On the Line with Kate McLeod
an exclusive interview with the pastry chef turned founder
Welcome to On the Line! A new series from Hotline Skin, bringing you exclusive interviews with founders, formulators, strategists and other key players in beauty. I’ll ask the first round of questions and then turn it over to you. Missed one? Read them all here.
Back in April, I caught up with the Kate McLeod over Zoom while she was with her family in Costa Rica. I was in my office-bedroom in Brooklyn, not jealous at all. As a longtime fan of the Kate McLeod solid moisturizing stones, I was excited to learn more about the woman behind the brand and discuss the launch of Bug Balm, a new kind of mosquito repellent. Mosquitos are, after all, very on theme for our summer skin series.
I’ve read interviews with Kate and even interviewed her myself once before, but over nearly two hours, she shared a truly wild backstory and imparted so much wisdom that we hardly talked about mosquitos at all. I think you’ll agree with my choice to keep the focus on her instead.
One quick thing before we get into it—since our interview, the brand launched another summertime body staple, the Sun Stone, an after-sun cooling and soothing balm.
As part of this series, you also get the opportunity to ask your own questions! Ask Kate anything in the comments and she’ll pop in over the next few days to answer.
Don’t miss the Hotline Skin exclusive discount at the end!
P.S. The Hotline Skin Virtual Live Event for paid subscribers is tonight! If you have not RSVP’d yet, please do so asap or email hi@joldef.com for the link.
You’re in Costa Rica right now, but where are you normally based? Introduce us to Kate McLeod, outside of your namesake brand!
Normally we are based between upstate New York and NYC, but I don’t know how that is going to change in the future. New York City is so amazing and it provides endless opportunities for learning, diversity, meeting cool people, and seeing amazing things. But with the phase that my family is in right now, early childhood, I think that there is also a magicalness to not being in the city.
I was asked recently in another interview what the best parenting advice I was ever given was and it was “aim for yes.” I believe in structure, I believe in boundaries, and I believe it is my job as a parent to push those boundaries and to hold them so they can feel safe and stable and certain in them.
I believe that the magic of early childhood and imagination comes alive with unstructured free time and the ability to be in a Yes. So what does a Yes look like? A Yes is like, can you throw those rocks over in those tide pools? Yes, yes you can. Can you go running like crazy through the yard upstate? Yes, yes you can. If you really want to wear a tutu every day to camp or to school and there’s no uniform guide, yes. Knock your socks off. Whatever that is doing for you, yes, yes you can. But, can you run around wild at the dinner table? No, no you can’t, sit your bum bum down. Being in the city, there are a lot more No’s for their own safety, so I just feel like my mama bear heart is being pulled a little more strongly to nature.
Photo: Kate McLeod
I knew you were a pastry chef prior to founding your brand, but I was surprised to learn that you had a career in finance even before that! How and why did you make the transition from finance to the culinary world?
Do you want the real story? [I obviously said yes.] The real story is even more convoluted than that. I grew up in a small town and didn’t really know how many different types of jobs were out there. In college, I was very good at economics and math and did summer internships in finance. After my last internship, I returned to Wellesley with a job offer from Goldman Sachs and with my major nearly complete, I declared a leave of absence my senior spring and moved to Italy for culinary school. A week after getting back, I hit the summer training program at Goldman and a few weeks later, Lehman folded and it was just such a different world from my summer internships. I did my analyst years, but I had this shift where I recognized there’s a difference between being good at something and dedicating your life to something.
It started this realization, that I’ve really come to understand over the past 15 years, that I identify more than anything else as a maker. Literally no matter what I am doing, if I can get my hands into it or feel it somatically, I feel connected with my body, which calms me and eases my anxiety. I always need to remind myself that in order to connect with my body, I have to use my body. When I decided to work in finance, I didn’t know myself well enough or about all the possible jobs you can have.
I knew I had to leave Goldman, but I was paralyzed. What was I going to do? In your twenties you’re like “oh gosh, I don’t want to ruin my resume,” but I found in the UK, there’s a very competitive post-Bacc culture—a big market for people who realize they wish they had done something different from undergrad. So I applied to the Courtauld Institute in London and did a post-Bacc and Master’s in the History of Art. In that cooling off period from finance, I got really into working my hands again because I was a student and it gave me the space without the pressure. I ended up opening a made-to-order bakery in London and would do some weekly catering.
Then, with my partner at the time, I moved to South Africa and continued that realization that no matter where I am and what I’m doing, if I can get my hands in it, I can feel at home. I would experiment with local ingredients, cooking my way through living and traveling around. Then I was briefly in Paris, where I got really into chocolate, which came in handy later on. Eventually I called off a wedding, blew up my life and moved back to New York in 2015.
What happened when you got back to New York?
Back in New York, I got really lost again. I thought about cooking, but no part of me wanted to cook in NYC full time. I was doing some catering, but I was also taking lots of yoga classes and got my teacher certification and went through Ayurveda training. I had a lot of anxiety over not having clarity, which looking back I’m like oh honey, no one does.
