There's a moment early in my career that I still think about.
I was working for one of the big luxury beauty houses - the kind of brand everyone recognizes instantly. Beautiful packaging, glossy campaigns, a logo that meant something the second you saw it. And like most people in that world, I rarely questioned what was actually inside the bottles. It was about the prestige. The experience. The story on the box.
Then one day, a customer came back to return a product. Her skin was inflamed and visibly peeling. She looked at me and asked a simple question: "What's in this that did this to my skin?"
I didn't have an answer. I genuinely didn't know. That was many years ago.
But that moment changed everything for me. I started studying ingredients obsessively, trying to understand what I had been selling without truly understanding. And what I found shocked me. All the ingredients on the packaging were some fancy names that I could not associate with anything 'nature' created that I would be familiar with.
Back then, there was almost no transparency in this industry. Products would feature one pretty flower or plant on the front label, letting you assume that was the star of the formula. But flip the bottle over, and that same "natural" ingredient was often listed near the very bottom - meaning it made up a fraction of a percent of the entire product. The rest? Often loaded with synthetic fragrance and fillers that had nothing to do with the story being sold to you.
So What Actually Counts as "Natural"?
Here's an uncomfortable truth: there's no universally agreed-upon definition of "natural" in cosmetics. Everything on this planet technically originated in nature in some form. But to safely get into a jar of cream, almost every ingredient - even "natural" ones - has to go through some degree of processing.
This is exactly the loophole greenwashing brands exploit. They lean on the word "natural" because it sounds safe and wholesome, even when the substance of the product doesn't back it up.
Why I Believe Nature Knew What It Was Doing
I believe nature was designed - intentionally, by our Creator - with everything our skin needs to heal, protect, and defend itself. Long before labs and synthetic chemistry existed, plants, oils, and botanical extracts were already doing exactly what our skin needed them to do.
Synthetic ingredients are cheaper to produce. They're consistent batch after batch, and their results are predictable because they're engineered that way in a controlled lab environment. I won't pretend otherwise. But predictable and cheap were never the values I built Yunasence around.
I believe nature's complexity is exactly the point. A single plant extract carries thousands of compounds working together in ways we don't always fully understand, but our skin does. That's not a flaw to be engineered away. That's by design. This is why, at Yunasence, we choose nature's way whenever we possibly can.
The Approach I Actually Believe In
About 95% of what goes into our formulas is plant-derived. The remaining ingredients - things like retinol, ceramides, peptides, hyaluronic acid, and certain vitamins - aren't there because we couldn't find a botanical alternative we liked. They're there because, after careful research, we found them to be genuinely safe and effective, with decades of safety data behind them. As well as being superheroes for your skin.
Before any ingredient enters one of our formulas, we look closely at how it's made, what its safety profile looks like, and what real performance data supports it. We're not interested in trends or marketing buzzwords. We're interested in what's genuinely safe and effective, long term, on real skin.
One thing I'm especially proud of: none of our ingredients are banned in the European Union, which holds the highest cosmetic safety standards in the world. That's not a coincidence. That's a deliberate standard we hold ourselves to.
Why This Matters to You
After everything I witnessed early in my career - the vague labels, the diluted "natural" claims, the lack of transparency that left a woman with inflamed, peeling skin and no answers - I wanted to build something different. A brand that trusts what nature already does so well, and only reaches for science when it genuinely earns its place.
Real skincare, rooted in science, created with care. That's not just a tagline for us. It's the standard we use to choose every single ingredient that goes into your skin.
