The Monkey + Moon 'My Allergy Story" trilogy is told from the perspective of our Founder, Maxime Renfrew. These three allergic reactions spanning five years were pivotal in the founding of the company, bringing to light the unregulated use of preservatives and chemicals in the UK's cosmetic and personal care industry:

My three years in Shanghai had been a whirlwind of charging about on an electric vespa with zero responsibilities. I had studied a Masters in International Business, worked for a wine company, and adventured across South East Asia with a wonderful international group of new friends. But all good things have to come to an end.

With access to Taobao (Chinese ebay/Amazon), I had been indulging in the array of "natural" American make up brands available in China. Knowing what I know now, I cringe at the idea of putting anything on my face that came from unofficial sellers on Taobao.

About a week after using my coveted natural makeup products, my allergies came back to haunt me. I now realise that the products I bought were more than likely fake, given that I used an unregulated site in a country renowned for rampant IP violations, and so the ingredients would have been filled with who knows what (despite my careful analysis of every ingredient list).

I started to experience the same symptoms as before, but this time I had no NHS or A&E. I did at least understand what was causing the reaction, so I could avoid the makeup and get my face back to a semi- normal state before the symptoms got worse.

This series of images documents my swollen lips as a result of the allergic reaction which occurred in Shanghai. The last image is me today.

Unfortunately, living in Shanghai, a city renowned for air pollution, there was little hope that my face would calm down and my reaction subside if I was being exposed to this kind of environment every day. I eventually made the decision to come home, and once again my recovery process took the best part of a year. I don't have many photos of my face from this time, but you can see in the image below that my eyes are red and swollen and I just generally look unwell.

Despite making a full recovery, I was now reacting to the Clinique make up which I had used for the past three years. Re-reading the Clinique ingredients, I decided to research which ones might be causing a reaction. Two more chemicals were added to my list:

Tocopherol (often described as “organic” vitamin E) and Dimethicone.

I set about trying to find make-up free from limonene, linalool, acrylates, parfum, tocopherol and dimethicone. It quickly dawned on me that they didn’t exist, at least not in the UK. More research uncovered a handful of products from a couple of Australian vegan makeup brands.

I curated a new collection of make up and personal care products from various companies, picking and choosing products on the basis of their individual ingredient lists. This might sound simple enough, but the majority were international and often Australian brands which were difficult to get hold of in the UK.

Because vegan brands don’t formulate their products for allergy sufferers, I am still very diligent about checking ingredient lists in case they have altered the formula.

Read the final post in this series: My Allergy Story London 2020.