St. Ives

St. Ives is an American mass-market skincare brand best known for its Apricot Scrub, a facial exfoliant that became a fixture of drugstore beauty aisles. The brand originated in California as St. Ives Laboratories Inc., a Chatsworth-based maker of hair and skin care sold under the "St. Ives Swiss Formula" name [8]. Its products centre on natural exfoliants and botanical ingredients, and are sold widely through mass retailers.

Ownership of St. Ives changed hands several times and is now split by region: following a 2024 transaction, the brand's North American and European business is held by the private-equity firm Yellow Wood Partners, while the rest of the world remains with Unilever [13]. For that reason the brand is best described as acquired rather than independent, though it stays commercially active.

⚑ Thinner sourcing. The article relies largely on the brand's own statements (T2–T3). Glowpedia is seeking independent sources.

St. Ives grew out of St. Ives Laboratories Inc., an independent California company that marketed a "Swiss Formula" line combining natural ingredients with a science-backed positioning. For years the brand leaned on this Swiss identity: according to trade coverage, it imported Swiss ingredients and maintained a small laboratory in Scion, Switzerland, even though the company itself was founded in Chatsworth, California.

The brand's exact founding year is not cleanly documented. Its own marketing invokes a heritage stretching back "a century ago," tracing the first Apricot Scrub to the Iverson family settling in California [11]; parent company Elida Beauty similarly cites "over 40 years of heritage." The documented corporate record points to a more recent commercial start: the signature Apricot Scrub launched in the 1980s, and a 2019 trade article described the brand as "founded over 30 years ago," placing its origins in the early 1980s [6]. The independent record and the brand's heritage narrative therefore diverge.

St. Ives has passed through a chain of owners. Alberto-Culver acquired it from St. Ives Laboratories Inc. in February 1996 for $110 million [14]. Unilever then acquired St. Ives in 2010 through its purchase of Alberto-Culver [6]. In 2021 Unilever created Elida Beauty as a business unit for a portfolio of heritage brands, and St. Ives (North America and Europe) was folded into it [7].

In December 2023 Unilever agreed to sell Elida Beauty to Yellow Wood Partners, a Boston-based private-equity firm, and the deal completed on 6 June 2024 [13]. The transaction covered St. Ives only for North America and Europe; the brand's business elsewhere, along with Pond's outside those regions, stayed within Unilever [7]. The operating entity for the acquired US brands appears on stives.com as Evermark, LLC, while Elida Beauty's own brands page lists its parent as Elida Beauty, trading as TIGI Holdings Limited [2]. St. Ives sits alongside sister brands such as Pond's, Noxzema, Q-tips, Caress and Timotei in the Elida portfolio.

One source disagrees on the current owner: the FAQ on stives.com still refers to "Unilever (the parent company)," which appears to be legacy copy left unchanged after the Elida and Yellow Wood transitions [3].

St. Ives positions itself as nature-inspired, accessible skincare built around natural exfoliating ingredients. The company's tagline is "Nature Inspired & Cruelty Free," and it describes its range as covering "your back, knees, cheeks—all of you." Its featured ingredients include apricot, walnut shells, oatmeal, green tea, shea butter, aloe vera and argan oil.

The brand is priced for the drugstore tier and distributed through mass retailers such as Walmart. In 2019 it ran a "Nature Reset" campaign that shifted its messaging away from its Swiss associations toward natural-ingredient claims, aimed at younger millennial and Gen Z consumers the company described as "stressed-out and ingredient-conscious" [6].

The Apricot Scrub is the brand's signature product, marketed on stives.com as "still America's #1 face scrub." The line also spans body washes, lip scrubs, cleansers and hand and body lotions. According to the company's FAQ, most products contain no animal-derived ingredients, with the exception of its Collagen & Elastin moisturizer and body lotion, which use collagen and elastin from a marine source.

St. Ives says it has been PETA-Certified Cruelty-Free across its entire product portfolio since December 2018 [3]. It also notes that its parent company stopped using plastic microbead scrub beads in 2014, replacing them with natural exfoliants such as apricot kernels, cornmeal, ground pumice, silica and walnut shells.

In 2016, plaintiffs Kaylee Browning and Sarah Basile filed a class action against Unilever United States over the crushed walnut shells in St. Ives Apricot Scrub, alleging the material causes "microtears" in facial skin [9]. The suit cited dermatologists who compared the scrub to "using sandpaper on your face," and claimed the "dermatologist tested" labelling was deceptive because the product was not actually recommended by dermatologists. The court dismissed the case, finding that the plaintiffs had not provided sufficient evidence of a safety hazard or product defect that the company was required to disclose [9].

St. Ives is an actively marketed brand rather than a dormant one, with a current US e-commerce site and a maintained skincare blog. Its status is best characterised as acquired: since the June 2024 completion of the Elida Beauty sale, the North American and European business has been owned by Yellow Wood Partners through Evermark, LLC, while Unilever retains the brand for the rest of the world.