BTS with Grown Alchemist and Their 360-Degree Approach to Natural Skincare
Main image – Grown Alchemist
Most beauty brands talk about glow from within. Grown Alchemist has been quietly building an entire biological ecosystem around it – from AI diagnostics in store to air-purifying plants and vitamin infusion therapy – long before “holistic skincare” became a marketing buzzword.
When I sit down with the brand’s CEO Anna Teal, she doesn’t start with a hero product or a trending ingredient. She starts with a philosophy.
“The brand was always founded on the philosophy that if you fuel yourself as a person with goodness, then you will ultimately have healthier skin,” she explains. Healthier skin, in this context, is not a vague ideal but something “optimised in terms of how it’s working.” If your skin works well, she says, “it tends to be healthier, glowier skin.”
That idea – that skin is a system, not a surface – sits behind almost everything the brand now does.
What follows is a fascinating look at how this philosophy translates into products, formulations and treatments that push natural skincare far beyond the familiar.
Beyond the bottle: treating skin as a whole environment
For Teal, Grown Alchemist has always been about a 360 degree approach. “The premise of the brand was actually ahead of its time,” she says, because it recognised early that skin health is shaped by more than products alone.
Grown Alchemist CEO Anna Teal. Image – Grown Alchemist
There was “always a discussion around what you fuel your body with, the right kind of nutrition, eradicating pollutants wherever possible,” and acknowledging that depending on where you live, “you’ll be exposed to different types of pollutants and free radical damage.” How well your body functions “will also have an impact on your skin health.”
You see that thinking play out physically in their stores. “If you go into one of our stores, our store has plants in there that naturally purify the air because we want to create clean environmental conditions,” she says. The idea is to move you from “a busy, smog filled city and then into a little bit of a” reset space, because “if you breathe in clean air, you’ll be overall healthier.”
The same philosophy underpins their in-store tech. An AI diagnostic will ask where you live, what your skin type and needs are, then combine that with AI imagery of your skin to generate a prescription. It considers “humidity index, UV index, pollution index for where you’ve geographically said that you live in the world” – all treated as non-negotiable factors in your routine, not background noise.
And Grown Alchemist is equally focused on what happens when the product actually lands on your face. “We believe it’s not just about the products that you put on your skin,” Teal tells me via Zoom. “It’s how you put the products on the skin to trigger the reparation mechanisms in your body.”
That is why their services incorporate techniques like lymphatic drainage, facial massage and cryotherapy. They are designed “so you really de-stress the fascia of your skin,” “encourage blood flow to the top of the skin,” and “encourage the reparation system.” There is even a partnership with REVIV for Grown Alchemist branded vitamin infusion therapy, so you have “an inside replenishment as well as an external replenishment.”
In other words, the brand’s version of “holistic” is literal, not figurative.
Natural – but serious
From a product standpoint, Teal is clear: the brand has always been “grounded in we want to have scientifically advanced natural formulations because we want them to be potent.”
They work within a specific formulation charter- what they will and will not use- and all formulations are at least “94% natural”. The belief is that “if you have something that is naturally derived, it’s easier for your body to absorb it. So better absorbed, better utilised to give you better results.” Her analogy is simple: “if you had a fresh orange versus having processed orange juice,” most people intuitively understand the difference.
Image – Grown Alchemist
But this isn’t a brand stuck in essential oils and vague claims. As cosmetic chemistry has developed, Grown Alchemist has “evolved much more into the biotech space.” Teal describes a shift “from botanicals, essential oils and moving and working with our formulation team to get more and more advanced ingredients.” The current lineup includes “plant EGF factors,” “snow mushroom and adaptogens,” “different weights of hyaluronic acid,” and fermented ingredients, so they can “really push the boundaries in where you can take the natural history” using cosmetic science.
Still, she recognises the historic stigma: “natural isn’t as efficacious or as potent or as good for your skin.” There has been “a legacy less so now I’d hope of natural is great for naturality if that’s your thing, but not great if you want performance and results.”
Her answer to that is unapologetically rigorous. “Particularly in the last two years since I have been here,” she says, they have focused on testing “the end formulation with clinicals” and running user trials at “typically double the industry average.”
“All of our latest products have been tested on a range of between 120 to 150 people across the Fitzpatrick scale and male and female skin with different ethnicities,” she explains. The aim is “a really good holistic view” so that they can “really stand behind our formulations.”
The pairing of clinical data and real user feedback matters to her. A clinical can say “you have 20% wrinkle reduction” – “you’ve got the nice statistic.” But what she also wants is for people to be able to say “I’ve woken up with more youthful looking skin. I can see I look better.” They test for both, because “they give you different things that you can play around with as a brand.”
