Secret Skin: The Region’s Newly Launched Destination For Conscious Beauty
Conscious beauty describes the way people choose their beauty products, according to their personal values. Generally, this means choosing organic products that contain fewer chemicals and toxins, and those that are eco-friendly, and cruelty-free, while making sure that these brands are giving back to their communities.
Enter Secret Skin, a new platform for clean beauty that has just launched in the UAE by a benevolent founder, Anisha Oberoi. A cancer survivor herself, she shares her challenging journey and finding her passionate calling through her business. Gazetta learns more about this zealously intriguing entrepreneur and her ethical practices.
1) Tell us a little bit about yourself, Anisha.
There’s so many different facets about me, to start with, I’m the CEO and founder of Secret Skin, a discoverability platform that connects conscious beauty brands from around the world to mindful customers who want to consume consciously. So in effect on the outside, it’s a marketplace for clean beauty brands, one where there are no toxins present in the ingredients. It has sustainability across the flywheel of shipping sourcing and packaging. These are small businesses that engage with little minorities and communities to wild harvest the ingredients that go into the product. So they’re very clear on the kind of identity and conscious credibility that they want to share. What Secret Skin does is it goes and finds these founders that have built these brands from passion and purpose and offer the customer an opportunity to give back to the community, making them possible to enter this region. So we are a one stop shop to do all your imports, licenses, and registrations, and all we want is for you to come into the UAE so that we can give the customers this experience while teaching them more about sustainability practices to switch from conventional to clean. Raising that awareness is the mission. We want to use beauty to discuss social change as a part of a larger narrative that focus more on women’s health in this region so they can become a lot more empowered to manage their own health and to take charge of it. So that’s Secret Skin. Before this, I was with Amazon, I launched Amazon fashion in India, I was a part of the team that launched it in Australia. I moved here a year and a half ago and I really struggled to find the right role that would have the same scope, the same scale, the same thrill and the challenges, but I couldn’t. It’s as if the universe was telling me that I cannot go back to my old life because I was meant to do something new. I just woke up one day in February, the plan has been building in my head for a couple of months, registered the company on the 26th of February and launched it on the eighth of October.
2) What’s the story behind secret skin. How did it just come about?
I get asked this question a lot, that why Secret Skin? My Amazon training has taught me that the word “skin” is a very highly searched keyword when you’re going into a beauty business. It’s the largest organ, but important to note that the “Secret Skin” is a very pure, deep and strongest part of us, that we hide. We want to help build a community that burnishes themselves and bring their real selves out regardless of age, gender, color, race and through self ritual, self acceptance, self love and giving back to the community. It’s more than a vegan lifestyle. It’s like a revolution of mindfulness.
So the brands that we carry have already gone really far in thinking about what kind of packaging they should have. It can be violet glass, if it’s plastic, then its biodegradable plastic, from the people that they use to everything has sustainability practices implemented across. We took a leaf out of that book and said that if we are the true representations, like a curated assortment of all of these beauty brands, and all the values that they embody, which feed into our own tenets, then everything that we must do going forward also should reflect that. Our packaging is equal to sustainable, it’s 100% recyclable material. When you receive the box, it has a line made in foil stamping, which is also sustainable for the love of the planet. You receive a postcard where it tells you that with one single click, you’ve provided micro economies to the communities that wild harvest ingredients that go into your tribe, or you’ve reduced the carbon footprint through our free shipping. The box has dried hibiscus flowers and straw, which we have sourced in bulk, and nothing is scented because we didn’t want to have any fragrance or chemicals in our products. We’ve also partnered with the loop, it’s a pro incentivization recycling app which means that if you have your plastic bottles of drinking water, you can give it back and you can earn equal reward points to come back to Secret Skin and shop because we want to acknowledge your pro environment behavior.
3) What is sustainability and what does it mean to you?
Sustainability is a lifestyle, and I try to implement it in as many ways as possible through my everyday routine. So from tip to toe, everything that I apply whether it’s the shampoo or the face cleanser or all my personal care and beauty products down to the deodorant, everything is clean pretty much. During COVID, when I would order food,I’ve been trying to support these restaurants by keeping the little glass bottles and condiments aside so that the next time they bring me something, I can give them back. I also love flowers in the house and whenever they send a vase, I will always return them so they can recycle it. Finally, we only use glass bottles to drink.
4) You are a cancer survivor. How has your outlook, your experiences, your life, and body changed posts your diagnosis.
