❄️ Cryo-Powered Beauty Start-Up to Scale-Up with Seoulista Beauty Founder Una McGurk
We explore the beauty and innovation behind Seoulista Beauty, from compression to cryo, with all things natural in between.
Hello Tech Powered Luxury listener, and now reader!
🎙️ This week, we are thrilled to bring you an exclusive interview with Una McGurk, the entrepreneur who is revolutionizing at-home beauty treatments.
🌟 Are you new here? Welcome to our amazing community - keep reading to discover everything about Tech Powered Luxury, our Community Rewards and how this newsletter came to life.
✨ I’m Beatriz Barros and I’m very excited to have you reading us today!
👀 TL;DR
Cryo beauty is making waves in skincare, leveraging cold therapy to boost circulation and collagen production for firmer, more radiant skin. Seoulista Beauty leads with innovations like the Cryo Cool® Skin Tool, combining simplicity with effectiveness.
Seoulista's hero products use medical-grade materials to deliver fast, concentrated skincare benefits, proving that natural, sustainable beauty can be powerful and efficient.
Busy schedules and limited skincare knowledge drive the demand for easy, on-the-go beauty routines that deliver high efficacy with minimal effort, making advanced skincare accessible to all.
💎 Exclusive Question 💎
Who has been your most unexpected mentor, and what did they teach you?
“Definitely my father, Gerard McGurk a man without any formal education who left school at 15. He was raised on a farm and the youngest of 9 children, he left school at 15 and trained as a mechanic, but in a few short years owned the business he worked in with over 40 staff. He taught me from an early age to be independent in my thoughts, to have my own ideas and not to be too influenced by others directing my path. This has really stood to me, as fear of failing and criticism from others can hold back so many people. He loved his work owning multiple businesses and had a 'grit' and a self belief to drive them on, sometimes during very difficult times. When I decided to leave my Marketing Director position, a job others could only dream of, he never questioned my intent and simply asked me if he could help me set up the wellness business I wanted to open. He introduced me to key functions I would need in finance and practically helped me hire the team to fit out the building.
He was my biggest cheerleader, and was open to new ideas and looking forward to what the future would hold. I owe him my ambition, grit and determination to drive on in business, when others may give up, but to be kind & modest in how you conduct yourself.”
❄️ On Cryo Beauty
As a Brazilian living in Europe and not knowing how to dress for the winter, I often tell myself that cold is psychological. Well, apparently it’s also healing. Cryo beauty has taken the industry by storm, and it's easy to see why. Its popularity began with cryotherapy, a treatment initially used in Japan in 1978 by Dr. Toshima Yamaguchi to alleviate rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. And even long before that, there is evidence that cold treatments have been used ever since the ancient Egyptians, with attempts of popularizing it throughout history.
Unfortunately it took some time to develop the technology that could be safe and scalable enough for mass use, and even more so until it trickled down into beauty salons and eventually into at-home beauty treatments.
In recent years, cryotherapy has found its niche in the beauty industry. From cryo facials to tools, the application of extreme cold in skincare aims to rejuvenate, tighten, and refresh the skin by boosting circulation and reducing inflammation. The best part is that the cold only serves to stimulate the body’s natural healing processes.
“By dropping the temperature of the face, when you put this on, as it's really cold, you're basically bringing fresh oxygenated blood to the surface of the skin, and the skin naturally looks better.”
The magic of cryotherapy lies in its ability to enhance blood circulation and promote collagen production. When exposed to sub-zero temperatures, the blood vessels constrict and then dilate, bringing nutrient-rich blood to the skin's surface. This process helps to reduce the appearance of wrinkles, tighten pores, and leave you with a radiant complexion.
One of their first hero products was a sheet mask that had the mission of giving an instant facial, created with biodegradable medical materials:
“The material that we use will drop the temperature of the face by 10 degrees and cause a compression. So when we inject this material with our serum or solution, that is absorbed into the material and then transferred 5 times faster than any topical application. So, basically, we're creating a vacuum in the skin.
I'd seen it in the clinic world for years: I knew that compression delivers a very fast result. I know that cooling the skin brings fresh oxygenated blood to the surface of the skin. So you're allowing nature to do a lot of the work, and then you can add corrective serums and potions to help improve the outer surface of the skin.
It's an attempt to deliver a concentrated, multitasking product into the skin very quickly in one session of 20 minutes.”