I’ll never forget this. It was the eve of my 30th birthday, I was having all this anxiety and my sister-in-law, who was really into this type of stuff, gave me some cocoa butter, looked me dead in the eye and said, “you really need to spend some time with yourself and this is going to take a long time to put on.”
Cocoa butter is a rock hard solid and it was so, so difficult to apply. I told her she was crazy, but I did it and the results I saw in my skin overnight were truly insane, like nothing I had ever experienced before.
I’m sensing we’re about to hear the Body Stone origin story.
Around the same time, I was getting really into oils and mixing, taking free classes at Enfleurage in the West Village, an amazing essential oil shop. I loved to create recipes, but I’d never done anything for the body and realized there was a whole new field of recipes I could get into! I started playing around with it, treating the cocoa butter like chocolate, tempering it the same way, adding in some oils.
If you think about the inside of a chocolate truffle, it’s ganache. And what’s the difference between ganache and chocolate? Ganache has a higher oil content and will make butter melt faster. My hypothesis was to treat the cocoa butter like a truffle. Oil at room temperature is liquid and this butter is solid, so if you incorporate more oil, it will melt faster. So I decided to see if I could use oils to make the cocoa butter melt easily on the skin. And I realized that when I used the product I made for myself, it wasn’t just a product anymore. When I used it at night or in the morning, I had a better day. I was calmer. Taking care of myself, applying it, gave me internal grounding and connected me to myself. That’s magic. That’s its superpower.
How long did it take to get the formula right and when did you know you were on to something bigger than just a moisturizing solution for yourself?
I was teaching yoga at WeWork, and I said to the WeWork people, I want to offer an oils workshop. This was in the height of WeWork so they were like “yeah!” I ended up putting together an oils workshop which also featured the Body Stone and I was starting to find my groove. I bought a Square chip and would take Uber Pools everywhere. I would literally strike up conversations with the people in the car and try to sell early versions. I would set goals for myself, like "I'm going to sell at least one or two stones on this ride” and I would do it.
When I first decided to sell the Body Stone, I had a bunch of scents and didn’t know what to launch with. I really liked the scent of the Grounding Stone which is vetiver and bergamot, but everyone seemed to like the scent of the Daily Stone which is rose, frankincense, and neroli. I ended up having a scent choosing party and I invited friends, but it was also very normal for me to make friends on the L train, so I invited those new friends too. One of these people ended up marrying a good friend of mine and she was like, “oh my god we met like ten years ago when you invited me to a random party to test essential oil blends at your apartment in Williamsburg.”
The Uber Pool model is genius, but I assume not very sustainable. How did you go about selling them after that?
At the time, in 2016, 2017, I was just making these products and scents for myself, friends and one little shop on board. I figured I would just have this little boutique business. Things got serious in 2018, when I started selling them at Onda Beauty, where Naomi Watts discovered them and mentioned the stone in her Top Shelf piece on Into the Gloss. I didn’t know it was coming and it received amazing attention. First it was Naomi Watts, then Lily Aldridge, then Hilary Duff, all within a couple of months, it was crazy. I had been using the stone for two years and it had changed my life and I felt so honored to share the stone, but I knew I needed a partner to really put it out into the world. As we know, I didn’t want to sit in front of a computer or do that part of it.
When I was solo, I didn’t even write anything down, I’d just tweak things, figure it out batch to batch. When I met my amazing co-founder, Nichola, she very sensibly, reasonably and correctly said we have to write this down so we can teach it and have help. It was honestly a horrible, really stressful summer. But over the process of making somewhere between five to seven thousand stones, I learned so much about the ingredients that I never would have known. I really got it down.
Wow. I read Into the Gloss religiously around then, so I’m sure that’s when I first learned about you. Beyond the obvious, can you talk about how a solid moisturizer differs from a traditional lotion?
Do you know how much water is in a typical bottle of lotion? The industry average hangs out in the low 80s, it’s 75% to 90% water. Grab a bottle of some of my “competitors” and the next ingredients after water are glycerin and alcohol. You’re down to under 5% of the remaining ingredients when you even get to the moisturizing ingredients.
We’re 100% nourishment, 100% moisturizing ingredients. We are the most concentrated moisture on Earth. There’s literally nothing else that I could put in it. I could sub out an oil, but you couldn’t get it more concentrated. When people say they’ve tried solid moisturizers and don’t like them, I tell them they haven’t tried one like this. I’ve worked with these ingredients through the lens of a pastry chef. That has enabled us to get a product that is just cocoa butter and oils. There’s no occlusive wax, which is huge in other solids, and is why it glides on like silk and is 100% moisture.
So it’s one of those products that people say they didn’t understand until they tried it.
