The Skinary App: How It's Helping Us Figure Out What's Causing Our Breakouts

Skin care is one of our favorite things to talk about. I mean in the words of my friend, “You only have one face, so you have to take care of it.”

Struggling with acne her whole life founder of Skinary, Bianca Harris, managed to keep her breakouts somewhat under control. That was until she got older and she had one of the worst breakouts she’s ever had.

About a year ago it came back in a crazy way. i had a massive breakout, I had hives, my eye swelled up. It was pretty bad and I had no idea what triggered it because I hadn’t made any changes to my skin routine and I hadn’t been traveling or doing weird things.

Not unlike most of us, Bianca uses apps to track almost everything in her life but when it came to skincare and trying to figure out what was causing her breakouts there was nothing. Insert the idea and birth of Skinary, the health tracking app for your skin.

We had the chance to talk with Bianca about this new app, her skin care, and what it’s like to be a first time founder.

WHAT IS SKINARY?

It’s a health tracking app for your skin! Sometimes people like to call it the Fitbit for your face. We track your lifestyle, diet, and cleansing habits, and with a daily selfie, we help you figure out what habits is triggering your breakouts and concerns. 

SO HOW DOES IT WORK?

When a user first downloads the app, they set up their profile, take a selfie, and select an avatar. Then we do an initial assessment to give them their first set of recommendations.

Everyday, you take a morning selfie and tell us you are doing throughout the day. What you ate, how you are feeling, the beauty products you used. This is where we get into your habits, and every time we see a change in habits or a change in your skin, we alert you to the different triggers and make recommendations around habits to improve upon.

For example, a specific kind of nonorganic almond milk is a trigger for me. It will make me breakout along my chin. With Skinary, we would be able to identify something like for you after a few days of usage.

We have three habit categories we focus on to be really integrative about our recommendations - diet, lifestyle, and cleansing. With your permission, we sync up with your phone’s health + movement data to fill in the blanks, just in case you forget to log info that day.

HOW IS YOUR LIFESTYLE RELATED BACK TO YOUR SKIN AND IT’S HEALTH?

For decades, it was thought that many diet and dermatology were not related. Studies as recent as the last decade, have made it clear that diet may influence outcome. It’s not just what you put on your face but what you put into your body as a whole.

There are a lot of products coming out that talk about your gut health and that’s the very beginning of a deep dive into integrated health.  With the Skinary app we are taking technology and integrative health and applying it to your face so that over time you can figure out specifically what works best for your body.

YOU’RE A FIRST TIME FOUNDER, WHAT HAS THIS PROCESS OF STARTING YOUR OWN COMPANY BEEN LIKE?

It taught me that to be brave. If you have an idea that won’t let you go to sleep, be brave and go for it. I was working a full-time job, and I just would work on this early mornings before the office, late nights after and I traded traveling to do this. Skinary woke me up at 5am everyday, excited as hell to work on and I leaned into that.

Starting anything, takes a lot of bravery - so just be brave. The worst thing can happen is it didn’t work, but you learn from that.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE SOMEONE LOOKING TO TAKE THE LEAP OF FAITH AND START THEIR COMPANY?

I would say, 100%, do all your research, talk to people and hit the pavement. Before I worked on a prototype and branding, I spent half a year talking to people who necessarily wouldn’t believe in the idea - men and dermatologists. After I got really positive feedback, I began reading countless dermatology books, getting up to speed on what the app space looked like and deep diving into user research.

As you start your business go through the proper steps of setting it up, don’t just dive into a prototype and all of that. Like you need a C-Corp not an LLC if you want to raise money with investors.

Also, you don’t have to quit your job to have a startup. I know a number of founders who have full-time jobs, like I did. We all put in 40 hours into our businesses, so we had 2 full-time jobs, and one of them gives you financial stability. I just went full-time because we are getting so much traction, that if I didn’t I would hurt the business. 

SO WE HAVE TO ASK, WHAT SKIN CARE PRODUCTS DO YOU USE?

I use to have a very intense beauty cabinet and I was still having skin issues! But, I just went through and donated away alot of stuff that I wasn’t using and tossed everything that expired, and restarted.

My routine is really simple and solid, with some cool tools and treatments. My base products, like cleanser, toner, essence are from Muji. It's clean (surprise!), good travel sizes that I can refill and really cost-efficient. With a basic routing that is gentle routine, I can experiment with hype products, treatments and tools - and can see what my skin likes.

Having a really solid and consistent routine is the first step of getting my skin back on course if it’s been acting up! Then I begin to layer in diet and lifestyle changes!

One thing I found in all my research, do not do product cocktails. It’s safer to use the same brand for your everyday skincare routine since brand's design their product’s chemicals to work off of each other, and not cross brands. The last thing you want is your X branch toner interacting with your Y brand moisturizer on top of your skin! That’s how chemical burns happen!

SO THE APP DOESN’T GO LIVE TILL AROUND MAY, HOW CAN WE BE APART OF IT NOW?

Sign up for our waitlist on our website! Our private beta and preorder for the full version is releasing soon and you will get an invite via email to download and be apart of testing out the app. Which is cool because we are taking feedback directly from users to make the app better before we publicly release!

When we launch the full version, the app is free and you can upgrade to premium for $9.99 a month, or $49.99 for a year. So it’s the cost of two moisturizers for a year. 

DESCRIBE YOUR SLAY.

I have an “organized" slay. I kind of know what my next day is going to be before I attack it. Then I would also say our slay is “authenticity”, as I look at what I would like this brand, community and messaging to be, I just want it to be transparent, real and always authentic…as hell. 

Make sure to follow Bianca and the launch of Skinary on Instagram!

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