People often ask me what inspired me to create Climate-Smart skincare. My inspiration came from my father.
Because of my father, I was conditioned to think about how the environment impacts all surfaces including the skin.
Growing up I did not spend my summers on the lake or at the public swimming pool like other kids in Austria did. I spent all my summers traveling with my parents and my sister, supporting my father in his role to expand powder coating worldwide. Powder coating, if you don't know, is a process where a coat of color is permanently applied on metal surfaces that are constantly exposed to the environment (think outdoor furniture, fences, bikes, airplanes, etc.). How you exactly treat the surface changes in different environments, and I believe I was a First Grader, just six years old, when I knew already that extreme temperatures, hot or cold and different levels of humidity, high UV index and pollution affected how a surface should be treated.
I did not appreciate how special it was to be included in so much of my father's work until I was an adult.
Traveling to different countries was not as easy in the 70s as it is today. We often spent days in a small car driving in Europe from one corner in the North to the other corner in the South and so on. Often the radio didn't work, there were no cell phones or computer games invented yet, and so my parents talked to us to keep us entertained. My father told us interesting stories about the places we'd go to, how people's lives were different from ours, their culture and history. He told us about the projects he was working on, the companies and people he was meeting there and how it was all related to our lives. Looking back, I loved this time with my father. I believe this special kind of upbringing instilled a curiosity in me about how things work in different places. I certainly knew early on that I wanted to be as passionate and driven in what I was going to do as my father was. I think I admired that most about him as a child. Luckily, I found
my passion in my idea of Climate-Smart skincare and I am driven to change how people
use skincare anywhere in the world.
Innovation often comes from the outside.
I always loved skincare. I get this from my mother. She always took outstanding care of her skin and pampered herself and us girls with wonderful beauty products. When I moved from Austria to California in my late 20s, my skin suffered. It started to behave in a bipolar way - sometimes too oily and sometimes too dry. After finishing business school, I started working, and used my father's formula for success: passion and commitment. Pretty soon I was regularly traveling for business between the East Coast and the West Coast which added to my skin problems. In search of a solution, I couldn't help but suspect that the different climates must play a role in how my skin behaved. After all, the outer skin is a surface, and from what I knew about the
climate effect on a surface from my father, it must play some role in it. My curiosity was sparked. I started to read articles in medical journals about the latest research about how the
outer skin relies on the specific climate it is in to find its
natural moisture balance. I am not a trained scientist, dermatologist or esthetician which led me to think "outside the box" using my unique experiences and knowledge I got from my father early on to solve the problem.
Thank you for everything dad! For life, love, for the little and the big things you gave me and thank you for inspiring the best idea of my life.
