The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
For Rationale founder Richard Parker, scientific skincare has never just been a means to an end- it’s his greatest passion.
A competitive swimmer as a teenager, a 14 year-old, sun-damaged Richard visited a dermatologist. That visit became the catalyst for a lifelong obsession with human skin. “It was a fascination,” Richard tells me. “I’d never seen scientific treatments like this before.”
Despite his early fascination with science, it was music that drew Richard’s attention throughout his adolescence. “I knew that medicine wasn’t my path because I was also an artistic kid,” he says. “I knew that my interests lay in the artistic field- at least in the early part of my life. As I got older, I realised the two things could coexist. Medicine wasn’t to be my path, but I definitely felt and affinity for formulation science from my early 20s.”
Following his studies in music at university, it was at age 25 that Richard, a music teacher at the time, set out to educate himself on the science of skincare. “I was absolutely determined to find a way to improve my skin.
“At that time, which was around 1985, there was a lot of interest in a drug called Retin-A, or Retinoic Acid,” Richard tells me of one of his earliest skincare trials. “Retin-A originally started its life as an acne medication. It’s a very specific Vitamin A molecule that has a very close affinity for human skin.” It seemed to be the miracle skin-salve Richard had been seeking, given that it had been touted as a cure for both of his major skin concerns- acne and sun damage. “I thought ‘I’ve got both of those, so let’s give it a whirl.'”
After purchasing a tube over the counter at a Sydney pharmacy, Richard found that while the product targeted his concerns, it was highly irritating to the skin- this is where his research started.
“My first interest was in things called Alpha Hydroxy Acids. There was just some research starting to be done in the United States showing that these products had a similar effect to Retin-A, but they were natural. That’s where I started- looking at Lactic Acid and Salicylic Acid, and putting together some very simple formulas.”
By age 30, Richard realised that his interest in formulation science went beyond just a hobby. “Sometimes you have passing interests in life and they might grab your attention but then they go,” he tells me. “You think ‘That was fun for a while, but I don’t think I could do that for a living.’ I read recently the question ‘What could you do all day, every day, even if you didn’t get paid for it?’ For me, that was definitely researching and formulating skincare products.” It was this realisation that took Richard back to university to study formulation science and eventually launch Rationale in 1992.
“The very first product I made was in our kitchen,” says Richard. “It was a basic moisturiser and while it wasn’t an earth shattering formula and nothing like what we do today, it was the thrill of seeing it work after hundreds of flops. It was exhilarating.”
Having a passion and the ability to formulate products was one component of the business, but marketing, branding, distributing and even hiring were sectors that were foreign to Richard in the brand’s infancy, “My husband Greg and I decided to get on the learning curve together,” he says of the challenge. “We wore the marketing hat, the production hat, the sales hat, the distribution hat, the education hat. Between the two of us we covered every role, but it was the best training because we learnt from the ground floor what had to happen to make this venture successful.
“The trick is to find people who are better at [their roles] than you are. Every single person at Rationale is 100 times better at what they do than either Greg or I were in the beginning.”
Within a year of launching, Richard had formulated the world’s very first AHA/BHA serum- an accomplishment that, to this very day, remains a huge benchmark for scientific skincare. “It was a groundbreaking product,” Richard explains. “The difficulty was having Alpha Hydroxy Acids, which love water, and Beta Hydroxy Acids, which love oil. Trying to get them into the same formula, which had to be oil free because we were making it for people with oily skin, was very challenging. There were many, many thousands of failures.”
The process of formulating a new product hasn’t changed a great deal since that early development. “The starting point for us is always human skin itself. Rather than asking ‘What’s the latest trend?’ we look at human skin.” Each product takes hundreds, if not thousands, of iterations before it’s ready to launch. “It’s not just the product’s efficacy [that’s important]- it’s its elegance.
“The really hard part is adding active ingredients- they become the differentiator between a really effective skincare product and a very poor quality one. I knew that I wanted to make the best products available, and I knew that that was going to be an expensive proposition.”
Given that 80% of facial ageing is caused by the sun, Richard cites one of his proudest accomplishments as his work within the realm of sun protection. “There’s been a recent study published in Australia showing that all of our years of telling people to use sunscreen every day has actually paid off- we are reducing skin cancer and we are seeing a reduction in skin diseases caused by the sun. I think being at the forefront, creating things like our Superfluid Sunscreens has been the highlight of my career.
Pioneering Isotropic, or “skin identical,” ingredients has been another proud accomplishment of Richard’s. “Isotropic means using as many of the same ingredients found naturally in human skin to increase penetration of the actives and deliver them where they need to go, but also to prevent irritation.
“When I started working in this field, it was believed that the skin was an impenetrable barrier,” Richard explains. “The idea of feeding the skin or nourishing the skin was laughed at my scientists and medical doctors. We now know that the exact opposite is true- the skin is a highly effective barrier, but it’s also selective. It likes things that it knows well, like anyone else. If we use artificial or synthetic ingredients that the skin doesn’t recognise, then the skin will reject them. The closer we can bring the formulation to being made of the same lipids, proteins, vitamins, minerals and molecules [as the skin], the more the skin is at skin is at peace and the more comfortable the skin is with allowing those products to penetrate the barrier and do their job.”
At the core of Rationale is the Essential Six, a concept Richard explains to me as the “six food groups that the skin needs.” Rationale’s ethos isn’t about quick fixes or overnight miracles. Instead, the company favours the idea of “skin fitness.” In the same way that we wouldn’t expect to see changes in our body immediately after altering our fitness habits, we can’t expect the health of our skin to improve overnight- particularly not if we wish to see results that last.
To determine which of the Essential Six are right for a consumer, Rationale staff invite consumers into their clinics to assess the health of the skin and write up a skin prescription. While Rationale was initially sold through other salons and doctors (Richard tells me that over 100 dermatologists and plastic surgeons in Australia alone stock and recommend Rationale products), the Rationale clinics have become something of a “home” for the brand.
“We need customers to be able to experience the brand in its purest form, and that’s where our flagship clinics came in,” says Richard. “From every touch point, the customer is treated with the time, the knowledge and the expertise that they deserve.”
Something unique to the clinics is one of Rationale’s more recent global-first developments- skin DNA testing. “[Skin] is genetically determined, and we can’t change that,” explains Richard, “but on top of that, the emerging science of Epigentics completely turns that on its head. It appears that yes, we are born with this genetic code for our skin, but it is highly influenceable. You could be born, like I was, with the gene for skin cancer, but your behaviours determine whether that gene is expressed or not. If you do the right thing skincare wise, even though you’ve inherited the genetic tendency to skin cancer, you may not develop it. It’s exactly like flicking a switch. Whether that switch is activated or not is very much in our hands, which I find very encouraging because it means that we have control over our skin health and destiny.”
To listen to the full interview with Richard, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify.
