Stephanie Lee, founder and CEO of Selfmade

I've grown up in the beauty industry. My mom, a refugee from Vietnam, went into trade school and became a hairstylist. I remember when I was five, like dancing in the aisles between chairs and sweeping up the hair and getting my nails done by the ladies when they didn't have clients. I also worked at Mac Cosmetics at the counter as a retail makeup artist. When I was working at Mac at more of a corporate level doing product development, I had a mental health crisis.

I had major anxiety, major depression, and it was interesting to be a person of color and never to have used the words “mental health” before. I recognized that I had no tools, resources or conversations around my emotional wellbeing.

So I dove deeply into therapy, and I realized [this information] about human behavior and relationships and patterns is not taught in schools. You're lucky if your parents can teach you about things like having a secure attachment. But [when you’re just trying to] survive, there's no ability to talk about those things.

I quit my job, traveled around the world and had conversations with folks around mental health and self-worth and brought all of those pieces back. It was important to me because the brand got its start through these real conversations and research.

It's really interesting working in the beauty industry when so much of the conversation around your worth is about an exploitation of flaws. In therapy, [I was] paying so much money to embrace my inherent worth that I was born with for free. Those two things were really in conflict of each other.

Our data shows that those with a higher feeling of self-worth are 10 times more likely to see themselves as beautiful. When it comes to consumer brands, what I have heard is when you look good, you feel good. That's so extrinsically motivated what we know, from a mental health standpoint, is the exact opposite.

When you feel good, you look good, and you don't care about what other people think, and that is extremely powerful. Essentially, that's what [Selfmade is] rooted in and why mental health and psychodermatology are so important: it is the exact moment of the relationship with ourselves when we stand in front of that mirror and see ourselves.

[Selfmade uses] psychodermatology as the window into our emotional world. We’re using our skin as data points into our emotional world in order to truly take care of ourselves in a deeper way.

When we look at the pillars of emotional health and mental health, those are three things that are very tangible and actionable areas of our lives that we can build on. These concepts are actually our product families. Instead of highlighting what's “wrong” with my skin, these three lines are what we want to build into our lives.

When it comes to “attachment,” this is all about hydration, filling yourself up with moisture barrier repair, because so much of attachment is about true bonding and healthy boundaries. The idea behind “resilience” is that friction leads to growth mindset. That's why it's a scalp and body scrub, and the line is really about repair and recovery. “Intimacy” is about comfort: making your body a home, because it requires so much vulnerability to be intimate and to feel pleasure.

The way that we do our product development is really different, I think, than most product development processes for consumer goods. When I do the pipeline, I'm basically marrying psychological concepts with a product, product experience, and product benefits. I work with our mental health experts to validate our processes and messaging and to align those [mental] benefits with the benefits of this actual product: that’s how those two things intersect. That validation is really key.

We do a mental health deep-dive for every single product launch. Every single person, including our teammates, our partners, and our junior advisory board members attend. It's a basically a Q&A where we talk about why this product concept is important: how is it important to BIPOC, how does it affect gen Z, what are the benefits of doing it? What are the obstacles to achieving it? We basically build mental health practices into every facet of the brand from the website to the copy, to the product, to the Instagram post to the product experience that we create.

Every single one of these products is based off of a mental health psychological concept.