We’re 100% PURE® — the clean beauty pioneers who colored makeup with fruit instead of synthetic dyes, and never looked back.
Read our story100% PURE isn’t just our name, or our ingredient list. It’s a promise: to make the purest, healthiest products we can — with compassion, kindness, and empathy for people, animals, and the planet we all share.
Because you should never have to choose between safe ingredients and results you can see.
In 2000, an eighteen-year-old chemistry student at UC Berkeley named Susie Wang saved a week of lunch money to afford a $60 Vitamin C serum everyone was raving about. Within a week, the pristine liquid had turned brown in the bottle. It had oxidized — degraded into something that would do her skin more harm than good.
When she checked the testers at the department-store counters, every one of them was brown too. An entire industry was quietly selling the same broken promise. So she turned her dorm room into a lab, taught herself to stabilize the vitamins so they’d stay potent, and filed the patent herself — as a teenager.
That patent drew the world’s largest beauty companies, and Susie spent the next few years formulating for three of them. Until the day a chemical from an eye-cream formula spilled onto her lab bench — and began to warp and dissolve the hard surface.
If it does that to a table, what is it doing to our skin?
She couldn’t un-ask the question. She walked away to build the purest line of cosmetics she could imagine.
The signature idea arrived in a garden, not a lab. Susie was picking blackberries for a tart she was baking for Ric’s birthday when she noticed how vividly the juice stained her fingertips — rich, dimensional color, straight from nature.
Why synthesize dyes from coal tar, she wondered, when fruit already makes the most beautiful colors on earth? In her “beauty bakery,” she and her brother James made the first batch of Fruit Pigmented® makeup — a mascara tinted with blackberry and black tea that, to this day, smells faintly of fruit. It became our patented signature: cosmetics colored by real fruit, vegetables, tea, and cocoa, carrying the antioxidants of the ingredients they’re made from.
Ric Kostick was already an entrepreneur — he’d built a teen shampoo line good enough for Sephora and Nordstrom, with packaging that landed in the Museum of Modern Art. But after losing three family members to cancer, he became fixated on what actually goes into the things we put on our bodies. Susie’s science was the answer he’d been looking for.
Together with James — Susie’s brother, who left a path toward investment banking to build the company by hand — the three founded 100% PURE in 2005, in a farmhouse in Napa. From a home in the Oakland hills, they packed the dozen orders that came in each day themselves, cushioning every one with biodegradable cornstarch peanuts instead of styrofoam. Caring for the planet was never a campaign for us. It was there in the very first box we ever shipped.
In 2006 we opened a tiny shop on College Avenue in Berkeley — half store, half organic apothecary. Our whole pitch was radical for the time: what you put on your body matters as much as what you put in it. The proof was right there on the shelf — the lip products were sweet enough to taste, the vanilla buttercream scrub turned a shower into dessert, and curious students would wander in and leave having smelled half the store.
Susie first formulated it for herself, during those sleepless early years when startup nights left her with dark circles and puffy eyes. Green coffee and green tea to de-puff, rosehip oil to restore — a fix for her own tired mornings that went on to become one of our most-loved products, with millions sold since.
Every formula meets strict purity standards and will never contain harsh or toxic ingredients.
Color from fruit, vegetables, tea, and cocoa — never coal-tar or heavy-metal dyes.
We will never, ever test on animals — and we’re certified cruelty-free by PETA.
A painstaking vetting process ensures every ingredient we source is never animal-derived.
Most beauty is cooked at high heat and shipped from a catalog. We never outsourced our secret. In our “Beauty Bakery,” formulas are cold-processed in small batches to protect the vitamins, enzymes, and fruit pigments that heat would destroy — on a solar-powered campus we built ourselves.
Every formula runs Susie’s nine-step process before it ever earns the 100% PURE name.
Each raw ingredient is screened for chemical pesticides, herbicides, and other contaminants.
We confirm every ingredient works with the others toward the intended result.
If a formula claims to moisturize or brighten, we prove it actually does.
Samples are rigorously tested to ensure they’re non-irritating on skin.
Low-comedogenic ingredients, tested so formulas won’t clog pores.
Packaging is checked to be free of toxins like BPA and phthalates.
We make sure formula and packaging never degrade one another.
Every formula is incubated and tested for overall stability over time.
Active ingredients get an extended stability process of their own.
Where an ingredient comes from decides how good it is. So we go to the source — the fields, groves, and cloud forests where each one has been perfected for generations.
“An ingredient or formula composed of plant, mineral, and/or marine vegetation that undergoes chemical changes due to biological processes such as fermentation, distillation, and cold processing.”
The rebel chemist. She filed her first stabilization patent as a teenager, formulated for the world’s biggest beauty labs, then left it all to build the purest line of cosmetics she could — and invented Fruit Pigmented® color along the way.
My mission is to create the absolute healthiest, purest, most nourishing formulas.
The builder. Bound for investment banking, he chose purpose instead — packing the earliest orders by hand and building the operations, and the solar-powered campus, that make everything we sell.
I am committed to producing the highest quality products.
The changemaker. He sold his first product — a teen shampoo line — to Sephora and Nordstrom, and saw its packaging land in MoMA. After losing three family members to cancer, he set out to find truly healthy products, and helped turn Susie’s science into a company.
My goal is to make the biggest, positive change.
From Napa, with love
Giving isn’t a campaign for us — it’s built into how we do business. Through our partnership with B1G1, every time you shop with 100% PURE, we contribute to carefully vetted global projects supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Susie, James, and Ric found 100% PURE in a Napa farmhouse, packing every order by hand.
Our first store opens in Berkeley, alongside the very first Fruit Pigmented® makeup.
We bring making in-house to a solar-powered Silicon Valley campus — our “Beauty Bakery.”
Twenty years on, a loyal global community of Purists — with giving woven into every order.
Two decades in, we’re still making beauty the hard way: from real fruit, real plants, and real conviction. See what nature’s pigments can do for you.