Emma Lewisham is not particularly interested in beauty’s next big ingredient. This is notable because beauty, as an industry, is very interested in beauty’s next big ingredient.
We have become accustomed to skincare arriving in cycles of obsession: an active emerges from relative obscurity, acquires a devoted following, migrates onto ingredient lists and into bathroom cabinets, before the collective gaze inevitably shifts elsewhere. Retinol. Niacinamide. Peptides. Exosomes. The language changes; the promise of discovery remains. Lewisham, however, is more interested in the thing beneath all of it: the skin.
“The skin is far too intelligent and interconnected to be reduced to a single hero ingredient,” she says.
It’s an idea that gets to the heart of the New Zealand skincare brand she founded seven years ago: a skin-first philosophy rather than products created around a single on-trend ingredient. Emma Lewisham has always existed slightly against beauty’s prevailing currents. Its earliest provocations were environmental: refillable packaging designed as a system rather than an afterthought; natural formulations expected to withstand the same clinical scrutiny as their conventional counterparts.
Years of confidence in this thinking has been accompanied by years of proof. Years of proving have also meant that some of the people most qualified to interrogate it have begun to take notice. Dr Peter Agre, the American physician and molecular biologist awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of aquaporin water channels, has publicly recognised the scientific thinking behind Emma Lewisham on merit alone. It is the first skincare brand with which he has chosen to engage in this way.
“The skin is far too intelligent and interconnected to be reduced to a single hero ingredient."
For Lewisham, who arrived in beauty from outside the industry, the significance is difficult to overstate.
“Coming into beauty from outside the industry, there have been many moments where we have questioned whether the way we were approaching things was right precisely because it wasn’t how the industry had traditionally done them,” she says. “You spend a lot of time asking yourself, ‘Are we seeing something that others aren’t, or are we simply getting it wrong?’”
“That is why Dr Agre’s recognition means so much to me. It isn’t an endorsement of our products – it is a recognition of how we think and how we work, and that distinction matters to me.”
It is a distinction worth lingering on. Beauty has become extraordinarily good at looking scientific. Our shelves are populated by apothecary bottles, percentages and increasingly sophisticated claims; our vocabularies have expanded accordingly. We speak casually about cellular turnover and skin barriers in ways that would once have been confined to dermatologists’ rooms. So how do we really know what is genuinely scientific?
“There’s so much noise around scientific claims in this industry, it’s hard to know what actually has rigour behind it. That’s why we chose to test our formulas at the highest level of independent scrutiny - with a Nobel Prize winner whose integrity meant the results could not be influenced.” Their skin first philosophy has pushed the brand away from the tidy seduction of a hero ingredient. Its formulations contain up to 25 evidence-based, meticulously selected ingredients, each earning their place in a formulation designed to coordinate the skin’s biological response. The skin, in this view, is less a canvas onto which efficacy is applied than a living system to be understood.
Agre’s own life’s work makes the meeting of minds particularly interesting. His discovery of aquaporins – channels regulating how water moves in and out of our cells – revealed something elemental about human biology. Not a new ingredient, but a new understanding of something the body was already doing.
There is a pleasing symmetry here with the question preoccupying Lewisham: what if skincare became less concerned with ingredients and more interested in how the skin works?
“We don’t treat the skin as the recipient of efficacy, we treat the skin as the source of it.”
“What his work reaffirmed for us was something we had already come to understand through our own work in formulation: skin is not governed by one pathway, one trigger or one ingredient, but by a complex, interconnected network of processes operating simultaneously.
“We want to create products that don’t just deliver an immediate result, but work with the skin’s own biology in increasingly intelligent ways. I’m less interested in what a product can do while it’s sitting on your skin and more interested in what your skin can do because of it.”
It is an appealing thought. After decades spent acquiring evermoreelaborate routines, perhaps the next luxury is not asking our skin to accommodate more but enabling it to perform better.
