A Clean Start This engineer-turned-skincare consultant is sharing her ever-evolving collection for clean beauty. By Amy Ferguson | Photos by Kate Zills Is there anything more humiliating to admit at age 32, as a hard-working mother and wife, that you’ve fallen victim to the phenomenon that is TikTok? I’m strictly asking for a friend, a friend who has been convinced over and over again that she needs certain beauty products because complete strangers (who are half her age, by the way) say so. But 28-year-old Kate Zills, who runs an online clean beauty store called MADE, isn’t here to judge my friend or me or anyone else who has been influenced by TikTok. In fact, she completely gets it. “In my attempts to research clean and effective skincare products, I became so frustrated with the entire process,” Kate says. “It would take me 30 minutes to find one product I could use in a single store, and then I’d get furious as to why some
ingredients were even allowed on the shelves. I kept thinking there had to be an easier way.” For some, that easier way is trusting the advice of random users on TikTok, who may or may not know what they are talking about. But Kate had deeper motivations to take things into her own hands. As a full-time environmental engineer with Hazen and Sawyer, a company focused on controlling water pollution, Kate’s thoughts about the world quickly changed when her eyes were opened to the amount of hazardous waste and contamination constantly threatening all types of communities, both near and far. “I’ve seen first-hand how damaging chemicals can be to us and to our environment,” Kate says. “People just don’t know how fairly unregulated the market is.” HooversMagazine.com 51
