Story & Lesson Highlights with Marisa Maas of Culver City

We recently had the chance to connect with Marisa Maas and have shared our conversation below.

Good morning Marisa, we’re so happy to have you here with us and we’d love to explore your story and how you think about life and legacy and so much more. So let’s start with a question we often ask: Have you ever been glad you didn’t act fast?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, not acting fast ended up being one of the best decisions I’ve made.

I spent nine years as a holistic fitness influencer under the name MissFitAndNerdy, and while I was deeply grateful for that chapter, I eventually felt I had reached my highest potential in that space. I knew I was being called to build something bigger and more enduring, I just didn’t know what yet. Instead of acting fast and forcing a pivot for the sake of momentum, I gave myself permission to slow down. I spent about a year experimenting with ideas, testing concepts, workshopping potential business structures, and following genuine curiosity.

That period of exploration eventually led me to an idea in skincare. What started as a simple idea for a basic skin-barrier repair cream evolved, through deeper research and long conversations with my friend Dr. Caitlyn Kellogg, into something far more exciting: a probiotic-powered, biome-first approach to skin health.

Together, we co-founded SymbiōSkin, a brand that sits at the intersection of my personal skin healing journey, my background as a holistic health coach, and my lifelong love of science (shoutout to my MIT education). Looking back, I’m incredibly glad I didn’t rush the transition. SymbiōSkin isn’t just a business idea — it’s the one that feels most aligned, most impactful, and most like what I was meant to build all along.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Marisa Maas, and I’m the co-founder of SymbiōSkin, a microbiome-first skincare brand built on a simple but often overlooked truth: your skin is a living ecosystem. After years working as a holistic health coach and navigating my own skin challenges, I became deeply interested in one of the least understood systems in the body: the skin microbiome. With a background rooted in science and systems-based health, I began studying how the skin microbiome influences skin resilience, inflammation, barrier function, and long-term skin health.

Just like your gut, your skin has a microbiome that helps protect, repair, and regulate the system when it’s healthy. When there is too bad bacteria (a state known as skin dysbiosis) you get acne, premature aging, dryness, irritation, redness, and sensitivity. But when you have the right balance of good bacteria, you get glowy, radiant, clear, calm, hydrated, smooth, and resilient skin.

Our hero product, the SymbiōSkin Probiotic Serum, is designed to support the skin the same way probiotics support the gut. This topical probiotic skincare formula delivers live, beneficial bacteria directly to the skin, where they interact with the microbes already on the skin, helping shift the skin microbiome toward balance. These beneficial microbes also produce postbiotics (including lactic acid, short-chain fatty acids, and bioactive peptides) which help hydrate the skin, calm visible redness, and support smooth, even texture. The result is skin that functions better because it is biologically supported, rather than aggressively stripped or over-treated.

Unlike much of the “probiotic skincare” currently on the market, which often relies on ferments or isolated postbiotic ingredients, SymbiōSkin uses true topical probiotics with live bacterial cultures. These living skin probiotics are essential for supporting microbial diversity, ecosystem resilience, and long-term skin health, rather than simply mimicking the downstream effects of bacteria without actually restoring the microbiome itself.

While I come from a holistic health background, SymbiōSkin is firmly rooted in science. My co-founder, Dr. Caitlyn Kellogg, is a physician and dermatology resident who leads our scientific rigor, ensuring our microbiome skincare formulations are biologically sound, responsibly developed, and grounded in emerging research. As scientific research into the skin microbiome and probiotic skincare continues to expand, we remain closely engaged with new developments and committed to creating products that are evidence-informed, thoughtfully designed, and future-facing. This is truly biotech meets beauty.