It’s the kind of rigour you’d expect from a major heritage brand. As Teal notes, “if you take a large-scale brand like a Clinique or an Estée Lauder, they will of course do clinicals and they will do user trials. It’s not as common for a brand of our size to go through the rigour that we go through.”
Why Grown Alchemist refuses to be a fast follow
One of the more interesting parts of our conversation is what Grown Alchemist has chosen not to do.
When she talks about their newly upgraded regenerating range, for example, Teal mentions that the regenerating night cream reformulation “went back to the bench, I think over 20 times, because we really wanted to make sure that we had a product that we knew felt nice to use.”
She wanted the sensorial aspect, visible difference to the consumer, “technically and clinically” proven improvement, and “a really fantastic ingredient story.” That takes time. “We’re not a fast follow brand,” she says. “We’re not the kind of brand that will go, oh, here’s this latest trend for ingredient X. We’re going to launch something as quickly as we can.”
She’s careful not to criticise brands that do move fast, but she is clear that “it’s just a very different business model that we’re following.”
Image – Grown Alchemist
When I point out that consumers are starting to realise this too – that a product launched three minutes after an ingredient trends isn’t automatically better – she offers a balanced view. Fast follow can make sense “if you’re about democratisation and that’s your main angle,” especially for ingredients like exosomes that historically sat in more premium products.
But for Grown Alchemist, the goal is “more complex formulas, which will have exosome plus this, plus this,” with proof that “it works under a pretty stringent and rigorous formulation charter.” That, she says, “will naturally take longer.”
Biotech naturals
When asked for a concrete example of how cosmetic chemistry helps them “take the very best out of nature,” Teal goes straight to the regenerating range.
They use a specially-sourced plant EGF factor. “We can trace back to a farm in Australia that we have sourced,” she says. “We have sourced it specifically so that we know the ethics that go behind that plant. We know it’s been vertically farmed, so it’s also been farmed in a very sustainable way.” There are “plenty of research papers around EGF factors being very good for your skin, particularly in triggering reparation mechanisms.”
They combine that with rambutan. “Rambutan is a fruit that is found in Southeast Asia,” she explains. “There are many, many Southeast Asians that will actually talk, a lot of them are on TikTok actually, that will say, I drink this because it’s really great for my skin.” It also happens to be “a very good bioretinol equivalent,” triggering “the same kind of properties that can help with smoother looking skin.”
She is careful not to frame retinol as the villain. “There’s nothing wrong with retinol,” she says. “I think vitamin A is, we all know, it is up there as a holy grail ingredient. It just wouldn’t pass our formulation charter.” So instead, “we have found, in our view, one of the best naturally derived alternatives that we’ve been able to source in a sustainable way” to incorporate into their formulas.
For Teal, this is the essence of their position. “I don’t think there’s any one extreme that gives you the right and best answer,” she says. “You go too far on the natural route, you will get stability issues. You need some kind of preservative to keep your products stable.”
On the other hand, “on the far right, you’ll end up with a lot of chemicals on your face.”
That isn’t just a lazy criticism though of chemicals though. Teal is prepared to defend some controversial preservatives. “There are ingredients and preservatives like parabens that get a lot of disproportionate kind of bad press when there’s actually a lot of data and more data saying that they are safer, more stable than some of the younger alternatives that are out there.”
“I’m not saying there’s anything that’s bad in either camp,” she says. “But we’re trying to give a best of both approach.”
That “best of both” is backed by structure as well as philosophy. They have a cosmetic scientist in the product development team – “again, this is uncommon for a brand of our size” – so they can in-house the technical capability. That means when they write a brief, they can fold in consumer trends, ingredient trends and formulation constraints in a “very specific way” that delivers robust formulas, not just nice ideas.
The hidden costs of doing things properly
Responsibility for Grown Alchemist is not limited to what is inside the jar. It also shapes how that jar comes to exist.
“We are cruelty-free, we always have been cruelty-free,” Teal explains. The brand is also currently going through Leaping Bunny certification, as well as the B Corp process. They aim for formulas that are “non-skin irritating,” and from an ethics perspective, they “can trace the source,” meeting eco-cert and ISO standards.
The packaging is part of that story too. Their aluminium has “already been recycled once and is recyclable.”
Teal is frank about the operational reality: “It’s a pain in the backside. I’ll be very transparent around costing and around sourcing because anyone that is in the beauty space knows that components have a very, very long lead time that has doubled in the last couple of years. And when you are narrowing who you can buy from, it actually makes managing your operations very tough from a cost and supply chain perspective.”
