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50 November 2016 | beautystorebusiness.com Skincare Spotlight AS A BEAUTY INDUSTRY PROFESSIONAL, ONE of my goals is to educate consumers about our amazing industry. This sometimes means I have to re-educate consumers. One of my biggest pet peeves is people's misunderstanding of controversial ingredients and the negative effects they may or may not have. While speaking with Lily Tse, the founder and CEO of Think Dirty, I learned that she shares this pet peeve about misinformation, although she approaches the topic from a very different perspective. The idea for Think Dirty, a mobile app that allows consumers to scan beauty products and see the "dirti- ness" rating of their ingredients, originated from her belief that bad choices are made based on false facts and that better information leads to informed choices. Her app, as she describes it, makes it easy for beauty consumers to obtain accurate information about their product choices. Born in Hong Kong, Tse moved to Canada with her family during high school. She attended the University of Toronto before starting her career in design and advertising. For 13 years, Tse worked at various agen- cies defining marketing strategies and creating ads for large consumer-facing companies, including American Express and General Mills. The idea for Think Dirty came from her mother, a breast cancer survivor, and Tse's subsequent obsession with understanding risk factors and trying to minimize them. While researching diet and environmental risk factors, Tse stumbled upon Annie Leonard's 2010 short film, The Story of Cosmetics. Tse watched it with objective eyes. It was then that she realized not everyone agrees about the potential impacts of various ingredients—and she decided her goal was to bring the same transparency to ingredients used in beauty products as is required with food and beverages. Tse explains, "As a consumer, I was always curious about ingredients. When I was working at various agen- cies, doing campaigns for a food company, I sometimes found that the ingredients might not be great, but I was not able or allowed to do anything." Like many startup businesses, this one took a few years to take form. Tse initially had the idea for Think Dirty in 2010, but it was another two years before she acted on it. Tse first endeavored to bring Think Dirty to life by pitching the concept during a "hackathon," a 24-hour competition for startup businesses in the technology space. Although her idea didn't win any awards during that first competition, Tse couldn't stop thinking about the concept. "I get bored so easily," she says. "The fact that I could not let go of this idea told me it was something special." She became even more determined to turn her concept into a reality. A year or so later, after a job layoff, another hack- athon provided the opportunity for her to compete once again. "If I win this time, I really have to move forward with this idea," she promised herself. She did win, and viewing the victory as the equivalent of a market and concept validation, Tse persisted and officially launched Think Dirty in 2013. Today, the business is woman- owned, independent and bootstrapped (with the help of some Canadian government grants). As Think Dirty continues to grow, Tse feels a tre- mendous responsibility to deliver unbiased, accurate information. As both a brand and beauty consumer, her main concern is: "How do you make sure that your information is the best and most accurate? How do Think Dirty Lily Tse's mobile app reveals how "dirty" the ingredients in beauty products are. by Ada S. Polla Top image courtesy of Ada S. Polla; photo by Kelli Daily, Third Line Studios, center image courtesy of Think Dirty Lily Tse is the founder and CEO of Think Dirty FAST FACTS Launched: 2013 HQ: Toronto, Canada Employees: 7 Brands on the app: About 40 THE THINK DIRTY RATING SYSTEM Think Dirty assesses and assigns a rating number (1-10) to the overall risk of a given product based on the potential health impacts of its published ingredi- ents. The higher the rating, the greater the potential for risk presented by a product's ingredients. Each ingredient listed on the product label or manu- facturer's website is evaluated for any documented evidence of: • Carcinogenicity • Developmental & Reproductive Toxicity • Allergenicity & Immunotoxicity