How we define beauty has evolved over time. In recent years, people have started to become more concerned with the way they feel and not just with how they look.

This is a lesson that supermodel-turned-businesswoman Elle Macpherson learned on the way to establishing her own ingestible beauty company.

"For me, what I have come to terms with is that from my personal experience as a woman, the way I feel has much more importance to me today than the way I look," Macpherson, who cofounded health business WelleCo four years ago, told CNBC's Tania Bryer last week at the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year 2018 Forum in Monaco.

"And the by-product of that is because I'm well and healthy — and this was really the foundation of WelleCo, the business that I started with my co-founder Andrea Horwood."

In 2014, Macpherson teamed up with Horwood to launch WelleCo, which offers a range of plant-based ingestible beauty products and dietary supplements to consumers, that are designed by nutritional doctors. While Macpherson has been dabbling in the business world since the 1990s, WelleCo was established after she came to terms with the state of her own health and well-being.

A few years back, Macpherson realized that she wasn't feeling or looking well. After consulting her nutritional doctor Dr Simone Laubscher, the model was put on a plant-based diet and given an alkalising green powder — a product that Macpherson describes on the WelleCo website as having helped turn her life around.

"I was malnourished and not getting enough sleep. I was trying to apply the same things that worked at 20 (years old) — and they didn't work anymore at 50. That's sort of a no brainer, but it took someone to point it out to me," Macpherson told CNBC about her transition.