Customised skin-care products offer options for all conditions

Hong Kong-born Theresa Ma never intended to set up her own skin-care company. But the marketing graduate's own skin problems, which have plagued her since childhood, turned into an obsession with ingredients and how they work.

After years of her own trial and error experiments into beauty products to try to cure the latest stage her skin was going through, Ms Ma found herself returning to the same one or two products because of how their textures and ingredients felt on her skin.

'I am a true beauty product junkie that tries every new product and ingredient launched on the market,' she said. Her skin problems over the years have included bouts of severe dry skin which would crack and bleed. 'Everything manifests itself on my skin. I will sometimes break out in a rash if I'm under stress. That's why I'm always striving to achieve perfect skin.'

She realised other people were facing similar problems and wanted precisely targeted skin care, so six years ago Ms Ma launched her own skin-care brand, Skin Care Options (Sco), and opened her first stand-alone store in New York, where she is based.

Counters in upmarket department stores such as Barneys New York and Barneys New York in Beverly Hills followed, as did a secondary line, Sco Essentials, which has just arrived in Hong Kong. The Sco concept is to offer custom skin-care products formulated to address individual needs. The product range began with a core base of products designed to clarify, hydrate and balance skin, with clients able to choose products based on preference for texture and performance. Those products can be used off the shelf or customised for situation-specific concerns by infusing a product with up to three active ingredients. Infusions can be adapted as a person's needs change over time.

'Whatever your issues are, we can address them through active ingredients,' Ms Ma said, adding that the texture of a product never changed regardless of what active ingredient was added.

Sco Essentials was created as a way to offer clients a personal service associated with Sco with the ease of a ready-made product, while allowing the brand to work in the constraints of prohibitive business costs.