September 10, 2019

Meet Victoria and Gloria Lu of Chemist Confessions

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Victoria and Gloria Lu.

Victoria and Gloria, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Gloria and I both used to work as skincare formulators/chemists for a big beauty conglomerate. We happened to be cubicle mates and quickly realized we shared the same awful humor. Both of us also had similar frustrations with the skincare industry. It was overly saturated and confusing, making it really difficult (even for us!) to shop for skincare, so we started an instablog to share the chemist’s perspective on skincare since we work with all the ingredients and turn them into a skincare formula. On our blog, we’re known for decoding product ingredient lists, to help people familiarize with common ingredients in skincare. The goal for the blog is to keep skincare science fun and ultimately help make it easier to shop for skincare that fits your skin and all its quirks. Surprisingly, the instablog has done really well and we decided to take the leap and make a few product solutions. We still try to maintain the same level of transparency and education by sharing percentages of all our skincare actives we put into each of our products. It’s only been a little over a year but it’s been a crazy but awesome journey so far!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Haha it definitely hasn’t been a smooth journey, but we’ve definitely been lucky in that none of the bumps in the road have been that problematic. Even as formulators, product development always has it’s surprises. We’ve had to scrap our original packaging designs because our formula didn’t like the type of plastic, change product names at the last minute, and even had unpredictable formula instability. With any startup there are always unexpected challenges and obstacles. What’s really helped getting through them is actually having a cofounder to lean on and go through these experiences together (sounds cheesy, i know…). Also having a sense of humor.

Chemist Confessions – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Chemist Confessions is a quirky, chemist owned, chemist-run skincare company. On the content side, we’re all about making skincare science fun and approachable. As a brand, we’re all about research-backed ingredients and quality skincare formulas and less marketing fluff.

I’m the cofounder of Chemist Confessions. As a company, I’m most proud of our commitment to transparency and sharing the percentages of all our skincare actives in each product. We believe that the only way we can change the industry is to lead by example and have an honest conversation about the ingredients in all of these skincare formulas.

What sets us apart is that we’re not about trends or fancy marketing stories, we’re all about skincare ingredients. As chemists, we understand which ingredients both natural and synthetic not only are safe but can really provide true long term benefits for skin.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
My proudest moment was when I held the first product we made because that’s really when the company felt real. I couldn’t help but gush over aquafix and kept thinking “That’s ours! We made this!”

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