ESSE: Clarifying skin health

Maintaining 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 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.

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.

Simplicity is key. There are only four products in this range and it is exclusively available to professionals. The collection takes a microbiome approach to acne, and we’ve combined some new actives and techniques with effective oldies such as salicylic acid.

We’ve created a very mild, detoxifying cleanser. Conventional ranges tend to strip skin of its oil but this is counter-productive as if you remove the surface oil, skin will respond by producing more sebum and this drives the formation of more comedones. The usual approach is to use retinoids but we have chosen to replace these with bakuchiol, which offers the same results but without the phototoxicity and sensitising effects.

We’ve also used live lactobacillus probiotics to calm inflammation and boost barrier function. The probiotics produce anti-microbial peptides that make life very difficult for pathogenic microbes. Low vitamin D levels are very closely correlated with increased acne symptoms, so we use pre-vitamin D to boost the levels in skin.

Overall, we have outperformed other topical approaches and we come close to matching long-term antibiotic and retinoid combinations – obviously with fewer side effects.

We’ve put together a unique facial that uses live probiotic bacteria. It’s called the Esse Live Probiotic Experience. The client is taken through the process of reactivating the probiotics. These microbes prefer low levels of oxygen, which is why we apply them below an alginate mask to give them a window of opportunity to establish a niche in the client’s skin microbiome. The results have been great.

We tend to attract more ethically minded spas because of our organic certification, vegan accreditation and carbon-neutral status but we generally prefer to work with spas that really prioritise the results on skin.

Clients are often interested in a brand’s environmental credentials but will make their final choice based on efficacy. We understand this, so we generally downplay our certifications as these are associated with a less scientific approach. Looking to the future we are also expanding our offering into the medical aesthetics channel and looking at new in-spa treatments using narrow-band light.

To find out how Esse’s approach to skincare could attract new clients to your spa, visit: www.esseskincare.co.uk