SymbiōSkin is a doctor-founded, biome-first skincare company that works with your skin’s natural ecosystem, not against it. Our mission is to help people break the cycle of biome-disrupting skincare and restore harmony to their skin microbiome, so their skin stays naturally clear, smooth, and radiant. We are here to redefine what skin health looks like by inviting people back into balance, and into symbiosis with their own bodies.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
One of the most formative experiences of my life was going through a severe withdrawal from long-term topical steroid use, which I had originally been prescribed for eczema. What began as a conventional treatment slowly turned into one of the most physically and emotionally challenging years I’ve ever experienced. My skin was basically falling off, I was itching until I bled, I was swollen and barely able to move, and I truly wasn’t sure I would make it through. It forced me to confront a difficult truth: many so-called solutions don’t actually heal, they just suppress symptoms until the body can no longer tolerate them, leaving you further from balance than when you started.

That experience fundamentally changed how I understand how health is treated in the world. I stopped seeing the body as a collection of isolated problems and began seeing it as an interconnected system. One where the skin, immune system, nervous system, and microbiome are constantly in conversation. Healing, I learned, doesn’t come from overpowering the body, but from restoring its capacity to regulate and repair itself. That insight became a cornerstone of SymbiōSkin. That’s why I wanted to build the brand around honoring the skin as a living organ, one that exists in partnership with its microbial environment, and designing products that support that relationship rather than disrupt it. What came from one of the hardest chapters of my life is now the work I’m most proud of: helping people rebuild skin health by rebuilding trust in their own biology.

If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
I would tell my younger self that everything she is enduring with her skin will not be for nothing. That the pain, isolation, and sheer endurance it takes to live in a body that feels like it’s breaking down is quietly shaping something meaningful. During the hardest moments, when her skin is literally flaking away, she will be told that it looks like she’s molting because she’s becoming a butterfly. And she should hold onto that image, even when it feels impossible.

One day, she won’t just have emerged from her cocoon on the other side — she will have turned that experience into a way to help others heal and trust their skin again through SymbiōSkin. What feels like suffering now will become purpose, and what feels isolating will ripple outward, creating a butterfly effect, helping others find their own transformation too.

I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
One of the biggest lies the skincare industry tells itself is that skin needs to be controlled, corrected, or constantly overridden. For decades, skincare has treated the skin as a problem to manage rather than a living biological system to support. This belief has fueled the obsession with 12-step skincare routines built around stripping, sterilizing, over-exfoliating, and “killing bacteria” in the name of clearer skin, despite growing scientific evidence that long-term skin health depends on balance, not eradication.

Another deeply ingrained misconception is that bacteria are inherently bad for the skin. In reality, the skin microbiome plays a critical role in barrier function, immune regulation, and inflammation control. Beneficial microbes help protect the skin from pathogens and environmental stressors. When skincare indiscriminately removes these microbes, it destabilizes the ecosystem. While this approach can temporarily suppress symptoms, it often compromises resilience and contributes to chronic skin sensitivity, irritation, and dysfunction over time.

Finally, the industry often confuses intensity with effectiveness… more actives, stronger treatments, longer routines. But more isn’t better when it comes to biology. Skin health doesn’t thrive under constant pressure; it thrives when its natural regulatory systems are allowed to function. Healthy skin comes from working with the skin’s biology, not overpowering it. The future of skincare lies in respecting the skin as an ecosystem—one that thrives when given the right conditions to self-regulate and repair.

Okay, we’ve made it essentially to the end. One last question before you go. What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
What I understand deeply, through lived experience, is that the body doesn’t need to be forced into health; it needs the right conditions to return to balance. Most people have been taught to see symptoms, especially skin symptoms, as failures or enemies. But the body is constantly communicating. When something is inflamed, reactive, or breaking down, it’s rarely random. It’s signaling imbalance in a larger system.

I also understand how profoundly we’ve lost trust in the body’s intelligence. We’ve been conditioned to expect immediate results, even when those results come at the expense of long-term resilience. True healing isn’t dramatic. It’s often quiet, gradual, and easy to miss at first. But when you stop interrupting the system and start supporting it, something powerful happens: the body remembers how to regulate itself. That insight shapes everything I build through SymbiōSkin: not to overpower the skin, but to help it regain its own capacity to function, repair, and thrive.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.wearesymbioskin.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wearesymbioskin
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/missfitandnerdy/