Power of nature

Gaylia Kristensen spent 25 years working in sales and marketing for a multinational skincare company and was ready to settle into retirement in her native Australia. But even a beauty expert like her wasn't prepared for the lines and spots that started showing on her face.

"We moved back to Australia from the UK, and the harsh Australian climate was so damaging to my skin. I thought, 'my God, I need results. But I don't want to do Botox, I don't want to do injectables, I don't want to do surgery'," Kristensen says. "And that's when I went looking for a natural alternative."

When she couldn't find a product range that gave the results she wanted with natural ingredients, Kristensen took matters into her own hands.

"I came across these amazing new molecular polypeptide and protein technologies from Europe, and I thought, 'wow, they're totally going to revolutionise skincare forever'," she recalls. "They were techniques that were coming out of the pharmaceutical world - peptides were being used in medicines for a long time, and then peptides have come into the world of cosmetics. But now the big thing is that they've come into the world of natural cosmetics."

Launched in 2010, Kristensen's eponymous brand is now one of the champions of a new breed of anti-ageing skincare in which nature and science converge to produce hi-tech, results-oriented products - all based on the potency of bioactive ingredients.

"It's a very new world of state-of-the-art, cutting-edge technology, but naturally derived and with really visible results," says Kristensen, whose peptide and protein technologies come from plant, vegetable and marine extracts.