Juliette Marsden had spent most of a year doing what the internet told her to do. A foaming cleanser, an acid toner, a vitamin C, a retinol, a second acid on weekends. Her skin got tighter, redder and less predictable with every product she added. The advice that finally helped was the least exciting she had heard: stop nearly everything, wash gently, and put back the lipids the skin had lost.
Tobias Renwick was the formulation chemist who gave her that advice. He had spent years making products for other companies and had grown tired of two habits in the industry: hiding percentages, and adding fragrance to formulas meant for irritated skin. The two of them wrote a brief on a single page. It had three lines.
- The barrier comes first. Every routine starts with a cleanser that does not strip and a moisturizer built on the lipids skin already uses.
- Every active is dosed at a strength the evidence supports, and the number goes on the front of the bottle.
- Nothing is fragranced. Not with perfume, and not with essential oils.
The first formula
The Barrier Repair Cream came first. The outer layer of skin is held together by ceramides, cholesterol and free fatty acids, and research on barrier repair has long pointed to a blend of all three, in roughly a 3:1:1 ratio, as closer to what skin makes for itself than any one of them alone. Tobias built the cream around that ratio, with ceramides NP, AP and EOP at a combined 2%, and printed the ratio on the carton.
It took 31 versions. The early ones worked and felt heavy. The later ones felt elegant and did less. Version 31 is a rich cream that sinks in under two minutes, and it is still the formula in the jar today.
We kept asking the same question of every ingredient: is it here for the skin, or is it here for the marketing? If we could not answer, it came out.
What came next
2021
Seravane launches from Austin with three products: the Barrier Repair Cream, the Gel-to-Milk Cleanser and the Ceramide Serum.
2022
The Refill Program begins. The Barrier Repair Cream jar becomes a jar you keep, and the pouch that fills it uses 82% less packaging by weight.
2023
The Acids line arrives, each product with its acid, its percentage and its pH on the carton, and instructions written for two or three nights a week rather than every night.
2024
After two years of texture work, the Fluid Mineral SPF 46 launches in three tints. The first clinical results page goes live, with study designs and sample sizes.
2025
The Actives line is completed with the Peptide Eye Balm, a product whose page says plainly what an eye product cannot do.
Today
More than 40,000 customers, most of them on a repeat order. Every order still ships from Austin.
How we work
We are a small team, and we have stayed deliberately narrow. The catalog is fourteen products. We would rather improve the cream people reorder than launch a new serum every quarter.
We publish what we measure. When we run an instrumental or consumer-use study on a formula, the design, the number of participants and the results go on the Clinical Results page, including the results that are modest. When we have not measured something, we do not claim it.
We say what a product cannot do. The eye balm does not remove dark circles. The niacinamide is 6% because higher percentages have not been shown to do more. No product of ours is cleared by us for pregnancy or for a medical condition; that conversation belongs to you and your doctor, and we will give you every fact about the formula to take with you.
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- Best seller
- Refillable
Moisturizer
Barrier Repair Cream
Ceramides, cholesterol and fatty acids in the 3:1:1 ratio your barrier already uses
From $18
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Serum
Ceramide Serum
The barrier lipids of the cream, in a fluid that layers flat under sunscreen
$62
