This Wellington Company Is Helping End Avoidable Blindness with Mascara

Here's something we can get behind: meaningful change through beauty. Indigo & Iris is the newly-launched, Wellington-based beauty company that's aiming to give you more than just the fluttery lashes of your dreams. They're donating half of the proceeds from product sales to the Fred Hollows Foundation, to help end avoidable blindness in the Pacific.

To do this, they need to meet the minimum production quantities of their manufacturer. So they've taken to Kickstarter. They've already shot past their $75K target and are currently sitting pretty on $115,000 with a week to go. It's all down to the hard work of their founders, Hannah Duder and Bonnie Howland, who have worked for the past three years to source their suppliers, drum up likeminded support and perfect the formula.

Their first product is called Levitate — it's a mascara manufactured in Italy using coconut oil from Samoa. It's hydrating, lengthening, lash-defining, and super black. Levitate is also vegan and cruelty free.

Fifty percent of the sales from Levitate will go straight to the Fred Hollows Foundation. They work in the Pacific, in small, strong island nations where four out of five people who are blind don't need to be. Bonnie and Hannah say that they were drawn to this work because "when someone has their sight restored it is not just their vision they regain, but their independence and freedom."

That's something we can all support. Donate to the Kickstarter campaign here.