Amid snail slime serums, pulsed-light hair removing devices and Korean sunscreens on TikTok, a brand new sort of skin-care product is making the rounds. In one video, a white-coated scientist pipettes pink liquid into vials. In one other, on Instagram, a lady with glittery ombre nails unboxes black-and-white bottles crammed with futuristic youth serum. “Welcome to your skin-health and longevity journey,” the packaging reads.
If the pitch sounds extra Palo Alto than Paris, that’s as a result of it’s. Oneskin, begun by 4 Ph.D.s in a San Francisco biotech accelerator, is now a skin-care model sitting on the intersection of magnificence’s obsession with anti-ageing and Silicon Valley’s fixation with outfoxing demise. The firm’s lotions and serums, “proven to target a root cause of aging,” have attracted a fan base that features a who’s who of tech, biohacking and wellness varieties.
XPrize founder Peter Diamandis, an organization adviser, texts Oneskin’s co-founder and chief government officer, Carolina Reis Oliveira, each time he runs out of product. Serial entrepreneur and Oneskin investor Kevin Rose talked up the model on Tim Ferriss’ podcast, the place he steered the pioneering biohacker attempt the attention cream “on one eye for three months. That’d be f—ing cool, right?” Oliveira says self-help guru Tony Robbins makes use of Oneskin, as does Matthew McConaughey, who’s mentioned he makes use of the hair serum on his well-known mane (an endorsement the corporate eagerly reposted on its social channels). “It doesn’t feel like you’re buying a beauty brand,” says Jane Carlson, managing editor of the commerce publication Beauty Independent. “You’re buying something for the longevity of your skin.”
Science—actual and doubtful—has at all times been a part of the promote within the skin-care aisle, the place colourful jars of goop promise to plump, agency, brighten and easy utilizing components which might be “dermatologist-tested” and “clinically proven.” For a long time, manufacturers pushed most of this as “anti-ageing.” Creams usually used retinol or vitamin C, remixed with an ever-changing forged of exfoliants and antioxidants that promised to focus on high-quality traces and different seen indicators of the passage of time. Skin longevity, alternatively, claims to work deeper on the molecular causes behind these modifications. The promise isn’t merely to masks the indicators of ageing however to sluggish and even cease the method.
Oliveira and her three co-founders — all Brazilians with doctorates in tissue engineering, immunology and molecular biology — landed in San Francisco in 2016 to hatch a lab-testing service. Their platform would assess different corporations’ skin-care and cosmetics merchandise by measuring the organic markers of ageing in pores and skin samples. But potential buyers shrugged. “Nobody wants to back a service company,” as Oliveira places it. So the co-founders invented their very own product, aiming to nail “the big opportunity,” she says. “If it fails, it fails. But if it works, that can be a great return for everyone.”
Oneskin’s key ingredient is a customized molecule the founders designed to focus on what’s often called mobile senescence, a pure a part of ageing wherein broken cells cease dividing and as a substitute linger in tissue, inflicting irritation. (Scientists jokingly name them “zombie cells,” which trigger pores and skin to sag, skinny and develop uninteresting, resulting in wrinkles and a pallid, drained look.)
Once an obscure discipline of examine in gerontology labs, mobile senescence grew to become one of many hottest frontiers in ageing analysis over the previous decade, with senescent cells thought to assist gas every little thing from Alzheimer’s and coronary heart illness to creaky joints. Labs at Stanford University and the Mayo Clinic have printed research on the science, and biotech corporations have raised lots of of tens of millions of {dollars} to develop medicine primarily based on it. “There was a whole longevity field focused on senescent cells in the body, but no one was applying that to skin,” says Alessandra Zonari, Oneskin’s chief scientific officer and one other co-founder.
