Until I was 45, my skin had never given me a problem. My hair had. My weight had. But my skin had always been the easy part.
In other parts of my life, I had already learned a pattern. When I found something that genuinely worked for me, I stopped searching. I have used the same haircare for more than two decades. At 25, I found an eating pattern that suited me, and I still follow it today.
Skin was different. There had never been anything to solve.
Then, at 45, severe eczema appeared on my eyelid.
Moisturisers did not help. Prescription treatment did, but it came back.
What unsettled me was not only the eczema itself.
It was the timing.
Why now?
That question changed everything.
I have spent three decades around traditional Chinese medicine, so my instinct has always been to look for the root of a problem rather than only quiet the symptom.
Instead of continuing to ask, What should I put on it?, I started asking:
Why is this happening now?
That question led me into two years of research on how skin changes through the menopausal transition. My research was later presented at the European Menopause and Andropause Society Congress.
The more I studied, the less convincing it became to me to think about menopausal skin as a list of unrelated complaints.
A woman may first notice dryness. Another notices dullness or dark spots. Someone else finds that her skin has suddenly become reactive, itchy or less comfortable. Another sees more lines or less firmness.
The experience is individual.
But underneath those visible differences, I kept returning to four areas:
BARRIER · HYDRATION · TONE · REACTIVITY
I began to see them not as four separate cosmetic concerns, but as interconnected changes in the foundation of skin during the menopausal transition.
Yet much of skincare is organised in the opposite way.
Dryness gets a hydration product. Pigmentation gets a brightening product. Reactivity gets a calming product. Barrier weakness gets another product.
None of those products is necessarily bad.
The question, for me, was whether treating one visible concern meant we had addressed the condition of the skin as a whole.
There are practical reasons skincare is often formulated around a single concern. A simpler formula with fewer active ingredients can be easier to formulate, stabilise and test. It also creates a very clear structure for the consumer: one concern, one product.
But the routine can keep growing while the woman using it is still trying to understand why her skin no longer behaves as it used to.
I think about it like building a house.
You would not build one beautiful wall and call the house structurally sound.
The wall may be excellent. It may be beautifully made.
But the foundation has to work as a whole.
I see menopausal skin the same way.
Before asking the skin to do more, I wanted to support the conditions that allow it to function well.
Before stimulation, I wanted stability.
Stability before stimulation.
That became the formulation philosophy behind Rebalance.
I worked with a chemist in Stockholm to build a formula around those four areas rather than choosing one concern and optimising everything around it.
It was not the easiest way to formulate.
The formula failed twice as we worked through complexity, stability and challenge testing. But simplifying the idea simply to make the formulation easier would have defeated the reason I was creating it in the first place.
Eventually, that work became Rebalance, built around Neralis-13™, a 13-active complex developed around those four interconnected areas of menopausal skin.
I used the finished serum myself for a year before the first bottle was sold.
What I noticed first was not something dramatic.
It was that my skin still felt hydrated in the afternoon.
That mattered to me because I was not looking for a momentary cosmetic effect. I wanted my skin to feel more dependable again.
And that leads to something I believe even more strongly today.
Founder conviction is not your evidence.
Neither is a beautiful claim, a fashionable ingredient or somebody else's before-and-after.
Your own skin should have a voice in the decision.
Give something enough time. Observe what changes. Compare it with where you began. Then decide whether it deserves a place in your life.
I do not want women to borrow my confidence.
I want them to form their own.
Your skin. Your baseline. Your evidence.