Pharmos Natur

Pharmos Natur is a German natural-cosmetics company founded by Margot Esser-Greineder in Munich on 1 March 1986 [10]. Its skincare is built around hand-peeled organic aloe vera juice, an ingredient the founder turned to after the plant was used to treat her own severe burns. Today the business is based in Bernried am Starnberger See in Bavaria and describes itself as a family company; a profile on the sustainable-hospitality platform Green Pearls likewise calls it family-owned [19].

Over four decades the company has grown from six aloe products sold through selected German pharmacies into three linked lines: cosmetics, professional spa treatments and food supplements, which it markets together under the name PHARMOS NATUR Green Luxury. It maintains long-running farming partnerships in Mexico, Nepal and elsewhere, and it marked its 40th anniversary in 2026 with a change of management. The brand is active.

According to the company's account, the story begins in the early 1980s, when Margot Esser (as she was then named in brand texts) had a serious accident while travelling in the southern United States. She lay unconscious for hours in the sun and was taken with second- and third-degree burns to a nearby naturopathic clinic, where her wounds were treated with freshly peeled aloe vera gel rather than with skin grafts [11]. The company says the pain eased quickly and her skin healed without scarring.

The experience changed her career. She left the pharmaceutical industry, trained in plant medicine and body therapy, and travelled through Texas, Cuba, Colombia, Portugal, Andalusia and Mexico looking for the right growing conditions for aloe. In 1986 she founded Pharmos GmbH in Munich and launched six natural skincare products for sensitive skin through selected German pharmacies. Green Pearls adds that she began with two employees.

The founding year is not entirely uncontested in published sources. A January 2020 review on the German beauty blog Beautyjagd described the brand as having been founded "more than 40 years" earlier, which would place its start before 1980 [18]. The company's own history, founder and sustainability pages all give 1 March 1986, as does the Green Pearls profile, and that date would have made the brand 34 years old when the review appeared. This article follows 1986.

Alongside the products, Esser-Greineder developed her own treatment method, VegetoDynamik®, which combines touch, scent and energy work. Practitioners trained in it carry the protected title VegetoDynamikerIn®, and the founder page says hundreds of them now offer the method in institutes, hotels and spas around the world.

Research into growing conditions began in 1987, and in 1990 the company introduced its drinkable Aloe Vera Bio Ursaft, a pure aloe juice with no additives. It marketed the juice under the trademarked term "Lebensgesundmittel®", which it calls the first product of that kind.

In 1995 Paul Greineder joined the business, and the head office moved to Uffing am Staffelsee. The next year Pharmos Natur began growing aloe in mixed cultivation with smallholder families on the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, where the crop was certified organic. Further projects followed, not all of them lasting. A scheme in Sri Lanka, built around a drying facility for green papaya, started in 1999 and ended in 2006 when the country's civil war flared up again. The same year a Demeter-certified medicinal-plant project began in Gorkha, Nepal, where smallholders grow black sesame for the company.

In 2005 Pharmos Natur worked with the naturopathic nursing department of University Hospital Bonn in paediatric oncology [10]. In 2009 it opened a second organic aloe project in Colonche on Ecuador's Pacific coast and co-founded the charity Schülerhilfe für Nepal e.V. It joined the Biodiversity in Good Company initiative in 2014.

The 30th anniversary in 2016 brought a move to Bernried am Starnberger See, which put logistics, administration, sales and the company's training academy on one site. After introducing an environmental management system in 2019, the brand relaunched in 2020 as PHARMOS NATUR Green Luxury. The first own-brand store opened in Bernried in 2022.

The Ecuador aloe project ended in 2023, which the company attributes to the economic effects of the Covid years, and a new organic aloe project started in Campeche, Mexico, in 2024. In 2025 Pharmos Natur began working with AMAZONICA Akademie GmbH on a project with the Achuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and announced a partnership with the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences at The Surf Club in Surfside, Florida.

Pharmos Natur has no known corporate parent. The brand is owned by PHARMOS NATUR Green Luxury GmbH, registered in Bernried, which describes itself as a family company. In its anniversary year of 2026 the founder handed operational and strategic responsibility to her son, Alexander Esser, and to Marc Hees, in what the company calls a long-prepared transition [11]. No acquisitions by or of the company are documented.

