About Us
Our Philosophy
of Beauty
We are clean beauty
We formulate with sustainable, all vegan ingredients that support the health of your skin and the health of the planet.
We are slow beauty
We hand blend skincare that works in harmony with nature to progressively improve your skin.
We are effective beauty
We help you achieve your skincare goals by targeting your unique skincare challenges and prioritizing observable results.
We are wabi-sabi
Which is a fun way of saying that we embrace the impermanence and imperfection in everything because we know that’s what makes each and every one of us uniquely beautiful.
We are beautiful at any age
Beauty is not exclusive to the young. We celebrate skin in all its seasons and strive to create skincare that makes skin of any age more beautiful.
Our Formulating Principles
If it isn’t good for your skin, it doesn’t belong on your face.
If an ingredient doesn’t directly improve the health and beauty of your skin we won’t serve it at our bar or put it in your skin care.
We don’t mix oil and water.
Instead, we keep them apart until you combine them on your skin where they link up naturally, exactly as nature intended.
We target multiple mechanisms of action.
Our skincare targets the causes of your concerns. And we don’t just target a cause once or in one way. We target it repeatedly and differently from each of the three products in the Luxe Line.
We use natural methods to maximize ingredient penetration and bioavailability.
We employ diverse strategies to temporarily reverse the function of the skin barrier and promote the penetration of ingredients into the dermis. These include: lowering the pH of the stratum corneum, layering ingredients, boosting hydration, using fatty acids, phospholipids and fermentations as permeation enhancers and giving preference to ingredients that have low atomic weights and volumes.
We seek out synergies
The technique of combining complementary elements to increase their overall effect has been called biohacking, synergizing, layering, stacking, cross conditioning and cocktailing. In every instance, products or procedures that employ this technique tend to work better, faster and yield longer lasting results because they’re designed from the start to work smarter.
The greatest possible effect from the fewest possible ingredients.
When it comes to the number of ingredients in a product, less is usually more. Why? Because skin is better able to absorb fewer ingredients delivered at higher concentrations. Reducing the number of ingredients helps minimize the overall chemical load on your skin and lessens the chance of ingredient conflict or skin reaction. Fewer ingredients also means greater formula transparency so that you always know what you are putting on. And finally, simplified formulations mean less production waste which contributes to a smaller environmental footprint for our products.
How we do it?
How we do it?
We formulate with sustainable, all vegan ingredients that support the health of your skin and the health of the planet.
Our screen process
We hand blend skincare that works in harmony with nature to progressively improve your skin.
We are effective beauty
We help you achieve your skincare goals by targeting your unique skincare challenges and prioritizing observable results.
We are wabi-sabi
Which is a fun way of saying that we embrace the impermanence and imperfection in everything because we know that’s what makes each and every one of us uniquely beautiful.
We are beautiful at any age
Beauty is not exclusive to the young. We celebrate skin in all its seasons and strive to create skincare that makes skin of any age more beautiful.
Our screening process
How we do it?
We formulate with sustainable, all vegan ingredients that support the health of your skin and the health of the planet.
Our screen process
We hand blend skincare that works in harmony with nature to progressively improve your skin.
About Sara
I’ve been a practicing esthetician for most of my adult life. In that time I’ve worked practically every side of the facial fence, from improving the skin of the most demanding celebrities and operating my own facial practice to appearing as an on-air television skin care expert and consulting for major skin care brands. I’ve worked alongside some of the most famous tv dermatologists and practiced my craft in various settings from surgical offices to the most upscale of shops.
It’s been a dream career and I love what I do, but through it all I’ve been troubled by a question, namely, why do so many beauty products have so many un-beautiful things in them?
And I don’t just mean the clear and present dangers like synthetic fragrances, parabens and all the other toxins that are listed on every clean skincare site’s ‘banned’ lists. I mean the normal things that you see in your skincare everyday; things like blending agents, emulsifiers and preservatives, conditioners, texturizers, colorizers, consistency enhancers, neutralizers and stabilizers. Things with names like Triethanolamine, a pH balancer that’s also used in the production of cement, or the density reducer perfluoromethyl trimethoxysilane or the impossibly tongue twisting polyperfluoroethoxymethoxy difluoro hydroxyethyl ether. No wonder they started naming things with numbers, like CI 15620, otherwise known as red dye.
