SPF literacy changed beauty, but it did not solve the photoprotection question. Professor Thierry Passeron has spent more than twenty years studying how light affects skin — from UVA and pigmentation to mitochondrial stress, visible light, dark CPDs, and cellular repair. With SUNLUTION, he reframes sunscreen from a seasonal anti-burn reflex into a daily biological strategy. In this conversation, Passeron explains why photoprotection must move beyond SPF, how PhotoAdaptive Technology works, and what the skin needs when defense by day and repair by night are treated as one system.

Marion Colibeau first encountered fungi through material science. With Fungastique, she is translating that expertise into a new vision of mycotherapy, bringing French savoir-faire, emerging research, and daily ritual into the same conversation. We spoke about postpartum recovery, provenance, and the intelligence beneath the surface.

Laboratoires Botanique Avancée was launched in December 2025 with a rare level of scientific infrastructure behind its beauty story. Rooted in the Domaine de Baulieu in Provence, the brand brings together plant stem cell biotechnology, regenerative medicine, 3D skin organoid testing, and formulas reaching nearly 30% actives. In this conversation, co-founder and CEO Nathalie Cantagrenne reflects on NEO-REGEN technology, the 136 genes involved in skin aging, the discipline of formulating without shortcuts, and why regeneration only means something when the science comes before the story.

Skincare has spent decades organized around the face, the skin that meets the camera, the skin we maintain for other people. Gina Lucania, Vice President of Wholesale Sales & Marketing at goop, makes the case that the more honest territory is below the neck: the body is the skin we keep for ourselves, the last part we still care for without an audience. Not more steps, but more attention: reading the body the way we learned to read ingredient lists.

Elizabeth Barbalich founded Antipodes in New Zealand around a question natural beauty had not answered rigorously enough: what can a finished formula actually prove? Trained in biology and medical technology, she built the brand around third-party in vitro testing, formulation synergy, and a refusal to treat natural skincare as a category defined only by absence. In this conversation, Barbalich reflects on evidence, ingredient theater, the move from skincare into haircare, and why healthy skin - not ageless skin - remains the more meaningful beauty ideal.

Shay Bennaim, Global Brand President of Tata Harper Skincare, reflects on the brand’s next evolution: how to honor a founder-led legacy while sharpening focus, strengthening global consistency, and protecting the product conviction that made Tata Harper one of modern natural luxury’s defining skincare brands.

Rhodista begins with a question the collagen supplement category often avoids: what can the body actually recognize, absorb, and use? After thirteen years as an interior architect, Pamela Manasievski trained in functional nutrition and discovered bone broth through her own rosacea journey. Her Belgian-made elixirs keep the logic of the whole-food matrix: slow cooking, traceable farms, organic ingredients, no powders, no unnecessary additions. In this conversation, she reflects on bioavailability, beauty-from-within, longevity, boxing, and why real support is built through repetition.

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