The Silicon Valley Beauty Brand Biohackers Are Obsessed With
OneSkin, all over TikTok, merges the beauty industry’s fixation with antiaging and tech’s fantasy of halting death.
OneSkin’s skin-care line uses its key ingredient, a custom molecule designed to target what’s known as cellular senescence.
Photographer: Ryan Duffin for Bloomberg Businessweek
Amid snail slime serums, pulsed-light hair removal gadgets and Korean sunscreens on TikTok, a new kind of skin-care product is making the rounds. In one video, a white-coated scientist pipettes pink liquid into vials. In another, on Instagram, a woman with glittery ombre nails unboxes black-and-white bottles filled with futuristic youth serum. “Welcome to your skin-health and longevity journey,” the packaging reads.
If the pitch sounds more Palo Alto than Paris, that’s because it is. OneSkin, begun by four Ph.D.s in a San Francisco biotech accelerator, is now a skin-care brand sitting at the intersection of beauty’s obsession with antiaging and Silicon Valley’s fixation with outfoxing death. The company’s lotions and serums, “proven to target a root cause of aging,” have attracted a fan base that includes a who’s who of tech, biohacking and wellness types.