Susanne Kaufmann founded her Alpine maison in 2003, before high-performance natural skincare had a stable vocabulary. This second FOS conversation does not return to the origin story. It asks what happens after the category catches up to a founder who was early. From NovoRetin™ to ectoin, vitamin C, barrier repair, and daily photoprotection, Kaufmann’s recent launches read less like range expansion than formulation evolution. Here, she reflects on resilience, ritual, and why the future of skincare may depend less on correction than on long-term skin function.

Long before scalp care became a category, Léonor Greyl had already built its method around a simple principle: there is no beautiful hair without a healthy scalp. Founded in Paris in 1968, the maison worked with botanical oils, plant-based formulas, scalp analysis, tailored treatments, and massage decades before the language of “clean” or “hair spa” entered the mainstream. In this conversation, Caroline Greyl reflects on legacy, formulation nuance, the 55-year life of Huile de Léonor Greyl, and the discipline required to know what must evolve, and what must never change.

Founded by Charlotte Bouygues on the Château Montrose estate in Saint-Estèphe, Dix Hectares does not treat terroir as a decorative language. Its R&D lab sits close to the plots. Its botanicals are harvested according to solstices and equinoxes, dry-frozen, extracted through a low-temperature ultrasound process, and traced by plot, harvest, and batch. The rhythm is not only seasonal in image. It is seasonal in procedure.

For decades, the professional hair world operated on a clear hierarchy: brand educates, stylist transmits, client receives. L’Oréal Professionnel’s Global Creative Contributors program was built to dismantle that logic — and replace it with something rarer: genuine co-authorship at institutional scale.

I spoke with Margaux Nardini, Global Brand Engagement Director, on the thinking behind The Global Creative Contributors program, the architecture of Transformation Day (20 countries, 50 hairstylists, 100 celebrities, 4 color trends already traveling globally), and why she believes the distinction between ambassador and contributor is not semantic. It is structural.

In 2015, Medea Juhasz launched Catalyst Gold, a 16-ingredient multipurpose supplement combining adaptogens, Chinese herbs, amino acids, and superfruits into a single daily formula. The category she was entering did not yet have a name. "Ingestible beauty" would come later, once the market caught up to what she had already built.

We spoke with her about pioneering a space before the market had language for it, the knowledge produced by personal health crisis as a formulation methodology, and what ten years in a category you helped create actually looks like.

Odièle was built on that conviction. Whole botanicals. Nutrient-dense plant oils. Small batches. No synthetics, no preservatives, no artificial fragrance. Certified organic across the entire line, without exception. Fewer products, higher integrity, results that compound over time.

Le Balm took five years to create. It contains sixty-eight ingredients. It's waterless, solid, and can be used in many ways. It works on skin repair, moisture, protection, and renewal all at once. The 2.6.60 system (two skin layers, six actions, sixty-plus ingredients) isn't just marketing. It's a scientific method, the same kind used to develop medicines, applied to skincare.

In skincare, Yvan Galanin asks: what holds the face together? Coming from biotech, he was shocked by beauty's lack of rigor: unpublished studies, vague methods, shaped data.

His path was accidental: treating dermatitis with cottonseed oil healed his skin but reshaped his face, revealing dermal fat's structural role. Adipeau targets this layer (adipocytes that scaffold the face) with Kaempferia parviflora extract, validated through registered trials reviewed by Karolinska Institute.

Rudolph Care was founded in 2009 with a simple constraint: skincare should feel good, deliver visible results, and earn trust. Founder Andrea Elisabeth Rudolph works at the intersection of efficacy and sensoriality, with transparency down to every ingredient. Andrea has stayed unusually consistent in a category where language moves faster than standards. She unites the best from nature with the precision of science, treating ingredients, texture, and certification as operational choices.

Longevity is having a moment. But few brands approach it without shortcuts borrowed from beauty marketing. Youth & Earth is one of them.

Founded by Edward van Harmelen, Youth & Earth grew from a personal frustration with how fragmented, inaccessible, and age-coded the longevity space had become. The science was there. The language wasn't. Neither was a brand speaking to people who don't feel old, don't want hype, and don't want to wait for something to break before paying attention to their biology.