Those constraints make their products “probably costlier end-to-end to develop because of some of those decisions” around sustainability and traceability.
She gives a simple example: you can ask a manufacturer for triple weight hyaluronic acid in a serum. Or you can say you want triple weight hyaluronic acid and “you need to be able to buy it from partner X, Y, or Z because those three partners we have vetted and they work to the correct standards and ethics.”
In the first scenario, a brand gives “much more artistic licence” to go to a broader ingredient portfolio – “high speed to market, better cost of goods.” In the second, you “have better quality assurance, but you’re restricting how much is available to you and probably therefore then comes at a higher cost.”
For biotech ingredients in particular, they prescribe partners because “we want to make sure, particularly because we do work with biotech ingredients, that we’re safe and secure on the quality and the ethics of those.”
She is also open about the fact that doing things this way has consequences. “Sometimes we also get things wrong as well,” she says. “Sometimes we go out of stock because we can’t keep up with demand. So nobody’s perfect.”
The key, in her view, is direction and honesty. “As long as you are striving to be as strong,” she says, “then you can stand behind the credentials that you’re talking about is the best that anybody can do at any one period of time.”
And the hero products that sum up the brand
When asked for the product that feels most “Grown Alchemist”, Teal doesn’t pick just one.
The first is their Skin Defense Mattifying Primer, which has just had what she calls their “first true international viral moment.” “Our primer has just become organically TikTok and Instagram viral with some content creators,” she says. “I think we’re up at like 180 million views now in the last two or three weeks.”
She describes it as “a three-in-one friend.” It works as a traditional primer but also as a kind of filter for bare-skin days, especially “if you are in a more humid climate” because “it instantly blurs and mattifies.” It “smooths out texture, really mattifies the skin so it gets rid of shine and it feels quite cooling.”
Under makeup, it gives “that smooth base to then help with foundation application so it looks smooth and it helps with makeup grip like a traditional makeup primer.” But crucially, it also contains adaptogens that “really then help protect the skin against free radical damage.” It is not a UV defence, she notes – “we wouldn’t have the texture that we’ve got” – but it is “a super light, silicone-free formula.”
“There are many good primers out there but they use silicone,” she says. “We are silicone-free and it is super light.” For her, it is “a fantastic embodiment of Grown Alchemist because there’s a skin defence property. We’ve formulated it in a way that is non-traditional but giving the same effect. And it has got visually demonstrable results that you can see that are appealing to men and to women.”
She loves that “there’s a different conversation that you can have that makes that product relevant to them” whether they are in a hot climate, want a makeup-free day, or want better grip for foundation.
The second favourite is more personal. “It’s not a biotech product, but it’s just a beautiful product,” she says of the brand’s Skin Renewal Facial Oil. It blends “four different types of natural oil” such as rosehip and macadamia, and she loves it for its adaptability.
“Facial oils sometimes get a bad wrap that they feel too oily and slick on the skin,” she says. “This one is fantastic because you can use it in the day and it gives you, sometimes I actually put a drop in the foundation because it gives you like a bit of a glowier hue.” At night, she uses it before her night cream and does “a bit of a tension release, gua sha kind of” ritual because she gets “quite a lot of jaw tension.”
Again, the appeal is in the flexibility: “very easily absorbed, not too heavy,” and offering “different applications and uses that the customer can get from it.”
She also mentions their hand creams as another quiet success: “non-sticky,” aesthetically satisfying, and functional enough to work for people “that are constantly on the move and can’t have something sticky.”
In each case, what Teal values is the same: well-formulated, thoughtful products that do more than one thing, rooted in a clear philosophy.
The takeaway
Listening to Teal, what emerges is not a brand trying to bolt “science” or “sustainability” onto a marketing story, but one that is structurally built around both from the start.
Grown Alchemist treats your skin as a system living in a specific context: your city’s pollution index, your climate, your fascia tension, your lymphatic flow, your nutrition, your ethics. It uses biotech and cosmetic chemistry as tools to get more from nature, not as a replacement for it. It accepts that testing, sourcing and formulation rigour cost time and flexibility – and does it anyway.
In a market where natural often still reads as gentle-but-ineffective and science often reads as high-tech-but-harsh, Grown Alchemist’s real contribution may be something quieter: proof that you do not have to choose.
As Teal puts it, “we’re trying to give a best of both approach.” And in an industry still learning what “holistic” truly means, that feels like a good place to start.
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