I could capture the entire experience all over again, it’s a feeling. I truly believe that every person has to go through something that absolutely destroys them to figure out who they really are. When you’re younger, you’re addicted to the superficial, you feel that you’re invincible, and I was in my 20s when I was misdiagnosed twice because in India, gynecologists are not trained to pick up on the same signs as an oncologist would. I was obsessive about this business school that I really wanted to go to because it was an Ivy League school, INSEAD. I had gotten accepted and I was working with Zegna, an Italian luxury menswear brand which is where I started my fashion journey. I was all set to go to campus, and then realized a couple of weeks before I was going to take my flight that I had cancer. By then, it had already gone into my lymph nodes. I approached it like a project because I think that as a person, I’m very system driven and process oriented. I will look at something and have a very data backed approach to what should we do to mitigate this risk now, so let me also treat myself that way. I didn’t have a brother, a father, or a boyfriend, it was just my mom and me. I was devastated. I mean, I think I was also very resilient, I went through this entire process of identifying my illness with a couple of people that were close to me and whom I looked up to, researching which doctor I should go to and what kind of surgery I should have. I remember that they were asking me to sign all of these consent forms the night before because it was10 years ago in India, it wasn’t that advanced that you could look at these digitally enhanced reports to show you that if we remove the tumor from this angle, then how would the body recover? We went through the motions of it. I also recall going in for my surgery, face full makeup at 7:30 in the morning being wheeled in, and I told the doctor before he put the anesthesia on my mouth “I dolled up for you, you better keep the pretty!”
I woke up and I was a very athletic girl. I didn’t expect that because they had sliced my back and removed everything from my armpit to scoop out the nerve endings in order to bring the portion of skin to supplement the loss of skin because of the tumor. I was not able to open my arm out for many months and it took very painful physiotherapy to open it out to have full movement. I had tubes stuck to my body, and the doctor comes in and says, “Well, we’ve done a pathology of the tumor and it’s basically hormone driven. I was not going to be able to have kids because they were going to give me hormonal medication to change the pattern so that I’m not at risk. Everything that I had believed about myself when I was younger, at 26 I’m going to get married, I’m going have three kids, I’ll have a golden retriever, and I want the picket fences, none of that happened. Every day was a challenge. There would be days when I’d be really buoyant and inspiring to myself, and then there were days when it was overwhelming, I would not want to see anyone. My hair started to fall, and out of rebellion, I shaved my head, I was told to take it easy, but after my second chemo, I put on a gown, went to a wedding, after permission from my doctor, and danced to 7:00 in the morning, I think that I was always trying to push the envelope. Because that’s what kept me alive. My stubbornness to stay alive kept me alive. I think during your transformation, you feel like everything is falling apart. But in reality, everything’s coming together for you to meet your higher self. So you’ve been pushed, and to move out of your comfort zone so that you can experience your greatness and you can welcome change.
5) How were you able to connect a healthy lifestyle and a positive mind after this whole experience. Is it a daily practice for you now?
It’s like second nature. I think for me, it’s more holistic. I try my best to have the right nutrition and to get some exercise when I can. I need a lot more discipline now that I’m working all the time.
6) Could you share some of your daily mantras that you live by?
One thing that I do a lot is this 20 minute guided grounding meditation that one of my friends who is a healer sent me, it’s a positive visualization. There are times when I wake up nervous, and it really helps me feel more centered. Other than that, I like to sit in the light and to be out is important for me. My giant escape to the beach every once in a while because being in nature and buu the sea calms me.
7) Anything you’d like to leave our wonderful survivors out there with?
Learn to maintain your strength. I think that women need to know that our word is our law in our universe. You have to stand in your ring, even if you’re the only person in that corner. To be a lot more vocal about what you want, and what you deserve. Have the courage to ask. You need to have the responsibility to yourself to affect the change before you can go out and affect the world, you really have to be the change that you want to see. Women need to take care of themselves, they need to take care of their health. Don’t miss your pap smears. Learn how to give yourselves examinations, and it’s important to teach the next generation because girls and boys need to know how to have empathy for other people when they’re sick.
8) What’s next for you with Secret Skin?
Well, I want to continue to work very hard on providing the right kind of online experience for the UAE to discover beautiful products, and to be encouraged to switch from conventional to clean. We’re going to partner with a a female technology startup to talk about the importance of holistic wellness and women’s health in the larger context. We’re going to be adding on more new brands and giving a lot more for an e-commerce platform, we’re also going to be rolling out an app and getting into private label. I want to build refillables so that there’s less waste, hoping to use the R&D facilities that are local, because we are registered locally, the Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park is where we’re Incorporated. I will focus on developing a clear approach on how to give the right kind of experience to our customers by building a community that thinks about purpose, people and the planet. It only comes when you make that one small step. As a digital business, we’re a tech enabled enterprise, so we’re not just a beauty platform, we’re a beauty tech, which means that in the absence of the ability of being able to touch beauty products, I want to have encounters using AI and facial recognition to be able to give the customers an opportunity to buy the product on the basis of their skin type and their skin concerns. All of this is already happening in different parts of the world, and I want to bring it here.
