Why I Started Formulating Skincare, and Why I Never Stopped Learning: A letter from Angelina

When I think about the beginnings of aos Skincare, I don’t really think about starting a business. I think about plants.

As a child, I would lie on my stomach in the backyard and examine leaves and flowers up close. I wanted to know their names, of course, but even more than that, I wanted to know what they did. Could you make something with them? Could they help us? Could they soothe skin or heal a wound? From simple crafts to medicine and natural skincare, I was experimenting with plants from a very young age.

I also have extremely sensitive skin and an equally sensitive nose. Synthetic fragrance has always been particularly difficult for me. Even walking down the cleaning aisle of a grocery store can leave me foggy-headed with a headache, and sleeping in sheets washed with fragranced laundry detergent can result in a full-body rash. So perhaps it was inevitable that my fascination with plants, my sensitivity, and my love of science would eventually come together.

Life sciences were always my favorite subjects. I completed a Master Gardening course the summer after high school and went on to study botany, chemistry and biology in college. While working at a natural foods cooperative, I was introduced to western herbalism and learned the traditional art of making herbal salves. At the same time, I was spending my weekends working as a river rafting guide in Arizona, which left me with perpetually cracked, sore feet. Nothing I tried seemed to help.

I became convinced there had to be a better solution, so I started reading everything I could find about topical herbal remedies and skincare formulation. Then I started experimenting.

My first dozen or so attempts were utter failures.

Fortunately, my chemistry training had already taught me one of the most important lessons of formulation: failure is information. You observe what happened. You take careful notes. You try to understand why it happened. Then you change something and try again.

Eventually, those experiments became Skin Doctor, one of the earliest formulas in what would become aos Skincare. Years later, when my young son struggled with eczema and rashes, I found myself back at the formulation table. I had eliminated as many synthetic chemicals as I could from our lives, but I still couldn’t find something that soothed his unhappy skin the way I wanted it to. Once again, I researched, experimented and refined until I landed on something that worked beautifully. That formula became Zinc Rescue Cream, which remains part of the aos Skincare collection nearly 30 years later.

That cycle of curiosity, research, experimentation, failure, refinement and discovery has been repeated countless times since then. It is still at the heart of how we formulate today.

By 2002, I was a single mother living in Bend, Oregon, studying to become a massage therapist. Natural massage products were difficult to find, and online shopping was still in its infancy, so I went back into my kitchen and made my own massage cream. I eventually created a formula I loved and used it in my massage practice for years. That formula became our Deep Tissue Massage Butter.

A friend and I opened a massage clinic in downtown Bend, and before long we had half a dozen therapists working there. They tried my homemade massage butter and began asking if they could buy it. Then the Spa at Sunriver, the largest spa in Central Oregon at the time, called. One of their therapists had been using my massage butter, and they wanted to purchase it for the spa.

Suddenly, I wasn’t simply making products for myself anymore.

The spa wanted massage oils, lotions, creams and body scrubs, and I worked directly with their therapists and manager, adjusting and refining formulas until they told me they were “perfect.” Making skincare at home in a little log cabin full of children and a couple of cats presented some interesting challenges. Making the products themselves was the easy part. Creating a sanitary production environment, finding natural preservation systems that actually worked, improving stability and increasing shelf life required an entirely new level of research.

I loved it.

A few years later, their lead esthetician asked if I could create natural facial products. Some of the estheticians had become so sensitized to the products they were using that they had developed dermatitis on their hands and needed to wear gloves while giving facials.

Massage products were one thing. Facial skincare felt like an entirely different level of responsibility. I was self-taught, and I knew enough to understand how much I didn’t know. What if I created something that simply didn’t work? Worse, what if I created something that caused a bad skin reaction?

The spa team encouraged me, so I did what I have always done when I don’t know enough about something: I studied.

By then I had also been practicing and teaching Ashtanga yoga for about a decade and had become deeply interested in Ayurvedic medicine. Its combination of plants, careful observation and individualized care appealed to both my herbalist heart and my “science brain.” I began wondering whether I could apply some of those principles to skincare.

There weren’t many resources available at the time, so I scraped together my meager savings, packed up my eight-year-old son and, with the loving support of my new husband, traveled to India. We spent a month visiting herbalists and searching for Ayurvedic skincare specialists, eventually finding them in Kerala.

I’m not sure what I expected to discover. Perhaps some extraordinary secret, exotic ingredients or ancient recipes that would completely change the way I formulated.

Instead, I kept hearing something that, at the time, was almost disappointingly simple: use the plants that grow where you live.

The herbalists I met emphasized the importance of locally grown, indigenous plants. I had traveled halfway around the world looking for answers, only to be told to go home and pay closer attention to what was growing around me.

So I did.

I came back to Oregon, began contacting local farmers and started looking at our own landscape differently. With the help of a wonderful team of estheticians, I began developing facial products based on Ayurvedic body types, or doshas. The estheticians tested the formulas on themselves and one another, gave me detailed feedback, and once everyone was happy with a formula, they began incorporating it into professional treatments.

That experience in India ultimately reinforced something that has become increasingly important to me over the years: some of the most extraordinary ingredients don’t need to come from the other side of the world. Sometimes they are growing in a field just down the road.

Our dedication to locally grown, organic botanicals has two sides, and both are deeply important to me.

The first is formulation. I believe thoughtfully grown, freshly harvested botanical ingredients can be an extraordinary way to support healthy skin. Working locally also gives us the opportunity to know our growers, understand how plants are being cultivated and harvested, and work with beautiful fresh plant material. Instead of thinking about an ingredient simply as a name on an ingredient list, we can think about the actual plant, the soil it grew in, the people who tended it, when it was harvested and how we can gently process it to preserve what makes it special.

