Before I ever thought about making a skincare product, I did something most founders skip: I asked whether the product I wanted already existed. Not casually. Systematically.

I built a scoring model. I fed it the ingredient lists, claims, concentrations, and user experiences of every leading prestige skincare product I could find — over forty formulations, from the heritage French houses to the clinical American disruptors to the Korean innovation leaders. I gave the model three requirements. Not fifty criteria. Not a balanced scorecard designed to make everyone look reasonable. Three. The only three that mattered to me.

The Three Requirements
01
Minimum additives. No fillers, no fragrance masks, no texture agents that exist only to make the formula feel expensive in your hand. Every ingredient had to earn its place in the bottle by doing something measurable for your skin.
02
Zero hassle. One product. One step. I did not want a seven-step routine that required a spreadsheet and a timer. I wanted something I could reach for at 6 AM, half-asleep, and know I was done.
03
Maximum effect. If the active ingredients were at studied concentrations — the levels actually shown to produce results in published research — the product scored. If they were present in trace amounts for label decoration, it did not.

I ran the model. I expected the top products to land somewhere in the eighties. Maybe one would crack ninety — some formulation that had quietly solved the consolidation problem without anyone noticing. I was ready to buy it that afternoon and move on with my life.

The highest score was 65%.

It belonged to Sisley's Ecological Compound. A product I respect. A product that, by the standards of the industry, is genuinely excellent. And it still missed more than a third of what I was looking for. Most of the products you see on the top shelves — the ones with the white coats and the heritage stories and the $300 price tags — landed in the forties and fifties. A few fell below thirty. The average was somewhere in the high forties.

What the Numbers Actually Said

At first, I assumed the model was broken. Maybe the scoring was too strict. Maybe I was asking for something unreasonable. So I dug into the data, product by product, requirement by requirement, looking for the products that excelled at individual criteria even if they failed the overall score.

What I found was worse than a low average. I found a structural pattern. Products that scored high on minimum additives were almost always single-note formulations — a vitamin C serum here, a peptide complex there. They were clean, but incomplete. Products that scored high on effect were multi-step systems — a five-bottle protocol that demanded twenty minutes every morning. Products that promised zero hassle were, by and large, products that had given up on serious actives entirely. They were moisturisers with good marketing.

No product scored well on all three. Not because the formulators were incompetent — many are brilliant. But because the industry rewards complexity. More products mean more shelf space. More SKUs mean more revenue per customer. A single product that does everything is a structural threat to a business model built on selling you five.

The Thanos Moment

There is a scene in Avengers: Infinity War where Thanos looks at the universe and concludes that no one else is going to solve the problem. The existing systems are not designed to produce the outcome he wants. So he decides: fine, I'll do it myself.

I had my own version of that moment, sitting at my desk at 2 AM, staring at a spreadsheet full of scores in the forties. I wasn't angry at the industry. I was disappointed — not in the people, but in the incentives. The market had spent decades optimizing for shelf presence, brand storytelling, and repeat purchase behaviour. It had not optimized for someone who wanted everything in one. Not because that person didn't exist. Because serving her wasn't profitable enough.

So I stopped looking for a product to buy and started building the product I had been searching for. That decision — that 65% number — is the entire origin story of NeolabCare. The formula is not an iteration on what already exists. It is an answer to a gap the data proved was real.

A 9-in-1 treatment. Minimum additives — every ingredient included at a studied concentration for a documented purpose. Zero hassle — one pump, one step, done. Maximum effect — actives at levels that match the clinical literature, delivered fresh from the lab, protected from light, air, and time.

The industry's best scored 65%. We are aiming for 100 — not because we are smarter, but because we started from a different question. We didn't ask what would sell. We asked what would work — for one person, in one step, every day.

I didn't set out to build a skincare company. I set out to find a product that met three simple requirements. When the numbers told me that product didn't exist, I had a choice: compromise, or build it. If you've ever stood in front of a shelf full of products and felt like none of them were made for you — this is for you.

— Lareesa