For years, Kenny, one of our founders, mostly used clean, natural and organic skincare because he thought that was the better choice. Meanwhile, he was dealing with seborrheic dermatitis, Malassezia folliculitis, acne, flakes and redness, and his skin just kept getting worse. At some point, the whole clean-beauty thing stopped adding up.

The more he looked into it, the clearer it got: ingredients aren’t clean or dirty. Natural isn’t automatically better, synthetic isn’t automatically worse, and the words on the front tell you very little about the formula inside.

Malassezia became part of that rabbit hole too. We leave out long-chain fatty acids and esters Malassezia can use, while keeping Barrier Milk simple enough to make sense for pretty much any skin.

That thinking became Kirā. No clean-beauty rules. No ingredient fearmongering. Just skincare that makes sense.