BY LUCIE MCHUGH
A FORMER student at The Henley College has created a range of skincare products for young teens which
draws on her struggles with acne.
Jessica Goldsmith, 30, is about to launch GenGlo — a three-step line designed to prevent skin barrier damage in young people.
Ms Goldsmith, who attended Shiplake Primary School and now lives in Dunsden Green, said she came up with the idea while working as a trend spotter for beauty giant L’Oréal.
She said: “I was using AI and data and all of the tools that we had to stay ahead of trends, so I would spend a lot of time on social media looking at what people are searching as well as using Google analytics.
“I saw that 400 million people had searched on TikTok for ‘skin barrier repair’ and, as someone who is constantly trying to repair my barrier because I had acne as a tween, it really stood out to me and I thought, why is everyone repairing the damage and not preventing the damage?”
The skin barrier is the outermost layer of skin and is the first line of defence against external pollutants and irritants, also protecting against moisture loss.
Ms Goldsmith suffered with acne from the age of 12 and her skin barrier was damaged having been given bad advice on how to treat it.
She said: “I started getting acne at the classic puberty stages and what I was told at the time was to use bleaching.
“You would wear acnecide, which bleached your pillows, and then I was always getting skin peels to peel off the top layer of my skin to try and clear it.
“Later down the line I ended up getting adult acne which was because I completely damaged and irritated my skin barrier doing these things, which led to bulbous, huge, horrible adult acne.”
Miss Goldsmith wants her products to remove confusion for teenagers and their parents when choosing age-appropriate skincare.
She said: “There is a huge lack of knowledge, so parents, as well as teens and tweens, don’t understand that skincare that stings doesn’t mean it’s working, which is what I always thought when I was younger.
“It actually means that it’s irritating your skin barrier and breaking it, which is essentially going to create more breakouts and more redness and skin problems later down the line.
“The importance of having a brand specifically designed for tweens and parents of kids that age [means they] can pick up this brand and not have to worry about looking at the ingredients or what is on the back.” Ms Goldsmith left her PR and marketing role at WPP Ogilvy in March 2024 to pursue GenGlo full time.
She has since worked with a chemist in Leeds to develop formulas based on those of dermatologist-approved skincare lines from brands such as CeraVe, Cetaphil and La Roche-Posay.
Miss Goldsmith has created a cleanser, a spot treatment and a moisturiser that comprise “gentle” ingredients which would support rather than damage young skin. She said: “We worked to build these three products that don’t have all the adult actives that tweens don’t need that are too harsh or too drying like alcohol, peptides, all of the unnecessarily strong stuff that has been taken out.
“I think youths need to understand that their skin at that age is at the complete prime, the collagen turnover. I’m 30 and it’s what I would dream of “I think they just need to understand that you don’t actually need to do much to your skin. The only thing you need to do is, maybe after doing PE or after spending a hot day in the sun with SPF, you want to wash off dirt.
“That’s all you really need to do because your skin barrier is protecting all of the amazing oils and work that your skin is doing underneath to keep your skin plump and lovely.
“They just really need to understand that if anything, you need to support it, not correct it.”
GenGlo will be available on its website, genglo.co.uk from the end of the month.