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Clarifying skin health
Esse founder Trevor Steyn discusses skin rewilding and the brand’s new Clarifying collection
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aintaining the planet’s resources and biodiversity, which is becoming increasingly important to consumers, has long been a focus for Trevor Steyn. The South African biochemist, who started international probiotic skincare brand Esse back in 2002, has spent the last two decades formulating organic products that respect the planet while optimising skin health on a microscopic level. Esse’s radical approach to skin health challenges current thinking on how to promote healthy ageing and improve skin sensitivity. Having coined the phrase “rewilding the skin”, Steyn 42
and his team offer spas products and treatments developed to protect the complex and vast microbe communities that live on our skin. We ask the pioneering expert about the future of skincare and the launch of Esse’s new Clarifying range. What is your approach to skincare? Understanding the human microbiome has revolutionised our understanding of health. We can’t optimise human health without considering our microbes and this is as true for the skin as it is for the gut. This means that the future is probiotic not antibiotic. Our microbes protect us and modulate
our skin’s immune response, and we have treated them badly over the last 100 years. Consumers believed in the ‘war on germs’ and didn’t fully consider the impact of products that the multinationals promoted. Skincare is a very different offering when you understand skin as an intricate ecosystem that requires a diverse group of co-evolved microbes. How does this ethos inform Esse’s new Clarifying range? Simplicity is key. There are only four products in this range and it is exclusively available to professionals. The collection takes a microbiome www.europeanspamagazine.com