Tata Harper proved natural skincare could perform without compromise long before it became a default claim. In-house formulation. Extreme ingredient density. Full transparency. A fifteen-year refusal to choose between efficacy and pleasure.⁠⁠​ The industry finally caught up, ingredient scrutiny is mainstream, regenerative skincare is real, sensitized skin matters. Yet her work feels as urgent as day one.⁠⁠​ In our latest conversation, we explore what it takes to hold a vision over time. How formulation philosophy matures. How "natural" becomes technical language. How a founder recalibrates when the market finally speaks her vocabulary back.

Frances Shoemack's journey from winemaking to founding Abel reveals something essential about the future of natural perfumery. When industry veterans said high-performance natural fragrance was impossible, she didn't compromise, she opened the palette to biotechnology and upcycled ingredients. Working with Master Perfumer Isaac Sinclair and biochemist Dr. Fanny Grau, Abel treats each formula with architectural precision. Seaweed absolute for saline lift. Upcycled cherry for tart brightness. Biotech aldehydes for clarity. Even packaging reflects this discipline: home-compostable caps, lightweight glass. What emerges isn't a claim of purity but a practice of integrity, materials, methods, and meaning aligned toward a future where natural perfumery is both rigorous and human. Read the full conversation on discipline, innovation, and the science of scent.

What happens when a former fashion executive reimagines the wellness routine? Cleo Davis-Urman, founder of Barrière, turned a personal health wake-up call into a design-forward rethink of supplementation. The result: minimalist transdermal patches that deliver actives like B12 and NAD+ with high absorption, bypassing the digestive system entirely. I spoke with Cleo about the science, wearability, and why simplicity is the future of self-care

I first discovered The Lymphatic Brush during a treatment with Melinda Bognar at Muse & Heroine's the Healing House. That moment led me to its creator, Cecily Braden—a practitioner, educator, and designer based in New York whose work sits at the confluence of cultural knowledge, anatomical precision, and sensory intuition. Her patented Lymphatic Brush, a "soft tech" engineered to listen to tissue, translates trained touch into accessible care. In this interview, she unpacks the design, science, and pedagogy behind a lymph-first approach that restores flow and reframes what skincare can do.

After a decade in makeup, Diane Servant turned her attention to what lies beneath the surface. Her Face Sculpting® method combines external and intra-oral massage to work on the muscles, fascia, and circulation that define expression. It’s a practice built on anatomy, repetition, and the ability to listen through touch.
In our interview, she shares what the face can reveal when read not for perfection — but for information.

In a world where climate change has made protection a daily necessity, Amèle Moussaoui is reframing beauty as adaptation.

Her brand Misaj bridges ancestral rituals and modern resilience, shaped by her multicultural roots and scientific expertise.

Glow Protect unites hydration, radiance, and natural repellent power in one formula, Premium Protective Beauty for a changing world, where wellness becomes both shield and ritual.

Cicéron is the vision of Jeanne Tieu-Benichou, Doctor of Pharmacy, who discovered that skin vitality depends as much on its extracellular matrix as on its cells. From this came Collagenium C3 and the sérum-crème mist, formulas shaped by research and cultural sensibility. In conversation with Future of Skincare, Jeanne shares the origins of Cicéron and her perspective on the future of well-aging.

What happens when a beauty editor becomes a beauty founder? Neada Deters founded LESSE after years in beauty publishing, where she learned to separate substance from hype. LESSE reflects her disciplined approach: starting with just one essential product and expanding thoughtfully. By controlling sourcing and maintaining strict standards, she created something genuine in an industry full of excess.

Drawing from her experience interviewing experts and testing countless products, Deters transformed this knowledge into a focused brand philosophy. The result is a carefully edited collection that values quality over quantity.

Before co-founding the boundary-pushing skincare brand MANTLE, Josefin Landgård developed resilience on Nordic slopes and precision in the fast-paced world of healthtech. Her journey from elite skier to KRY's founding team and now to leading one of Scandinavia's most thoughtful beauty brands embodies powerful contrasts: speed versus stillness, science versus sensuality, and data versus intuition.

Irene Forte’s path into skincare was less about chasing an industry trend than listening to the land. While working within her family’s Rocco Forte Hotels, she saw how guests were drawn to the slower rhythms of Sicily, where food, wellness, and beauty were inseparable. At Verdura Resort’s organic farm, she began to imagine how olives, almonds, hibiscus, and herbs could be translated into something lasting for the skin.