As a pharmacist, I've spent years watching people accept something they probably shouldn't — that the products we eat, drink, and put on our skin are just going to be filled with ingredients that don't belong there. Fillers. Preservatives. Chemicals we can't pronounce. Somewhere along the way, we stopped questioning it.

That bothers me.

The skincare industry is no different from the food industry in this regard. Walk down any aisle and you'll find products loaded with synthetic ingredients that exist not to benefit your skin, but to extend shelf life, reduce manufacturing costs, or compensate for cheaper base ingredients. Preservatives are one of the biggest offenders. Most of them are synthetic, and most of them are in your products because they're easy and cheap — not because they're good for you.

When I was formulating The Everyday Face Cream, finding a preservative I actually felt good about was one of the hardest parts. I wasn't willing to compromise. What I landed on was an all-natural preservative system that actually works — no synthetic shortcuts, no ingredients I'd be embarrassed to put on a label.

The organically sourced piece matters just as much. We've normalized the spraying of pesticides and chemicals on crops because large-scale industrial farming makes it nearly impossible to do otherwise. Farmers are spread thin, working at a scale that demands chemical intervention just to keep yields up. The result is that the raw ingredients making their way into our food, our supplements, and yes — our skincare products — carry residue from that process. Smaller scale, more intentional farming changes that equation. That's why organically sourced ingredients aren't just a marketing term to me. They represent a different standard of care at the source.

Working as a pediatric inpatient pharmacist, I see daily what happens when the body is pushed beyond what it was designed to handle. Most of the children I help care for aren't hospitalized because of what they've put on their skin. The broader trend, however, is hard to ignore. More than one in five American children now meet the criteria for obesity — and that number keeps climbing. What we put into our bodies, consistently and over time, matters. Skincare is transdermal consumption. It's not separate from that conversation.

If a colleague or parent asked me why natural over synthetic, my answer is straightforward: the more we alter naturally occurring substances, the more likely our bodies are to respond in ways we didn't intend. We were designed to interact with what nature provides. The further we stray from that, the more unpredictable the outcome.

That's the philosophy behind PharmEssence. Keep it clean. Keep it simple. Don't put anything on your skin that you couldn't defend with a clear conscience.

Your skin deserves better than the industry standard. We made something better.

— Josh Cullen, PharmD
Founder, PharmEssence