Why I Started Quintessential

I didn’t set out to start a skincare brand.
I was trying to solve a personal problem.

Like many people, I spent years using skincare products that made confident claims and delivered very little. Improvements were vague, inconsistent, or impossible to separate from placebo. The language was persuasive; the results were not.

That disconnect was what bothered me most.

So I stopped buying new products and started reading instead, everything from ingredient lists, clinical papers, to dermatological research. I wasn’t looking for novelty or trends. I was looking for repeatable biological effects.

One pattern kept appearing.

The ingredients with the most consistent, clinically meaningful impact on skin health were not exotic actives or complex delivery systems. They were nutrients. Vitamins, minerals, fatty acids — the substances skin cells actually require to function, repair, and maintain themselves.

That raised a simple question.

If skin is a living tissue with nutritional requirements, why was skincare rarely (or never) designed around meeting those requirements completely?

Most moisturisers focus on texture, fragrance, or a single headline ingredient. Others rely on marketing language that implies efficacy without clearly explaining mechanism. Very few ask a more fundamental question: what does a skin cell need in order to work properly … and is it actually receiving it?

I assumed a product answering that question already existed.
It didn’t.

Having spent months trying to find a product that had every vitamin, mineral and essential fatty acid, and consistently coming up short, I decided to make one.

Quintessential Skincare was built around a straightforward premise: a moisturiser should provide skin with the full set of essential nutrients it needs to function optimally, in forms that are stable, bioavailable, and absorbable.

That meant prioritising nutrients over trends, biology over branding, and restraint over exaggeration. It also meant excluding ingredients that look impressive on a label but don’t meaningfully contribute to skin health.

The result is not a “miracle” product. It isn’t designed to create dramatic short-term effects or rely on novelty. It is designed to support the skin’s normal biological processes consistently and honestly.

That is why Quintessential exists.

Not to promise transformation but to remove unnecessary complexity and return skincare to something more basic, more rational, and more truthful.

Marcus McAlister
Founder, Quintessential Skincare