The co-founders started screening lots of of peptides — quick chains of amino acids that act as organic messengers — utilizing mathematical fashions to foretell which of them may sluggish or reverse mobile ageing. Eventually, in late 2018, a sequence stood out: Early exams on lab-grown pores and skin confirmed that OS-01 appeared to cut back markers of senescence. They formulated the peptide right into a moisturizer, confirmed it might penetrate the pores and skin barrier and ran a small trial that confirmed seen variations when topics used OS-01 on one aspect of the face and never on the opposite. The product was launched in 2021 with gross sales by way of the startup’s web site and finally on Amazon.com.
Four years later, Oneskin’s $99 Face Topical Supplement is completely positioned for the peptide frenzy. Peptides are huge in Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) circles, the place the medicine-averse are embracing injectable variations promising muscle achieve, sharper cognition and different advantages. Meanwhile, more and more mainstream GLP-1 weight-loss medicine — additionally primarily based on peptides — have normalised the concept of utilizing biotech for elective functions.
This all coincides with the sweetness business shifting on from its decade-long obsession with “clean” components in favour of efficient ones. “I want to know this stuff actually works,’ ” says Beauty Independent’s Carlson. That shift has created a gap for manufacturers adept in science-speak, together with newcomers comparable to Ourself and Droplette, which declare their patented supply strategies ship components deeper into the pores and skin, “where no skincare has gone before,” as Ourself says on its web site. Recasting magnificence as science has additionally helped to draw males; Oliveira estimates that 17 % of Oneskin’s prospects are male.
Still, Oneskin works in a regulatory gray space just like that governing dietary dietary supplements. By describing its merchandise as “topical supplements,” it may well trace at well being advantages with out triggering drug-level oversight — a technique that’s helped a technology of wellness manufacturers promote probiotics, nootropics and the like with minimal US Food and Drug Administration scrutiny. “If you want to get a product to people, this was the easiest way to do it,” says Paul Robbins, a University of Minnesota biogerontologist whose work on senescence helped set up the sphere and who first met Oneskin’s founders in 2018. “But they have to just be careful what they can claim.”
The science itself remains to be rising. Academic papers have simply began utilizing the time period “skin longevity” in earnest. A 2025 examine in Frontiers in Aging proposed “skinspan” as a measure of how lengthy pores and skin maintains youthful operate and touted “longevity cosmeceuticals” as transformative. Oneskin has printed peer-reviewed research on OS-01’s results in lab-grown pores and skin and small human trials — however these papers got here from its personal scientists; there’s no impartial proof the peptide outperforms old-school standbys like retinoids.
That uncertainty extends to the mechanism behind Oneskin’s merchandise. Robbins notes there’s rather more to study how finest to focus on senescence within the pores and skin, together with whether or not a peptide is the best strategy to do it. What’s extra, he says he doesn’t perceive how Oneskin’s peptide works. “How is it actually affecting senescence?” he asks. “I don’t think they really know.” Oneskin, for its half, has printed analysis that begins to reply the query, however Oliveira agrees there’s much more to analyze.
The firm is now making use of this science to totally different components of the physique, with merchandise providing “firm, bouncy lips” and “thicker, fuller, denser hair.” As a non-public firm, Oneskin doesn’t disclose its income or valuation, however Oliveira says it’s been worthwhile since 2022, rising greater than 50 % yearly. As of late 2024, it had raised $20 million in enterprise capital, with backers together with Unilever Ventures, the funding arm of the buyer merchandise large.
Other corporations are moving into the longevity recreation. Estée Lauder Cos. assembled a panel of aging-science researchers to advise it and final yr launched a line of merchandise centered not on eradicating senescent cells however activating proteins that affect mobile restore. It makes use of an artificial ingredient Estée Lauder developed referred to as Sirtivity-LP—together with, naturally, black diamond truffle extract, pure gold and a powder from ground-up pearls. French skin-care model Caudalie targets the identical so-called longevity proteins with an extract from the bark of the African mahogany tree. And why not? If there’s one factor the sweetness business has mastered, it’s discovering a brand new strategy to promote youth in a bottle.
By Tom Foster
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