And so I started asking every skin care expert and cosmetic chemist I thought might have the answer, Why are these things in our skincare?
“They’re there to make the product smell good, feel good and last
long.
“They’re there to keep you safe from bugs and germs and shelf stabilize the product.”
“They are there because they need to be there, because they have to be there, because they’re required.”
And so I stopped asking. In the skin care world it was a closed case.
If you wanted in on the latest skincare sensations, the incredible discoveries, in other words, all the wonderful things that make adventuring in skin care so much fun, then you had no choice, you had to compromise.
you had to be willing to take the bad stuff in hand with the good, smear it on your face and hope for the best. And for years, that’s exactly what I did, even though it never felt completely right.
I‘ve had a great many self-made millionaires and even a few billionaires on my facial bed over the years. When any of them shared how they manifested their wealth I expected to hear stories of iron resolve in the face of adversity, but what I often heard instead were tales that turned on complete happenstance, such as: “I met an old friend on the street and the next thing you know…” Or, “My business was failing and an employee came to me with this idea…” Or, “There was an unserved space in the sector and I just stepped into it.” It didn’t seem possible, or even right, that so much of what accounted for one’s success was due entirely to unplanned or random events – until it happened to me not once, but twice.
David is a Harvard graduate, a professor at UCLA medical school, and a smart guy by any measure. He’d found his way to me because the ocean surfing that he loved was playing havoc with his skin. I was putting a treatment on his face and explaining what went into it when David suddenly interrupted, “You know, they wouldn’t need to put all that chemistry in there if they separated the product into an oil and a water phase.” David went on to explain how blending oil and water opened the door to pretty much everything that I didn’t want in my skin care.
And that was the spark that set me on a journey of discovery that led ultimately to the creation of a skin care line based on not mixing oil and water. Without even being asked, David had answered a question I’d been asking all my life and showed me a whole new way to do skin care.
Rick is a retired restaurateur whose struggle with adult acne had led him to me. Once, when I was applying niacinamide to his face, he asked if this niacinamide was different from others that I’d applied in the past. I told him that while this one came from a new supplier it was allegedly of the same quality and chemically identical to the niacinamide I’d used on him before.
The next time I saw Rick, he brought along four small packets of niacinamide, each from a different supplier, and invited me to blind- sample them. The variations between them were slight, but consistently detectable, except for one that had been manufactured in Switzerland and was so much finer than the others that I continue to use it to this day. Rick explained that sourcing the best ingredients was one of his passions and he suspected that skin care was not all that different from cooking, where the final product can only ever be as good as the ingredients that make it up. And that’s why we meticulously source every ingredient that goes into our skincare.
Lucky for me, both Rick and David saw promise in the ideas I began to share with them – ideas they had inspired – and both became increasingly involved in the work of bringing The Skincare Bar to life. The bar and the skincare we blend here truly is a fruit born of our collective passion and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoy creating it for you.
Sara Turbeville
The Team
Sara Turbeville
Founder
Medical esthetician for highly regarded television dermatologists and plastic surgeons. Product consultant for skincare mega-brands. In private practice since 2008 as owner/operator of SKIN Santa Monica. In 2010 Allure Magazine named Sara one of the ten best facialists in the country.
Rick Rever
Product Development
Rick was the executive chef/owner of Production Caterers, a motion picture/television catering company in Los Angeles. Rick and his team were recipients of a Los Angeles Times recipe of the year award and an LAUSD Cooking in the Classroom award. Rick has cheffed for hundreds of celebrities from Paul Newman to Michael Jackson. In 1995 Rick joined legendary publicist Warren Cowan to help launch the west coast office of the public relations firm, Warren Cowan and Associates.
David Meriwether
Product Development
Assistant Professor of Medicine. UCLA Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology. David Geffen School Of Medicine.