In Switzerland and Liechtenstein the products are handled by a separate company, Pharmos Natur Suisse, which describes itself as the exclusive distributor there of "Pharmos Natur - Green Luxury aus Deutschland" [4].

Pharmos Natur frames its work around "sacred plants", a term it uses for medicinal and rejuvenating plants gathered from around the world. Its central idea is that a plant should not be reduced to single isolated active ingredients. Instead, the company says it tries to keep each plant's natural mix of compounds intact, and it develops every formula individually rather than from one standard base.

The brand groups its business into Holistic Beauty for skincare, Holistic Treatments for professional use, and Holistic Food, a range of supplements meant to support the skin from within. Its tagline is "Green Luxury. Natur, die wirkt." ("Green Luxury. Nature that works."). The founder defines Green Luxury as an intact, healing natural world that remains worth living in for people and all other living beings. The company lists its values as fair partnership, holism, sustainability, spirituality, ecological practice and social conduct in business.

How strictly aloe replaces water is described differently across the brand's own channels. The Swiss distributor's homepage states that no water is added to the cosmetics and that aloe is the base of every product [1]. The brand owner's newer ingredients page is more cautious, saying the aloe juice replaces a large share of the usual water in many formulations [14]. An ingredient list for one cream, quoted in the 2020 blog review, includes water (aqua) further down the list.

The core ingredient is Aloe Vera BioUrsaft, an organic aloe juice that the company says is free of aloin and related anthraquinone compounds. To ensure this, the leaf rind is removed by hand before the inner gel is scooped out, and the company says it uses gentle pasteurisation rather than chemical stabilisation. The founder page credits the juice with more than 160 naturally occurring compounds, while the Swiss site speaks of over a hundred.

Other recurring plants include black sesame oil, jiaogulan, reishi, moringa, centella asiatica, damask rose and nelli. The company says it sought out clinics and dermatologists in its early years to test its formulas.

Products named by the brand or in coverage include the Calming & Regenerating Elixir, the Love Your Age Power Cream, the Nature of Men line for men, and the Lunar Skin Ritual, a night elixir and night cream which the brand says support the skin's overnight repair. In 2025 it added two Aloe Vera Body Lotions, Calming and Refreshing, and in 2026 a product called Gua Sha Body. The drinkable aloe juice belongs to the food range.

On formulation, the company says its products contain no added alcohol, citric acid or parabens as preservatives, and that all products are made and filled in Germany in fully recyclable packaging. It states that it does not test on animals. Its formulas are described as vegan, with two marked exceptions: a rose cream containing beeswax and a lip balm containing honey [13]. The 2020 blog review called the Power Cream vegan even though the ingredient list it quoted includes beeswax (cera alba), so the range as a whole should not be read as fully vegan.

The company states that all its cosmetics are certified under the NCS natural cosmetics standard and that its organic raw materials are checked by the German control body DE-ÖKO-003. It also reports using FSC-certified paper for its folding boxes and leaflets.

Sustainability is a large part of how Pharmos Natur presents itself. It says its plants come from certified organic mixed cultivation without synthetic pesticides, and that its network includes around 200 farming families paid fairly in long-term partnerships, many of them lasting decades [11].

The company's environmental management has been validated under EMAS, the EU's eco-management and audit scheme, since 2020 [13]. On its sustainability page it says that changes to harvesting, handling, transport, storage and production planning cut emissions from raw-material transport from 87 tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2024 to 67 tonnes in 2025 [13].

The company lists a series of awards on its history page. It received an Ethics in Business award for corporate responsibility in 2012, and in 2013 Paul Greineder personally received the B.A.U.M. e.V. environmental prize A SPA DIAMOND award in 2014 recognised the brand's sacred-plants concept and its Calming & Regenerating Elixir, followed in 2017 by a GALA SPA AWARD for the Nature of Men line. The brand received the GREEN BRANDS seal as an ecologically sustainable brand in 2021.

In 2026 the company reported winning the sustainability category of the Glamour Beauty & Wellness Award. It also lists a sustainability award in the German edition of the Marie Claire Prix d'Excellence de la Beauté under its 40th-anniversary entry, without giving a separate year.

Pharmos Natur is active. In 2026 it marked 40 years in business, completed its management handover and launched new products, and its online magazine was still publishing in September 2026. The company remains independent and family-run, with headquarters, logistics, its academy and its first own store at Bernried am Starnberger See.