In this founder essay, Joanna Ellner reflects on nearly two decades spent reporting on beauty, testing products at the front line, and ultimately, questioning what skincare truly delivers. Drawing on her experience as both editor and brand consultant, she examines the gap between promise and performance, and why efficacy is not simply a product question, but a matter of respect.
The intoxicating promise of skin utopia exists at the bottom of a pretty glass jar. I believed this emphatically. And I was shown how by the world’s leading brands, for 18 years, as a beauty editor reporting on the front line for The Sunday Times, Style, and Stylist magazine.
Then later, as a brand consultant, I was invited behind the velvet curtain by those very same brands to witness how products were brought to life, from concept to shelf. I was a pen for hire, one with the ultimate vantage point: my readers - their customers. A predominantly female cohort, who were – and still are – spending inordinate sums on skincare each month, wrapped in a perpetual cycle of the thrill of discovery, trial, and expectation.
Because that’s what sits underneath it: expectation. That if you invest enough, consistently enough, intelligently enough, your skin will reach whatever imperceptible semblance of health and radiance you have imagined for it. I tested that belief for years, often obsessively. I wrote long-form pieces excavating the latest breakthrough in ingredient innovation. Serums were trialled for months at a time, diaries kept, skin photographed in the same light, shifts tracked and revisited. I played guinea pig, undergoing months-long trials, objectively testing performance with Visia scans and Corneometers. I spoke to scientists, brand founders, doctors and dermatologists, to get under the hood of the neatly packaged, bite-sized science that accompanied every new launch.
The results came in soft waves. Imperceptible shifts. “I think it’s doing something.” But end results would scarcely pass my self-appointed threshold of not only quantitative results, but recognisable, visible, detectable by my own eye. And, bonus points, if by someone else.
The global beauty market is now worth approximately £350 billion, with skincare accounting for close to 40% (McKinsey & Company, 2024; L’Oréal, 2024). In 2025, UK spending on health and beauty rose by 9-10% year-on-year, despite a backdrop of economic headwinds, and even as overall spending declined (Barclays, 2025).
Women account for an estimated 70-90% of skincare and cosmetics consumption globally.
Women account for an estimated 70-90% of skincare and cosmetics consumption globally, upholding the bones of the industry through consistent, repeat investment. In the UK, over a quarter of women report spending £100 or more each month in this space, with many spending significantly more once treatments and services are included.
This is not occasional spending. It is continuous. Embedded. Unrelenting. Having a bird’s eye view of the source of this economic fuel for two decades, while also bearing witness to some of the more tenuous, and at times, hollow iterations of ‘science-backed’ skincare, has left me with a deep sense of conviction: a duty to deliver the finest, high-quality, proven formulas.
We are living in a future-leaning age of infinite possibility, a time of constant innovation. And yet women have never lived in a world with parity in pay. In the UK, the right to hold a mortgage in one's own name only arrived for women in 1975; in many parts of the world, financial autonomy is still generations away. Every pound a woman spends on skincare is money that has been harder-won, within tighter constraints, often over a longer time. Women's money matters. To me, it means everything.
To knowingly underdeliver on performance, or to obscure results behind suggestion and language, is not simply a commercial flaw; it reflects a deeper disregard for the very consumers sustaining the industry. Women are the ones holding this category up, financially, consistently, over time - within a system that does not insist upon or require proof.
In No Logo (1999), Naomi Klein describes the shift from products to something more diffuse, where companies increasingly sell identity and experience. What sits on a bathroom shelf rarely functions as a formula alone. It imbues a version of yourself that feels slightly improved, slightly more resolved. That shift has also allowed skincare performance to drift out of focus. The emphasis moves towards what something represents, and away from what it can palpably deliver.
A similar idea sits at the centre of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics (2017), which argues that markets should ultimately serve the people who sustain them. Applied here, the implication is straightforward. When women are wholly funding a category, what is returned to them should be tangible, reliable, and able to stand up to scrutiny.
In sectors shaped largely around male consumers - automotive, performance sport, deep tech - progress is expected to be measurable. Products are engineered for marginal gains that can be tested, benchmarked, refined. Claims are expected to hold under scrutiny. Companies invest heavily in research and development to ensure performance improves, incrementally and demonstrably, over time. That expectation is intertwined with how those industries operate. In skincare, growth is driven by repeat purchase, while the requirement to demonstrate efficacy remains limited. Under UK and EU cosmetic frameworks, products must be proven safe but not proven to work. They cannot harm the skin, yet there is no requirement to demonstrate that they meaningfully improve it. For a category of this size, funded so heavily by women, that absence speaks volumes.
It also helps explain why innovation can feel constant while the underlying science changes more slowly. Newness is visible everywhere - in texture, in format, in language - but much of it is built on a relatively small group of ingredients that have been in circulation for decades. Retinoids, vitamin C, exfoliating acids, hyaluronic acid, niacinamide. Effective, often. Rarely new. What changes is how they are shaped, delivered, and communicated.
I didn’t pivot out of beauty journalism because I stopped believing in it. I left because the gap between what was promised and what could be proven felt too wide. There were exceptions, of course, but not enough. Craving depth, substantiation, and absolutes; I re-entered academia.
And it was during my degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine and biomedicine that I discovered a new way to hit performance notes never uttered before: biotechnology. It paves a new way to build products, one that reduces reliance on approximation and variability. Instead of extracting and adapting, ingredients can be developed with precision and intent. Their structure redefined, their potency sharpened, their interaction with the skin engineered rather than assumed. It ushered in true performance consistency, huge upswings in skin compatibility, and actives that were designed to be delivered efficiently into the skin, where they’re needed most.
That was too irresistible, too powerful for me to ignore. And so, REOME was born. A response to a model that has, for too long, allowed inference to stand in for proof. We conduct independent, objective clinical testing on our formulas and work with clinically proven actives, sourced from some of the most advanced biotech laboratories globally, at their tested efficacious levels. This matters. Many brands rely primarily on consumer perception studies, which can be useful, but are often presented as proof of performance.
We formulate with the most advanced, high-quality ingredients available, prioritising performance above all else. It results in some of the highest cost of goods in the category but ensures that the experience is exceptional and that results are not implied, but tangible. I cannot build this brand any other way.
Women uphold this category. They deserve honesty. They deserve value. They deserve formulas that stand up under scrutiny, that do what they say they will. It’s my life’s work to provide that for them. It should be every founder’s.
