This is selfmade. It didn’t get tidied up for you.

An operating system for burnout. Starting with skin. Built by people who hit the burnout themselves, and are still going.

Stephanie Lee · founder

I was told: if you can’t change it from the inside, change it from the outside.

I spent my twenties inside beauty: Michelle Obama’s office, then a major cosmetics house. Good at it, and coming apart. The job was covering the thing instead of feeling it. So I left, and went looking: 11 countries, 16 states, seeing how other cultures actually hold mental health.

My mom was fifteen when she got in a boat to leave Vietnam. “Take a bet on yourself” is the only thing my family has ever done.

People show you the highlight reel. Here’s the actual shape of six years.

A handful of us, on video calls · 2020

2020

Launched in a lockdown. One serum, 5,000 units, a waitlist of 3,315 people who’d never smelled it. And one belief under all of it: you are worthy, simply because you were born.

Super 8, from our early films · 2021

2021

A second product. Vogue, Forbes and Byrdie covered it the same day. We looked like we’d made it.

The jars from that run · 2022

2022

The Comfort Cream. The label machine broke and the first batch came back 64% damaged. I hand-stickered a hundred jars at my kitchen table. Three more products were in development you’ll never see. They didn’t make it out.

The brand turns three · October 2023

2023

A raise in motion. Big names attached, others circling. And that October, we turned three.

Rest Mode, as the homepage wore it · August 2024

2024

August. My eyes stopped being able to look at a screen. I called it Rest Mode, out loud, on the homepage. Two months later we launched Rumination anyway.

The failure was never the products. I kept picking the deep thing over the fast thing. I’d pick it again. It just cost us, right as the headwinds hit.

We took a lease on Abbot Kinney.

Rooms had been outrunning our ads for a year. So we signed for a space.

Jan 7The fires start. We were in the space that morning.
Jan 18We were supposed to open. We didn’t.
Jan 24Soft doors. A few people wandered in.
Jan 31We opened. Investor Day on the 2nd.
Feb 14We went back. A pop-up, for Valentine’s.

There is a video from the morning of the 7th, of three of us outside the glass working out where things go. There is another one from the same phone that afternoon. It is called Smoke Coming up.

Connection is the antidote to overstimulation. We’d written that years ago. This was the year we had to mean it.

Outside the room, Abbot Kinney. That smoke behind us is the fires.

We didn’t build it for them. We built it with them.

A board of Gen-Z writers, makers and skeptics was in the room seven months before a single bottle shipped. In 2023 they wrote their own open letter to the beauty industry:

“There is no bad skin. There is no good skin. Skin is skin.”

“But we ask: Who defined flaws and perfection in the first place?”

— the Junior Advisory Board

I didn’t build this alone, and I won’t pretend I did.

Stress raises cortisol inside the skin, and treating the stress measurably restores it (Choe SJ et al. (2018). Psychological stress deteriorates skin barrier function by activating the HPA axis in skin. Scientific Reports 8:6334. “Increased cortisol inhibits the differentiation of keratinocytes and decreases the expression of cytokines needed to maintain the barrier function.” — https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24653-z). We learned that from people, not papers.

Dr. Jeshana Avent-Johnson (Dr. Jeshana Avent-Johnson, Clinical psychologist · selfmade advisor, Secure Attachment Briefing (T7): “The relationship with self is the first relationship, the longest relationship you're going to have is with yourself.”) taught me the first relationship, and the longest one you’ll ever have, is with yourself.
Dr. Byron Young (Dr. Byron Young, MD, Psychiatrist · Chief Medical Advisor, Advisor interview (T2): “Back when you're forming the embryo, the skin and the nervous system kind of come out of the same layer — the ectoderm.”) taught me the skin and the nervous system come out of the same embryonic layer; he co-hosted our Rumination launch from a Black-owned coffee shop in Inglewood.
Robyn Watkins (Robyn Watkins, Formulator · beauty + product development, Formulation session (T1): “We tend to reach for the most aggressive things — too much acid, tearing the barrier down. But it's a healing process we're not honoring.”) taught me we reach for the most aggressive thing and tear the barrier down, when healing was never something to force.

The Junior Advisory Boardthe skeptics, since before bottle one
Bob Bianchinidecades of formulation science, and his own money
The first checksmostly women, mostly people of color
My parentsthe folding table, the boxes, the original bet

Six years of the work, on the record

Four products. Four questions you have to answer.

Secure Attachment: what does loving myself look like in action?
Corrective Experience: what if the old pattern got a new response?
Rumination: what if my body took over from my mind for ten seconds?
Self Disclosure: what do I feel when I touch myself?

Orders ship from my parents’ house. The site you are reading was rebuilt this spring.

I am not going to tell you we are back. That is not a thing you get to announce about yourself. We are making things again, and you can see them.

The bottle was half the idea. The other half, the door it opens, is being built now.

We’re still a work in progress. Proud of it.

The archive

Six years, in frames.

The worksheet · working name, Mental Health Serum

The receipts.

The science on this page traces to real work — a peer-reviewed paper and advisors on the record by name. We hold clinical percentages until they’re independently signed off.

1.Choe SJ et al. (2018). Psychological stress deteriorates skin barrier function by activating the HPA axis in skin. Scientific Reports 8:6334.“Increased cortisol inhibits the differentiation of keratinocytes and decreases the expression of cytokines needed to maintain the barrier function.”link ↗
2.Dr. Jeshana Avent-Johnson, Clinical psychologist · selfmade advisor — Secure Attachment Briefing (T7).“The relationship with self is the first relationship, the longest relationship you're going to have is with yourself.”
3.Robyn Watkins, Formulator · beauty + product development — Formulation session (T1).“We tend to reach for the most aggressive things — too much acid, tearing the barrier down. But it's a healing process we're not honoring.”
4.Dr. Byron Young, MD, Psychiatrist · Chief Medical Advisor — Advisor interview (T2).“Back when you're forming the embryo, the skin and the nervous system kind of come out of the same layer — the ectoderm.”