuts.

Your former products are known not only for their ingredients, but also for their sensory experience. How do you balance clinical efficacy with texture, scent, and overall user experience?

True luxury skincare must deliver both results and experience and I’m thrilled that I’ve greatly elevated my inventions with Beauty Crush formulations–my 4th company!
First, I always start with clinical-grade efficacy to meet or exceed a leading conventional product standard—our regenerative biotech actives, proprietary plant exosomes, and biomimetic peptides—supported by exceptionally high antioxidant levels from our vineyard-grown Sagrantino and Falanghina grapes, are all designed to deliver exceptional results.

Working closely with our chemists, and after achieving the desired efficacy, we then refine texture, absorption, and aroma to ensure the formulas feel beautiful on the skin and provide a great experience for my customers of all adult ages. The result is skincare that is both highly effective and sensorially elevated.

Our proprietary grapes are now exclusive to Beauty Crush formulations, and testing shows:

• Up to 8.5x or 750% higher ORAC antioxidant levels
• 6.8x higher phenolic antioxidant content

These extraordinary levels and ingredients directly support visible radiance and skin protection.

As more brands enter the clean and organic space, how do you see the future of beauty evolving, and What role do you see Beauty Crush playing in shaping the future of beauty?

The beauty industry thrives on the balance between large-scale companies and founder-led smaller brands. There is continued room for large and small companies as Beauty has been cluttered and crowded for decades.

Large beauty companies shape the industry through scale, infrastructure and global reach—they have an advertising infrastructure that smaller brands simply can’t match. Small, founder led beauty companies play a critical role: as the innovation and creativity engines, introducing new ingredients, sustainability practices, and storytelling approaches generally long before big brands adopt them. In many ways, small founder led brands invent the future of beauty, and large brands commercialize it. Younger founders will likely become more savvy choosing the right investors as private equity investments often lead to the brand losing its’ raison d’etre as margin pressures take over. I believe Founders will become more savvy while choosing their investors for longer term brand health.

Beauty Crush will help lead the next wave of innovation: regenerative biotech skincare grounded in organic and environmental values as we’re focused on:

• True innovation including patentable grape-based technologies
• Proven results through independent lab testing
• Radical transparency and authenticity, no green washing
• End-to-end sustainability, solar power, regenerative farming, refillable and ocean and land waste recycled packaging
• Traceability from vineyard to formula

Environmentalism will hopefully move back to mainstream in consumer products and the world. Building a company that provides great products while minimizing our carbon footprint through entirely solar powered operations, organic regenerative vineyard cultivation, clean crushing and processing, sustainable tree-free boxes, refillable, recycled and recyclable packaging, vegetable inks, local manufacturing and printing and more is my world. I’d like to set an example of no green washing and being transparent on the hard work it takes to being a true environmentalist—with the missteps and right steps that we all inevitably make along this sustainable path.

I am hoping that the future of beauty is high-performance, science-backed, and environmentally accountable—and that’s exactly where we’re building.

Find out more at: BeautyCrushSkin.com

Karen Behnke is a serial entrepreneur, driven by lifelong passions for environmentalism, wellness, fitness and skincare. Recognized by Elle, Forbes, and Cosmopolitan as the “OG of the Clean Beauty Movement,” she helped shape the organic and sustainable skincare industry long before it became mainstream. Karen was a founding member and served on ULTA’s Conscious Beauty Board for several years. Karen has partnered with celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow for the 2015 launch of Goop Beauty and Kate Hudson for co-branded products. She is best known as the Founder and former CEO of Juice Beauty, the award-winning organic skincare company she launched and ran from 2005-2023.

She has won many awards including Goldman Sachs’ Most Innovative Entrepreneurs and Glamour’s Top Eco-Leader. Passionate about eco-conscious innovation, she continues to live her mission at her organic beauty vineyard in Sonoma County and serves on the Environmental Media Association Board of Directors.

NOTE: After selling Juice Beauty’s majority stake to a private equity firm, Karen stepped aside from her role as CEO in 2023 when a new leadership team was appointed. By 2025, the company entered liquidation.

Closing Thoughts

What stands out in Karen Behnke’s perspective is the understanding that beauty is not separate from the systems that create it. It is shaped at the source.

Through her work, that philosophy moves beyond ingredients and into how products are conceived, developed, and brought to life. From vineyard cultivation to formulation, every layer reflects an approach built on integration, not fragmentation.

In an industry often driven by trends and surface-level claims, her perspective returns to something more foundational. It is not about reacting to the market, but about building with intention from the ground up, where performance, sustainability, and long-term thinking are aligned.

This next chapter reflects a continuation of that philosophy, now expressed through Beauty Crush Skincare.

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The Spotlight Series

The Voices Shaping Culture Spotlight Series highlights voices shaping culture, film, technology, business, and the arts.

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Thank You

Thank you, Karen, for sharing your perspective and for continuing to shape the future of beauty through innovation, sustainability, and long-term vision.

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About the Author

Susye Weng-Reeder, known online as SincerelySusye™, is a Google Verified Internet Personality, published author, and former tech industry professional with experience at Facebook, Apple, and Zoom.

Recognized as one of the first human AI indexed creators — not CGI — she has built a digital presence that surfaces across major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others. Her work reflects a deliberate approach to identity architecture, digital visibility, and long term authority in an AI driven discovery landscape.

Susye first gained recognition through intuitive healing, travel storytelling, and personal transformation writing. Over time, her focus expanded to include AI visibility, online identity strategy, and the evolving relationship between human creators and machine interpretation.

Today, she writes at the intersection of culture, technology, and emotional intelligence. SincerelySusye.com serves as a space for thoughtful analysis, creative expression, and conversations about how identity, authority, and narrative are shaped in the digital age.