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A new generation of founders and practitioners is redefining what it means to “look and feel good” – and building powerful businesses in the process.
This panel from GRAZIA Aesthetics Live brings together three pioneers – Simon Salter (SS), co-founder of DIRTEA; Rebecca Walker (RW), microneedling expert; and Ayat Toufeeq (AT), co-founder of Powder Beauty. GRAZIA Editorial Director, Milli Midwood (MM), sat down with them to discuss working at the intersection of aesthetics and wellness, and exploring how consumer demand is shifting towards results-driven, holistic solutions.
MM: “Wellness” is such a buzzword. What does this word mean to you?
AT: We’ve always had an approach to beauty as something that comes from the inside-out. We think of beauty in these pillars, which is topicals in clinic, ingestibles, but also our lifestyle. So I think when we when we talk about wellness, it’s an intrinsic part of beauty. It’s an intrinsic part of feeling good, looking good, and presenting your best self to the world.
SS: I don’t think prevention has given us enough care. I think the global health funding at the moment only gives 2 to 5% into prevention. They’re doing more on the disease rather than dealing with it in advance. And certainly in the UK it’s almost like a disease management rather than a health management. And the one thing about DIRTEA mushrooms, is that they’ve become almost the answer to modern day stress. The most important thing is you can take these and you can get better focus and get better skin and improve your immune system if you’re not willing to kind of lean into a lifestyle. The DIRTEA tribe is 80% women between the ages of 25 and 45. And they’re saying to us that here’s not enough research for women. And then I looked into the research, and all these studies that are for women women have been carried out on men. And it completely threw me to one side, the real the real North Star, I think in the world’s economy should be closing the gap in women’s health, and that’s certainly something we’re doing.
RW: It’s really amazing to start hearing everybody jump on this intergraed pillar effect, because for us as clinicians, its really hard for us to get that end result for you guys if you’re not doing living a healthy lifestyle in the first place. That’s why its great that people are looking into supplements and living a healthy lifestyle and eating correctly.
MM: How have you seen the last five years of the wellness industry change?
RT: Microneedling has boomed. I actually came into microneedling because for personal reasons: my mum was suffering from some scar tissue from cancer removal, and a plastic surgeon actually to us to do microneedling. And my mum, bless her, was my guinea pig for the next 12 years. We’ve also seen a massive increase in males.
SS: In May last year, I woke up and looked in the mirror, and one looked back at me was in Simon Benjamin Salter. The left side of my face completely dropped. If anyone knows it’s Bell’s Palsy. But there’s a reason I bring this in, and it’s because there is, there’s a lack of information and knowledge from the medical industry. When I went to go and see the doctor, they gave me a steroids and some sort of other pill, pat on the back, said good luck and sent you on your way, so I was on my own. And there was one person that reached out to me from the DIRTEA tribe, and his name is Dr Sash Mohan. He told me to come in 200 Hardy street one evening, and he said, I think I can help you. I’ve never had anything penetrated into my skin, but he created a concoction. He’s allowed me to talk about it because he’s going public. And I said, I’ll be your guinea pig. I’ll surrender to it all, because I don’t know what to do. He created something called p4 I don’t know if you’ve come p4 at all, but it’s a combination of different concoctions of peptides and all these ingredients from Mother Nature. And he found a way to create more tonality in my muscles. He injected me, about 30-40,times for every session, and what he was aiming to do was to create a strength in the muscles and allow my nerves to map their way back. I was initially told it would take five years before that I’ll see any recovery, and this took me under six months.
AT: We’ve also seen the rise of the informed skeptic. Everyone is very well educated, and they know exactly what they’re looking for. Our customer is following her world-renowned dermatologist on social media, she’s read the studies, she’s got chatGPT open… So I think now what what we’re seeing is that there’s a demand for evidence and scientific substantiation behind the products. We’re all informed. We’ve got information at our fingertips. And in terms of purchasing, we’re noticing that our community are buying full routines. They are the most engaged segment because they’re building and designing a lifestyle and a routine.
MM: How do you continue to build trust in a world where everyone is so informed?
Simon: There is something called The Alchemy of Perception, and it’s important when you build trust because the products need to do what they say on the tin. What we do in the DIRTEA tribes, we create these amazing events that people come to every month, and we wrap up with a DIRTEA truck, or do an experience itself. But the one thing that’s important for founders or building a brand is to listen. Understand the pain points, understand how we can actually serve them and serve them a better experience. Trust is the community. They are the heartbeat.
MM: How important is social media to you when building trust with your patients and clients?
RW: Controversial but I actually find social media to be an absolute nightmare, because clients come to us and they’re like, well, I already know what my skin types like, because I spoke to chatGPT about it. And I’m like, great, has he sat in front of you? So it’s really, it’s really challenging for us. But I’m really present on social media, because I think it’s really important for my patients to see our see what goes on, and that genuinely we live and breathe this world, and I would never do a treatment on my clients that I wouldn’t do on myself.
MM: In an industry that is so fickle, how do you decide what is worth investing in?
AT: We really look at three key things, which is brand values – do we love and respect these people? Do we want to support their journey? The second is ingredient integrity – are the products good quality? But the third, and I think as part of this conversation, the most important is scientific substantiation. Is there evidence? What can I trust? Today I’m sharing the stage with one of our exclusive brand brands, Vida Glow, and they are an amazing collagen-focused brand backed by scientific evidence. We’re approached by a lot of collagen brands that want to enter the region, but one of the reasons we’re working with Vida Glow is, uniquely, they fund their own clinical trials, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials that last for several weeks, and that measure outcomes. And for us, that’s really important.
SS: Creatine was a testament to that point. It’s not a hype. In the 90s, when they first brought this out, this was seen as a muscle-builder, and very male focused. But the results on this are amazing. There’s a wonderful researcher by the name of Darren Candow who was showing that anything between three and seven grams of creatine monohydrate, which is what we use, is enough to break through the brain blood barrier and increase cognitive focus, loosen anxiety, and loosen brain fog. Then you pair that with Lion’s Mane, which is one of my favorite mushrooms. There’s a recent study which was based on menopause and memory loss. There was a blind placebo. One was a cookie and one was cookie with Lion’s Mane, and those who ate the ones with the Lion’s Mane regularly made their their focus, their concentration, and their memories just excel. The moment they stopped, so did the effects. So the research actually shows us that, and the science shows us that consistency is key.
MM: Finally, to bring it back to entrepreneurship, what is the biggest misconception bout starting and running a successful business in the wellness industry?
RW: There’s no secret to it, other than I work really, really hard. And once you start that journey with that client, it’s so hard to let them go. There’s no magic wand to what we do. Most of my patients are with me for 10 years. It’s about hard work, building that trust and not listening to the noise in the industry and jumping on all the different skincare hypes.
SS: I read this quote the other day from Elon Musk that said, “building a business is like looking to the abyss while chewing glass.” I don’t think I’ve experienced that part, because I’ve had my brother. I love him all my heart, he’s a blessing. I’m blessed every day, and in some of the challenging moments, he allows me to be vulnerable. It’s not easy to build a business, you can’t quite predict what’s going to happen. But just try not to look over the fence of the future. Just try be here and be now.
AT: Exactly. You’ve just got to work hard, be mindful of your identity, and stay really focused and loving what you do.
See more from the first-ever GRAZIA Aesthetics Live here.