Yes, and I think that that is our biggest hurdle. When we were on QVC, the demo was insane and we would always sell out. When it sits on a shelf, people dismiss it as soap. I do think there is something different about holding something in your hand. It’s also easier to travel with and it doesn’t get in your rings. If you are a parent, your kids get it, they intuitively know how to use it and it gives them agency. It’s beautiful to teach them a self care practice. It can be used across skin types and ages, even strawberry skin, crepey skin, eczema, KP, psoriasis
I know being really hands on with everything is so important to you, but how involved are you with the development of new scents. When do you hand it off to someone else?
It’s shifted, it’s changed, and I’m grateful for that. I am still very deeply involved but I have support and the team has grown. I used to just present whatever was striking me, but then we got more experienced members asking the right questions, like how do we know this will resonate with customers? We now do creative briefs together. We don’t use synthetics, so in reality we are limited in the collection of pure essential oils we can use to create different scents. You can’t just make any scent, but just like children, those limitations and boundaries push you to be creative.
It’s really interesting to learn you have a limited collection of oils because I’ve been fascinated by how you’ve iterated on the original stone over the years. Especially with versions that do more than just deeply moisturize, you’ve essentially created a new category of functional moisturizers. Is that an accurate way to describe them?
I think you hit the nail on the head. We honestly offer two different types of stones—more of an aromatherapy stone, like the Daily Stone and the Grounding Stone, and then functional stones, the first example of which was the Sex Stone. It has no essential oils, but is upped with argan oil and can go from a total body moisturizer to something that can really enhance intimacy and is a lot of fun. Our alternative to feeling like you’ve been slimed awkwardly.
The Recovery Stone is also an amazing, functional stone. I’m really proud of that one. It’s chock-full of arnica oil that’s deeply healing on sore muscles and has a killer essential oil blend with ginger, cardamom, vanilla, and a little bit of this really cool essential oil called cubeb seed that’s like a citrusy pepper. The Breathe Stone is our take on a vapor rub, it’s our alternative to that sticky, goopy mess. [Ed. Note: the Recovery Stone is my favorite.]
I think some people start with these functional stones and love them and get pulled into our aromatherapy options or seasonal stones, which tend to be more aromatherapy based. But I do want to make clear that the base formula across all of these is pretty consistent, just cocoa butter and four oils. All of them are just a fatty acid, antioxidant powerhouse. We just had our first clinical study and we came back with 72 hours of moisture and after application, 100% of participants said they could really see and feel the difference. All the other benefits that we talk about are actually all bonuses, they’re just incredible moisturizers across the board.
We’re almost out of time and finally getting to the Dusk Stone! Another functional stone, it’s a natural insect repellant with lemongrass and citronella. I remember thinking this was brilliant, but if I’m being honest, I never remembered to use it until I was already out of the house. Flash forward to this year’s launch of The Bug Balm, a portable stick version of the same product. Was this always the plan or did you come up with this solution based on feedback?
The Dusk Stone is the first and only insect repellent to ever be sold at Sephora and the number one point of feedback that we’ve gotten on the Dusk Stone is I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, but can we make it more portable? The Bug Balm is the first time we’ve taken the exact formulation of a stone and poured it into a stick format. I still prefer the stone, I think it’s better to cover wider swaths of the body, so that’s what I grab. But the stick is amazing to throw in a clutch bag, in a backpack, if you’re going hiking, if you’re going out to dinner. It’s just a great touch-up.
If you’re new to our products I always say start with a test patch, watch how your body, your constitution, your skin reacts. But we are very, very pure, so if all is good, go to town because no one likes to be bitten by the buggies.
Describe the Kate McLeod brand in 5 words.
Magical, intentional, connected, efficacious, powerful.
In no particular order because they’re all so equal and it depends how you’re looking at it. When I’m going into Sephora, my number one is it’s efficacious. If I’m doing a workshop at an acupuncture studio I cover the efficaciousness, but I’m also really talking about those magical, intentioned, connected moments. Powerful goes either way, in that it’s powerful going to your spirit but also, powerful like this will change your skin.
Final questions I ask everyone. Favorite socks, favorite sandwich, favorite tv show, favorite toothpaste?
I can’t remember the last time I wore socks. I don’t eat sandwiches. I had people over for burgers recently and I realized I didn’t even think twice about not getting buns. I had lettuce leaves, people are like, “oh wraps!” And I’m like oh good one, yeah, go for it! My favorite toothpaste is Tom’s. You’ve stumped me on all four. I don’t really watch T.V., we don’t have one in the house, but I did recently binge Severance at an AirBnB and that was, wow.
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HAVE A QUESTION?
Your turn to chat with Kate! Ask her about a product, get personalized recommendations, discuss your favorite self-care rituals, chocolate truffles or anything else! Kate will be answering directly over the next few days.
Thank you for stopping by, Kate!
xx,
Jolie
Today’s interview is part of Hotline Skin’s Summer Skin School. Catch up with the class!
Loved this!