Formula Botanica Courses

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Giorgina Makara

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Aug 3, 2024, 5:47:47 PM8/3/24

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Back in September of 2017 I had a lovely chat with Lorraine and Gemma from Formula Botanica, and they gifted me two of their courses in exchange for feedback and reviews, which I was more than happy to agree to! This review has not been pre-screened or approved by Formula Botanica before publishing.

The diploma is broken down into modules with sub-topics and projects that build on one another. The content is richly presented with illustrative videos, explanatory PDFs, and fun little mini-quizzes. I chose to keep the PDFs digitally in Evernote, but you can also choose to print them. There are also fun little digital badges scattered throughout that you can collect as you progress.

Each module concludes with a quiz; at the beginning the quizzes are module-specific, but as you advance through the course the quizzes start covering more and more modules to illustrate how everything fits together.

Once you get into working with ingredients, emphasis is placed on experimentation and getting to know them through hands-on experience. The carrier oil handbook download contains some good starter information about the carrier oils, but also plenty of room for your own notes on characteristics like scent, skin feel, and absorption speed.

Later modules focus on topics like branding, marketing, compliance with government regulations, labelling, and organic certification. This is mostly focussed on the European Union regulations as 1) Formula Botanica is in the EU (for now, at least) and 2) EU regulations are so strict that if you meet EU regulations you will likely be most of the way to meeting the regulations in many other countries as well.

The course concludes with a final project, which is the only project where you have to submit a full formula to your tutor for grading. You are expected to design a product for a particular consumer with a particular need, and demonstrate how your formulation choices come together to meet that need for that specific target customer. There is quite a lot of writing involved as well as formulating to ensure you communicate everything!

From my time at the Formula Botanica 2018 conference in London, it seems most people who take this course (and the other courses Formula Botanica offers) are doing so in order to launch their own natural skin care line/brand. This course gives students a fantastic foundation to do just that, ensuring they know how to formulate safe, natural products.

I really enjoyed my Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation course. It has, without a doubt, made me a better formulator. The course work and presentation requirements forced me to hone my skills, sharpen my decision making, and create safer formulations.

The Formula Botanica Course sounds amazing, but its expensive to me! Since i am not going to make from these a job. I will keep making my products for me and my family. I think learning from you Marie, has been fabulous. You are a very good teacher, your blog and your videos are great, very well explained, good pictures and i love watching you! You are always in a good mood and very good energy. I can tell you have improved. You started with very simple ingredients and now you have very sophisticated ingredients. Which is hard for me to find. Because i live in Chile! Love you Marie you are my inspiration!

Hi: I am also in the US and am currently debating whether to do a diploma course with Formula Botanica or a diploma course with The School of Natural Skincare. I have to admit I am leaning toward the latter partly because although based in the UK, the fees for their courses are in US dollars (which means I always know what I am paying and am not at the mercy of exchange rates). Both look good. Does anyone have an opinion on The School of natural Skincare. One thing I suspect we all can agree on: We all love Humblebee & Me!

I took the course and I am working on my final project now. It is actually my 4th version of a moisturizer that I plan to use to launch my skincare business. I have learned do much between Formula Botanica and Humblebeeandme. Thank you!

Please note that nothing on this site has been designed or tested for large scale manufacturing or re-sale, and attempting to sell anything made from recipes on this website is a bit foolish and at your own risk.

Disclosure: This course (along with the Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation I reviewed back in 2019) was gifted to me by Formula Botanica in exchange for my review. My relationship with Formula Botanica has expanded since I was gifted the two courses back in 2017; I am now a Formula Botanica affiliate, and I work with them in a freelance capacity doing graphic design and some formulation work. This review has not been pre-screened or approved by Formula Botanica before publishing.

Like the Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation, the Diploma in Organic Haircare Formulation is broken down into modules with sub-topics and formulation projects that build on one another. You begin with Hair Science and proceed through Haircare Ingredients, Organic Shampoo Formulation, Organic Conditioner Formulation, Organic Styling Formulation, and finally Haircare Compliance (which helps ensure the marketing claims you make about your formulations are a-ok, regulations-wise).

Each of the six modules is comprised of PDFs, videos, interactive mini-quizzes, and in the formulation modules, sample formulations and guidelines on structuring, creating, and troubleshooting your own formulations for a wide variety of hair care products. In order to move onto the next module, you need to pass the module-end quiz with at least 80%.

The first two modules are parallel to, yet different from the Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation in very understandable ways. Module one is all about the hair (rather than the skin); its structure, how to care for it, and the physiological underpinnings of good haircare.

If you need help as you work through the course you can use the Ask a Tutor forum (searching through previous posts and/or creating a new post with your question), and you can also reach out to the Formula Botanica community through the private Formula Botanica Facebook groups. Formula Botanica has both tutors and student mentors on staff (over a dozen as of this writing), so there is lots of support available.

The Diploma in Organic Haircare Formulation has the same solid approach to teaching formulas I came to expect from the Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation, though the formulations are more complex and technically challenging. Formula Botanica does a good job of sharing inventive new formulation approaches throughout the course as well as continually encouraging students to innovate on their own. I really liked the ongoing encouragement to experiment, and the continued emphasis on how widely varied different hair types can be.

I would have really liked a rubric or marking guideline for the final projects, giving a breakdown of how much each element of the project was worth (in hindsight, this applies to Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation as well). There are a lot of components, and I believe students should know what components are the most important so they can allocate their efforts accordingly.

I do think this course is a lot more work than the Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation, so be prepared to do a lot of experimenting, testing, innovating, and iterating as you work through this course and launch into your natural haircare formulation journey.

Thanks for the comment, Chantal! You might be interested in reading through the Science-y Hair Blog for some free science-backer haircare content ? The more I learn about how haircare works, the more I think a condensed course would either be 1) not very condensed or 2) missing a lot of important info. Hmmmm.

Congratulations, Marie, on getting your diplomas.
I find this article very interesting, especially the part about hair care. Suddenly I understand why there are so few organic hair care products out there: there are just not many alternatives to the classic ingredients. And if they are there, it is not easy to put something together.
Thank you very much for this explanation!

Over the past year, we have seen our graduates win hundreds of awards and see dozens launch brands. They have applied the expertise and practical skills gained on their Formula Botanica courses to start up amazing, award-winning natural skincare and haircare brands of their own. In our graduate gallery, you can read about their brand success stories and how their initial decision to invest in a Formula Botanica education was a defining moment in helping them realise their goals.

We are proud to have maintained our course fees at the same level for the past five years (since January 2017) and to have kept them steady during the past year when the pandemic put pressure on personal incomes.

From offering a single course in 2014 when we launched, the school has grown to provide a portfolio of some 10 courses and programs. To provide this depth and breadth while raising the bar on our own exacting standards, Formula Botanica has grown. We now have a team of over 40 staff dedicated to supporting our students and graduates and developing our specialist course material.

Above all, a Formula Botanica-accredited education stands for excellence and competence and is highly valued in the industry. It provides indie beauty entrepreneurs with credibility of being formulators, not just founders, as they launch their own brands.

If you are considering a Formula Botanica course as a route to changing your life through natural cosmetic formulation, you can pre-enrol to benefit from 2021 course fees during our January 2022 enrolment. This will be your final chance to pay the current fees before they increase for our spring 2021 term.