A virtual trip to Amsterdam with The Beauty Gypsy and Kim van Haaster

This blog post was originally written by The Beauty Gypsy- you can find it here

Remember a time when we travelled freely? From California to Croatia, the world was our oyster. Personally, I have never been rooted in one place for this long. In the past six months, I was to have been in Amsterdam, Paris, Chicago and Rajasthan. In that order. But… we all know how that story is going.

Which has led to the genesis of this series of armchair travels. If we can’t travel the world, let the world come to us. From a slice of Parisian life via your local cheesemonger to California’s cool ocean vibes bottled up in fragrant jars, let’s transform our homes into their very own vacation spots. What say?

How to bring Amsterdam into our homes!

Let’s start with Amsterdam, a city that I would personally move to tomorrow, if possible. What’s to love about this Dutch fairyland? The canals. The storybook houses. The flowers. The museums. The food. The pottery. The people. Honestly, Amsterdam has THE friendliest, most helpful people in all of the world. 

And there’s no better person to bring Amsterdam into our own homes than Kim van Haaster, co-founder and CEO of Dutch-inspired beauty brand Bloomeffects.

Kim moved to Amsterdam (actually Haarlem – the land of tulip fields, which is about 25 miles outside Amsterdam) two years back and fell so in love with the place that she wasted no time in adopting its culture.

So deep was her passion that she founded an entire beauty range that’s steeped in Dutch heritage. Not only does Bloomeffects draw upon tulips for its proprietary ‘Dutch Tulip Complex’, bringing to its products the yet-unexplored skincare benefits of tulips (read all about them here), it also calls upon the very Dutch concepts of sustainability and circular farming.

And there’s so much science and tradition behind Bloomeffects that Kim even received two grants from the Dutch government to study the formulations.