Über Pharmos Natur
The brand, the philosophy, the story shaped over 40 years and rooted in a shared set of values.
CERTIFIED & COMMITTED
BIO (DE-ÖKO-003)
EMAS-VALIDATED
VEGAN
GREEN BRANDS
BIODIVERSITY
Margot Esser-Greineder
Entrepreneur. Therapist. Pioneer.
A personal experience with fresh Aloe Vera changed the course of Margot Esser-Greineder’s professional life. She left the pharmaceutical industry and founded PHARMOS NATUR in 1986. Her work is guided by the conviction that nature provides the most intelligent active ingredients for the care and health of the skin.
For 40 years, she and her team have explored the conditions that allow the full potential of selected healing and rejuvenating plants to unfold in skincare products: through careful cultivation, gentle processing and intelligent formulations that bring together nature’s active ingredients.
Margot Esser-Greineder combines pharmaceutical expertise with a profound knowledge of plants and body therapy. This approach gave rise to PHARMOS NATUR’s holistic skincare, its Holistic Superfoods and VegetoDynamik®, a treatment method she developed herself.
Her work is also shaped by a deep sense of responsibility. Long-standing partnerships with around 200 farming families, the respectful use of natural resources and the preservation of traditional plant knowledge are, for her, inseparable from the quality of a product. This philosophy continues to define PHARMOS NATUR today.
The beginning
A journey to the United States and an encounter with a plant that changed everything.
It was in the early 1980s when Margot Esser suffered a serious accident while travelling through the southern United States. She lay unconscious in the scorching tropical sun for many hours before she was found and taken to a nearby naturopathic clinic with second- and third-degree burns.
The treatment she received there was highly unusual. Instead of the skin grafts and operations that conventional treatment would have involved, the naturopathic practitioners treated her wounds with freshly extracted gel from a particular Aloe Vera plant.
The results were remarkable. The pain subsided quickly, her skin visibly regenerated, and no scars remained.
This experience became a turning point in her life. Inspired by the extraordinary power of the plant, Margot Esser resolved to devote her future work to plants and their natural active ingredients rather than to the methods of the pharmaceutical industry.
The Search
From the pharmaceutical industry to the diverse world of medicinal plants.
Margot Esser left her career in the pharmaceutical industry behind. But she did not simply want to use plants she wanted to understand them. In the years before and after founding PHARMOS NATUR on 1 March 1986, she completed extensive training in the fields that would later shape her work.
At the same time, her travels took her in search of the best cultivation conditions: to Texas, Cuba, Colombia, Portugal, Andalusia and Mexico. Wherever she went, she worked closely with farming families and natural healers who preserve and pass on the traditional plant knowledge of their cultures.
Many of these families remain partners to this day fairly compensated and supported through long-term relationships that help make it possible for their children to attend school.
The Realisation
Understanding the plant as a whole
It was not an isolated active ingredient that convinced Margot Esser, but the natural interaction of the whole plant. Every medicinal plant contains a complex spectrum of naturally occurring constituents. Within this evolved matrix, they can complement, support and balance one another. This is where the plant’s distinctive quality becomes apparent.
From this insight, a fundamental principle of PHARMOS NATUR emerged: not to reduce a plant to individual isolated active ingredients, but to preserve its natural active-ingredient matrix as fully as possible. The focus lies on the carefully balanced interaction of the ingredients within each formulation.
For this reason, every product is developed individually. There is no standard base formula. In the skincare products, hand-filleted organic Aloe Vera pure leaf juice, with more than 160 naturally occurring constituents, forms the active-rich foundation replacing water as a neutral carrier. It is complemented by selected healing and rejuvenating plants, plant and essential oils, as well as modern botanical active ingredients whenever they meaningfully enhance the formulation.
Origin and cultivation are equally important to this understanding. A plant can only develop its full quality where the soil, climate and cultivation methods are suited to its needs. This insight became the foundation of PHARMOS NATUR: to view the plant in its entirety and in connection with its environment from its living origin to its application on the skin.
A bridge between indigenous knowledge, craftsmanship and practice.
For Margot Esser-Greineder, traditional plant knowledge and modern practice were never opposites. In the early years following the company’s foundation, she sought dialogue with clinics and leading dermatologists, who tested her formulations under rigorous conditions.
Drawing on these experiences and her own pharmaceutical background, she developed a manufacturing process designed to preserve the plant’s natural active ingredients. It avoids harsh filtration, the isolation of individual substances and denaturation through freeze-drying or spray-drying. The plant is preserved in its entirety from the hand-filleted Aloe Vera leaf to the finished product bottled in Germany.
Equally influential was her many-year search for the ideal cultivation region. Across different climate zones, Margot Esser-Greineder explored where Aloe Vera develops its finest qualities — in Texas, Cuba, Colombia, Portugal and Andalusia.
Ultimately, she chose Yucatán and Campeche, in the land of the Maya. There, the plant benefits from nutrient-rich soils, intense sunlight and tropical vegetation ideally suited to its needs.
Responsibility does not end with the product.
At the same time, she represents a path back to the source: from the finished product to the plant, the soil and the people who cultivate it. Today, around 200 farming families worldwide are part of the PHARMOS NATUR network, and indigenous plant knowledge is incorporated into the products.
She supports the AMAZONICA initiative for the protection of the rainforest, is a member of Biodiversity in Good Company and, together with her team, maintains an EMAS-validated environmental management system.
In an industry long dominated by men, she has built a brand that is now active in nine countries.
VegetoDynamik® when touch becomes more than a step in a treatment.
VegetoDynamik® is Margot Esser-Greineder’s most personal creation. It is a holistic treatment method that brings together everything she has learned over the decades: plant medicine, body therapy, biodynamic psychology, the knowledge of indigenous natural healers and the experience with Aloe Vera that started it all.
In practice, this means mindful touch, conscious breathing and a calm, attentive manner of communication. At the heart of every treatment is the freshly filleted Aloe Vera leaf, applied directly to the skin an immediate connection to the experience from which everything began.
Today, hundreds of trained VegetoDynamik® practitioners offer this method in institutes, hotels and spas around the world. The PHARMOS NATUR Academy in Bernried provides a five-week professional training programme designed to be completed alongside work and leading to a diploma as well as the protected professional title VegetoDynamikerIn®.
“Green Luxury means preserving an intact and healing natural world that leaves people and all living beings a world worth living in and loving.”
Next generation
What remains when the brand passes into new hands.
In its anniversary year, 2026, PHARMOS NATUR is completing a carefully prepared transition. Operational and strategic responsibility is being passed on to Alexander Esser, the founder’s son and a lawyer, and Marc Hees, a management consultant.
Alexander Esser grew up closely connected to the partner families, the cultivation regions and the company’s philosophy. He has known many of the farmers in Yucatán, Ecuador, India and the Alps since childhood.
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