This Clever Frozen Face Mask Solves My Biggest Problem With Skincare Ice Cubes
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Main image – Cool Mood
I speak to a lot of new beauty brands at Live That Glow, and every so often one comes along with an idea so simple you wonder why no one has ever done it before. Cool Mood – a clever new take on at-home skin cryotherapy – falls firmly into that camp.
The concept combines facial icing and a face mask in one frozen, twist-up stick, kept in the freezer and applied straight to the skin. In other words, you get a cooling hit and skincare goodness in one, without an ice roller followed by a separate mask or homemade skincare ice cubes melting down your hands (more on those later).
Founder Mina Akbari came up with the idea after becoming a mum and realising that many of the little rituals she’d previously relied on to give herself some breathing space simply no longer fitted into her life.
“I realised at some point that I didn’t have any time for myself,” she tells me when we speak. “I was taking care of my baby, going to work, being a wife, and I was just running all the time.”
Mina didn’t want to give those rituals up, though. She just needed to find a way to squeeze them into the time she actually had. The result was Cool Mood – and a philosophy built around taking just 10 minutes out of a busy day for yourself.
So how did a homemade frozen face mask become a beauty brand? I sat down with Mina to find out.
“I still wanted to have that moment for myself”
Although Cool Mood came about after Mina became a mum, the inspiration behind it started earlier.
Mina tells me that during an earlier period when she was struggling with depression, she began looking for small ways to quiet an overactive mind and bring a little more calm into her day. While studying for her master’s in art history, one particularly simple meditation exercise stayed with her.
Image – Cool Mood
“One of the students brought a five-minute meditation into class,” she remembers. “She told us to relax, take four deep breaths and think about three or four things we were grateful for that day.”
“I was overthinking all the time and I wasn’t happy, but for those five minutes I realised I wasn’t overthinking. I felt so good. I remember thinking, ‘What just happened?’”
She kept doing it, while skincare became another form of downtime – from using an ice roller in the morning to sitting with a face mask on for 20 minutes. After having her daughter, Ariana, however, those longer rituals inevitably became harder to fit in.
“I still wanted to do something for myself, but I didn’t have the time I used to have,” she says. “I wanted something compact. I wanted to put everything into 10 or 15 minutes, but still have that moment for myself.” And hence, a skincare brand was born.
The bathroom thought that started Cool Mood
The idea for the product design itself came one morning while Mina was using an ice roller – something she already loved for its cooling effect – and thinking about the face mask that would normally come next.
“I remember being in the bathroom and thinking, ‘I wish this ice roller that I’m rubbing on my face had the ingredients in it, so I didn’t have to put another mask on my face and sit on the couch for another 20 minutes.’”
So she started experimenting at home, freezing mixtures containing ingredients like cucumber and rice water into ice cubes and using those on her skin instead. There was just one fairly obvious problem. “It was so messy,” she laughs. “It was dripping all over my clothes.”
Cooling skincare itself is nothing new, of course. Even back in the ’90s, plenty of us were putting those blue gel eye masks from The Body Shop in the fridge before wearing them, while more recently I’ve tried skincare ice cubes from some pretty big beauty brands. And I love the idea of all of them.
The problem is that, a bit like those gel masks, what sounds wonderfully refreshing in theory isn’t always terribly practical once you’re actually using it. Melting skincare ice cubes are, well, melting ice cubes.
Which is why I think Mina’s solution is rather genius. Instead of holding a slippery cube while it melts over your hands, she put the frozen formula into a twist-up stick, eventually creating Cool Mood: part face mask, part facial icing and, as the brand rather nicely puts it, “ice cream for your face.” It’s such an obvious solution once you’ve seen it, but I’ve never come across cooling skincare in quite this format before.
The sticks are kept in the freezer for at least four hours before use, then twisted up and glided directly over the face and neck. Mina designed the whole thing around her 10-minute ritual – taking a few deep breaths, thinking about the things she’s grateful for and then applying the frozen mask – although you’re equally free, of course, to skip the mindfulness and just enjoy putting something very cold on your face.
And unlike a traditional single-use mask, each $25 Cool Mood stick is designed to be refrozen and used up to five times.
“The important thing for me was that it was ready to use,” Mina says. “You take it out of the freezer, rub it over your face and neck, and at the same time you get the cooling sensation and the skincare ingredients. You don’t need to prepare anything or mix anything.”
Three familiar ingredients, served frozen
For Cool Mood’s first three masks, Mina deliberately chose ingredients that wouldn’t need much introduction: cucumber, rose and rosehip.
“I wanted to start with ingredients that people already know and are familiar with,” she explains. Cucumber in particular felt like a natural fit for a product built around cooling – not least because, as Mina points out, frozen cucumber itself has become something of a DIY skincare trend on social media.
Image – Cool Mood
Rose, meanwhile, has a more personal connection. Mina is originally from Iran, where she tells me rose water has long been a familiar part of both the culture and traditional beauty rituals.
“In my culture, rose water is so common,” she says. “We put it on the face, and even just spraying rose water on your skin is something I’ve known for a long time.”
The third is rosehip, which Mina describes as the richer option of the collection, while aloe also features across the formulas. Perhaps slightly unexpectedly given the ingredients – particularly rose – all three are currently fragrance-free, something I personally see as a plus when so many of us would rather keep unnecessary fragrance out of our skincare.
For now, Mina has kept the range deliberately small. But cucumber, rose and rosehip were never intended to be the end of it.
What comes next
Cool Mood may only just be getting started, but Mina already has plenty of ideas about where she wants to take it. For now, she’s building the brand alongside a full-time job, while getting to grips with everything from digital advertising to influencer marketing along the way.
“I take one step and I’m so happy about it, and then the next step is a new challenge I need to learn,” she tells me. “Everything is challenging, but I’m learning.”
Next on the list is growing Cool Mood’s audience and, longer term, scaling production as the brand grows. There are plenty more product ideas too. Watermelon, rice, and avocado are all possibilities for future launches, while some could eventually make use of the ingredients’ natural scents. And Mina doesn’t necessarily plan to stop at frozen skincare.
“My background is art and I have a lot of new ideas,” she says. “I’ve always had ideas, I just didn’t know how to bring them into the world.”
For the moment, though, she’s concentrating on the idea that started all of this: giving other busy women the same little pause she originally created for herself.
“I made this for myself and it helped me bring this pause into everyday life,” she says. “I thought maybe I can share it with other women like me who are busy and overwhelmed. Maybe they need this little moment in their life to connect with themselves again and bring a little bit of joy into their day.”
The takeaway
Cool Mood is still a young brand, but the idea behind it is a clever one: take two familiar beauty rituals and make them considerably easier to fit into real life. Because skincare ice cubes have always been a great idea somewhat undermined by the inconvenient fact that ice melts – and a twist-up stick neatly solves that.
One to watch, I think.