Their latest innovation? Seoulista Cryo Cool® Skin Tool. This aluminum-based tool doesn’t require refrigeration or a USB cable, making it incredibly portable and user-friendly. Unless you are religious about your self care routine, or have a minibar in your room, I’m pretty sure you understand the struggle of remembering (and gathering the strength) to get your tools from the fridge.
“One of the unique aspects of our product is not only does it have this lovely malleable little holder, but we have a product that we have created that is an airless pump, which is also quite unusual. Most serums are delivered in a lovely little glass or plastic pipettes, but our product is in this airless pump which has a sort of drop. That's how it produces its droplets. So there is no air getting back in to contaminate the product, and this product can go into your little cryo tool and dispense the product directly onto the skin.”
“Idiot-proof”, Una says. Really - especially because apparently we are expected to all be beauty specialists, knowing every single formula and what can go together and what can’t.
🧖🏼♀️ Ready for your 30-step beauty routine?
Me neither. From a quick survey with my friends, we can be divided into fairly two categories: “I wash my face with body soap and 8 out of 10 times take my makeup off” or “I have four different serums, three acids and two gel-turns-oil face cleansers.”
It’s absolutely great how accessible beauty products and wellness routines have become available to us, but there is a huge, let me say it again, HUGE difference in between actually knowing what you’re putting on your skin and just falling for the best-told marketing story.
And that’s fine, as we cannot possibly be experts on all chemicals and components. But on the other hand, we also don’t always have the time or budget to have our weekly facials at salons and beauty clinics. Not only that, it’s easy to cause more harm than any good when you have a myriad of very specific beauty products and little to no knowledge on what is the effect they’ll have on your skin.
How do you sort through the countless beauty brands that are out there and make sure you’re getting what’s good for you? Una McGurk is one of the very few beauty founders who have thought this through:
“Because we were going after the Masstige market, we were not going to have therapists or advisers necessarily guiding consumers to the correct product. So the product had to be capable of delivering results, but also to be as natural as possible.
The material we use was originally used in a burns unit. If the skin is burnt, it's still actually cooking. There had to be a way to cool the skin and stop that activity. A material using fermented coconut was created called biocellulose, and that is the material we use for the transfer of our serum into the skin and in this mask format.
So that material, being fermented coconut, is completely biodegradable: 75% in less than 40 days. That is the core of the technology because it is natural.”
First rule is to take care of the “protection of the skin, and also to cleanse the skin.” And around that she developed a whole set of products though cutting-edge technology, with sustainable materials and ingredients, future-proofing her brand while granting peace of mind to the ever-so-busy (hello, that’s me) or the incredibly-lazy girls (weirdly also me?) who need a quick, on-the-go, portable and reliable beauty routine.
“People would come in on occasion to have an intervention, but they couldn't always, through time or through budget, come as frequently as they'd like to.
There's a lot of simplicity around the products that we have. We were creating this suite of self care treatments that had high efficacy, were truly innovation driven, but also had a natural dimension.”
Listen to the episode to discover all about how Seoulista Beauty has been a great partner to London Fashion Week, being a favorite of makeup artists and is innovating the beauty industry one product at a time.
🎁 Community Rewards
For our beloved community this week Seoulista Beauty® is giving 20% off to our subscribers through the code TPL20* on checkout.
Not sure where to start? You can take their “Build My Regime” questionnaire and ave the best products for your type of skin and goals recommended to you. You’ll find it here.
Unrequested advice? Run to their website and next Tuesday you can have a full self-care sesh as we explore fashion rentals with Rachel Hennessy from Happy Days. Or even better, start asap and let us know how it’s going!
🧖🏼♀️ I know I definitely am. These were my results:
Very kind reminder: you still have until July 17th to grab a voucher for a treat or two of the amazing Grá Chocolates. Don’t know what we’re talking about? Check our Community Rewards of last week here. (you’re welcome).
*TPL20 is a one-time-use code, with no minimum order purchase and valid across the range on seoulistabeauty.com. Cannot be combined with other discounts.
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🎙️ Upcoming Conversation: Rachel Hennessy, the founder of fashion rental Happy Days
Tune in next week to hear all about a great concept of fashion rental, built on identifying very clear customer needs. Another step into a more circular business model, a topic very dear to us here at Tech Powered Luxury.
See you next week,
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