The second reason reaches far beyond skincare. I believe small organic farms are an essential part of a sustainable future. The way we grow plants affects our soil, our waterways, insects and pollinators, wildlife, farm workers, local communities and ultimately all of us. Supporting small farms that care for their land is not something separate from our mission at aos Skincare. To me, it is inseparable from it. Our own health is intimately connected to the health of the ecosystems around us.

As the years passed, aos Skincare grew far beyond my kitchen experiments. I stopped practicing massage so I could devote myself to formulation full time. We developed bespoke skincare for spas, opened our own skincare lab and retail store, weathered the 2008 financial crash, worked countless farmers markets and holiday markets, built a wholesale business, opened our own wellness spa, and eventually worked with destination resort spas throughout Oregon and Washington. At one point, we had around 150 different skincare products.

Through all of that growth, I kept studying. The internet opened up access to an incredible amount of scientific research that simply hadn’t been available to me when I started. I consulted with dermatologists and cosmetic chemists. I learned from estheticians working with skin every day. We listened to our customers. We revisited formulas we thought were already good and asked how we could make them better.

Because “good enough” has never interested me very much.

I want our formulas to work. Every ingredient needs a reason for being there. But efficacy is only one part of what makes a skincare formula exceptional.

I also want you to love using it.

This is one of my favorite parts of formulation. Plants give us an extraordinary palette to work with because an ingredient can offer something valuable to the skin while also contributing to the texture, color, aroma or overall sensory experience of a formula. I am always thinking about both sides.

What do I want this formula to accomplish for the skin? Which botanical ingredients can help me get there? How do they interact with one another? But also: How does the product glide beneath your fingers? How does your skin feel afterward? What do you experience when you open the jar and breathe it in? Does the texture make you want to linger for another moment while you massage it into your skin?

Those things matter.

Skincare is functional, but it can also be a small daily ritual. Those few minutes at the sink in the morning or before bed are an opportunity to slow down, touch your own skin and breathe in something beautiful. I want our formulas to earn their place in those moments. I want them to address real skin needs while also being genuinely pleasurable to use.

Over the years, the business itself changed many times. We grew, contracted, opened spaces, closed spaces, weathered recessions and a pandemic, and made some very difficult decisions along the way. Eventually, after decades of expansion, I began to feel a strong pull back toward where we had started: the plants and the formulas.

We closed our beloved spa and retail store and moved aos Skincare into a new space filled with beautiful natural light, where the team could devote more of its energy to research, formulation and production. We went from a team of 15 to a small team of five women. I moved into the countryside and finally began fulfilling another lifelong dream of growing my own medicinal herbs.

And after nearly 25 years of running aos Skincare, I handed the helm to Elisa, who had worked closely beside me for almost two decades.

One of the things that made it possible for me to make that enormous transition is that Elisa and I are very much of the same mind when it comes to the work itself. Over all those years together, she learned the complex methods behind formulating and crafting natural skincare, not simply how to follow a formula, but how to understand one. She learned the patience and precision required to work with botanical ingredients, the countless variables that can affect a batch, and the continual problem-solving that happens behind the scenes when you are making skincare this way.

And she became a formulator herself.

Some of the products that are now among our most treasured aos Skincare formulas began with Elisa’s own ideas, curiosity and experimentation. She shares my belief that there is always more to learn, always another question worth asking and always the possibility that a formula can become even better. Watching her develop that knowledge and then take it in her own direction has been one of the great joys of our years working together.

It also means that this philosophy doesn’t end with me.

The dedication to plants, science, thoughtful formulation and constant refinement that shaped aos Skincare from its earliest days is very much alive under Elisa’s ownership. She brings her own ideas and perspective to it, which is exactly as it should be. A living company, like a garden, shouldn’t remain frozen in time. It should continue to grow.

I still have the wonderful and slightly surreal pleasure of being part of the company I started, only now I work for her. I continue to support aos Skincare as a mentor, formulation consultant, graphic artist and writer. Elisa and I still get to talk about ingredients, puzzle through formulation questions, share research and imagine what we might make next. I get to stay connected with our customers and, most importantly, continue doing something I have loved since I was that little girl lying on her stomach in the grass.

I still get to ask questions about plants.

I still get excited when I learn about a botanical constituent I haven’t studied before. I still disappear down research rabbit holes. I still want to know why something works instead of simply accepting that it does. I still get completely absorbed in the challenge of making a formula more effective, more elegant or more beautiful to use.

And I know Elisa feels the same way.

After all these years, the more we learn about plants, skin and formulation, the more humbled we are by how much there still is to discover.

That is what striving for excellence means to us. It isn’t believing that we have finally created the “perfect” formula and can stop asking questions. It is remaining curious enough to keep learning. It is being willing to reconsider something we thought we knew. It is choosing exceptional ingredients, supporting growers whose values align with ours, and treating those ingredients with care once they reach our lab. It is bringing together traditional plant knowledge, decades of hands-on experience and what modern science continues to teach us.

Most of all, it is remembering that everything is connected: the health of our skin, the plants we formulate with, the farmers who grow them, the soil beneath their roots and the larger living world we are all part of.

Twenty-five years after those first experiments, that is still what I want aos Skincare to be about.

Making exceptionally thoughtful, effective botanical skincare. Supporting the people who care for the land. Creating formulas that are as beautiful to experience as they are purposeful for the skin.

And never, ever being finished learning.

With love,

Angelina
Founder, aos Skincare