Lewisham has made a similar argument about sustainability from the beginning. When the brand launched in 2019, she was told consumers would not refill their skincare. Emma Lewisham built its packaging to be refilled indefinitely anyway and is now the most refilled skincare brand at MECCA. Seven years on, the industry has caught up. Refill pouches and pods now populate beauty counters at almost every price point. Lewisham welcomes the shift, albeit with a caveat.
Her approach has also earned the endorsement of the late Dr Jane Goodall for the brand’s environmental leadership – a striking recognition for a company still relatively young.
“Where I think the industry still has work to do is in understanding that sustainability is a design decision, not a communications exercise,” Lewisham says. “It cannot be something you add at the end of the process.”
These ideas were born in New Zealand, but their reach is increasingly international. Emma Lewisham now appears in the beauty halls of Le Bon Marché in Paris, Harrods in London, at Credo and Bluemercury in the United States, Skins in Europe and Niche Beauty in Germany. It has become one of MECCA’s top-performing skincare brands across Australia and New Zealand and sits among the top five luxury skincare brands at Space NK in the UK.
There is something deeply satisfying about a brand born at considerable geographic distance from beauty’s traditional capitals finding itself on some of their most coveted shelves. Lewisham, however, seems less surprised by the international appetite than reassured by it.
“I really do believe we have the most intelligent, highest quality products in the world, and what these markets have shown me is that when that is true, it transcends markets,” she says.
The cultural validations have followed: a product endorsement by Oprah; Anne Hathaway choosing the brand’s pregnancy safe products. But Lewisham’s response to expansion is not to make the brand louder. Instead, she appears intent on making it more itself.
“Where I think the industry still has work to do is in understanding that sustainability is a design decision, not a communications exercise. It cannot be something you add at the end of the process.”
This is where M/M (Paris) enters the story.
The influential Parisian studio, founded by Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, is currently working with Lewisham on a new brand identity to be unveiled in mid-2027. Their fingerprints can be found across some of fashion and beauty’s most distinctive visual worlds, including Loewe, Dior and Byredo. Lewisham says they were the only studio she wanted.
What appealed to her was M/M’s ability to understand that evolution doesn’t require erasure. For Loewe, the studio famously looked into the House’s own history, redrawing a mark from its archive rather than manufacturing an entirely new identity.
“That is exactly the kind of evolution I wanted for Emma Lewisham,” she says. “Something that makes sense and truly reflects who we are, rather than manufacturing a brand or reaching for what might simply look good.”
M/M’s reading of Emma Lewisham was similarly archaeological. There was, they suggested, no brand mythology waiting to be invented. The substance already existed.
“They saw the substance of the product rather than the need to create a marketing story to sell it. We have a story but that has never been the selling point – the efficacy and quality has,” Lewisham says. For a beauty industry currently enamoured with world-building, that restraint feels almost provocative. And yet Lewisham is not rejecting beauty’s capacity for fantasy or pleasure. The tactile, emotional and aesthetic dimensions of a product matter precisely because the machinery beneath them can be so complicated.
“That is what I think luxury should do. It should make something highly complex feel effortless. There can be an enormous amount of thought, research and technology behind a product, while the experience of using it remains intuitive, beautiful and pleasurable.”
“That is what I think luxury should do,” she explains. “It should make something highly complex feel effortless. There can be an enormous amount of thought, research and technology behind a product, while the experience of using it remains intuitive, beautiful and pleasurable.”
Perhaps that is the thread connecting Emma Lewisham’s seemingly disparate ambitions: the refill, the laboratory, the beauty counter, the new M/M identity. The hard work should happen somewhere beneath the surface. What reaches the customer should feel considered, desirable and, ultimately, easy.
“If the first era was about proving that another way was possible, I think this next era is about proving just how far that way can go.”
For Lewisham, that next frontier leads back to the place she began: the skin itself. “What if the greatest untapped potential in skincare is the skin itself. That has been our guiding principle from the start and there is still so much left to uncover.”
Emma Lewisham is available exclusively at MECCA in Australia, and at select stockists globally.
