The skincare wisdom of Emma Lewisham

The first thing you notice about Emma Lewisham is her skin. The 39-year-old New Zealander is sitting in a stark boardroom in her office inside a converted warehouse in Auckland’s city centre, sipping a cup of liquorice tea. Her face is effortlessly, yet noticeably, luminous. 

Many have already cottoned on to Lewisham’s skincare routine. She launched her eponymous beauty brand from her kitchen table in 2019 and, after growing rapidly within Australasia, her formulations – which total 12 so far – are now gaining traction globally. The brand has 203 doors, including Space NK, Liberty and Harrods in the UK and Goop, Net-a-Porter and Melanie Grant in the US (and Credo from next year).  RRP sales globally for the year ending March 2024 totalled NZD$13mn (about £6.1mn), and are on track to reach NZD$27.5mn (about £12.9mn) this year.

A mineral SPF50 is the hardest product to crack

The main selling point for Emma Lewisham is its use of natural ingredients that are formulated to work with the skin. She was spurred to start the brand after her own struggles getting pregnant, as well as the loss of her mother to breast cancer in 2016, which made her reflect on the potentially harmful or carcinogenic ingredients that were in the skincare she was using. “That made me go down this path of looking at what is best for my health,” says Lewisham, who previously worked as a strategy and marketing executive for Japanese tech company Brother International. “It wasn’t necessarily that all of these ingredients were harmful, but some just no longer felt luxurious to me – ingredients like synthetic fragrance, which are petrochemical derived, or hydroquinone or parabens or phthalates.”

Emma Lewisham’s hero products

Supernatural Blemish Serum, £68

Supernatural Vitale Elixir Refill, £75

Supernatural Skin Reset Serum, £85

On looking for alternatives, she came up short. “The natural products on the market eight years ago were from organic health stores, which were all very earthy, felt and smelt funky, and often lacked evidence.” Instead, she created her own product, the now bestselling Supernatural Skin Reset Serum, which uses a blend of bio-available vitamin C, niacinamide and the naturally occuring amino acid ergothioneine to target hyperpigmentation. 

Lewisham says her custom formulations – which are designed to tackle her own skin bugbears, as well as those of her customers – are what set the brand apart. “I think we’re unique in the fact that we take our formulations to the labs, so we own all our own IP. None of our products are formulated off-the-shelf with one ingredient added, which is quite typical in skincare. To me that’s a totally different company. We didn’t launch to create a beauty brand or be a marketable brand.”

One of the brand’s recent releases is the Supernatural Blemish Serum, a patented acne product that uses live-probiotics instead of strains sourced from the gut or dirt. “Incorporating a formula that prioritises a healthy skin barrier and supports the skin’s own protective microbiome offers both corrective and preventative benefits,” says Melanie Grant, the Australian skin expert and celebrity facialist, who uses the blemish product every day. “I don’t often experience breakouts anymore, but I do struggle with sensitivity and rosacea and this serum has equally been a gamechanger.”

The bestselling product at Space NK, however, is the Supernatural Vitale Elixir, touted as “Botox in a bottle”, which launched this year. It seeks to replicate the same relaxing effect of Botox, preventing the contraction of the muscles that lead to the development of wrinkles and fine lines. “It’s different to putting retinol on – it’s got various ingredients, one being a relaxant complex that inhibits the skin’s intrinsic behaviour to tense,” adds Lewisham. “And the formulation is proven to reduce muscle contractions by up to 91 per cent after 24 hours.”

Next, she’s formulated a mineral SPF50, which she says has been the “hardest product to crack”, and which launches in the UK next year. “Zinc oxide, which is the natural ingredient used for sun protection, is a very large, white molecule that also has a greasy and oily feel, so it’s really hard to work with,” she says. “You have to figure out how you’re going to bring that whiteness down on the skin with the right levels of other ingredients.” The final product, which Lewisham has been working on for eight years, has a pinkish tinge but absorbs into the skin with no colour, and leaves no oily residue to speak of. “It’s a medical grade-level product that is also luxurious and we’re really proud of it.”

Lewisham achieved B Corp certification in 2022 through her circular business model, which encourages customers to buy refills – a rarity in luxury skincare – and send in their empty pods and pouches for refilling or recycling. “Somewhere along the way, the beauty industry decided that it was acceptable to be a linear model,” says Lewisham. “But I also think that brands weren’t aware that the packaging, when it went to recycling plants, wasn’t being recycled.” 

Lewisham has also made the intellectual property behind the circular framework public. The brand’s customers, too, are increasingly partaking in the programme: 30 per cent of the total purchases from Lewisham’s website are now for refills, and the number of empties returned to be refilled grew by 150 per cent from 2022 to 2023. 

“I just want people to have products that genuinely work – they’re paying a lot of money for those products – and they see real results,” says Lewisham. “I get so much joy out of people telling me that they see results. And that’s why we genuinely do not skimp on ingredients. I would rather lose money, and have less margin, but know that they work.”