How did I know GLOWGUARD was the one?
Honestly, because every version before it made the answer very easy.
No. Too thick. Too sticky. Too heavy.
Sometimes it split. Sometimes it looked right in the bottle but felt wrong the second it touched my skin. Sometimes we were technically close, but I still knew immediately that it was not the product I was dreaming of.
I lost count of how many DHL parcels arrived over those years, but it was definitely more than 20 iterations.
At one point, I asked our lab how many attempts it had taken them to formulate one of the most famous sunscreens in the world.
Six. We were well over 20.
I remember thinking we must be the most frustrating clients alive. Our account manager, Judy, bless her, was endlessly patient with us.
Looking back now, I think part of the problem was that I knew exactly how I wanted GLOWGUARD to feel, but I did not yet have the technical language to explain it.
I had spent years working on the shop floor at MECCA, so evaluating products had become instinctive. You learn very quickly what feels beautiful on the skin, what sits well under makeup, what people come back to repurchase and what deserves a place in their routine.
But instinct and formulation are two completely different things.
Now that I have done more formal product development training, I would approach those early rounds very differently. At the time, though, so much of my feedback was based on feeling (how naieve does that sound!).
I knew when something was wrong before I always knew how to explain why.
And somewhere along the way, I became completely fascinated by formulation itself.
The sophistication of a great lab goes far beyond having access to good ingredients. It is where those ingredients come from, how they are processed, how they interact with one another, the percentages used and even the way the formula is mixed. Which in turn means even with the same INCI list there are countless wasy to make something.
I find that world endlessly interesting.
I sometimes like to imagine cosmetic chemists are a little like magical chefs. Where their secret raw ingriednets are sourced from, or how they mix them or what percentages they use to create new innovations.
That curiosity became a huge part of how GLOWGUARD developed.
For as long as I can rememeber I have been obsessed at different products, skin types and ingredients, trying to understand what people actually noticed made a difference to their skin.
That is how I became interested in Centella, Purslane and Glutathione.
I remember sitting with friends who were studying medicine and asking them to help me read research papers on different antioxidants and understand which ingredients would be stable enough to make sense in a sunscreen formula.
It really did take a village.
At the same time, I was trying to understand what people disliked most about SPF.
I went back to one of my university marketing research lecturers and asked her how to design a proper survey, then posted it everywhere I could think of.
The responses were useful, but one thing really stayed with me.
Almost nobody mentioned reapplication.
By that stage, I had become convinced that reapplication was one of the biggest problems in daily sunscreen use, yet consumers were not naturally identifying it as the thing they wanted solved.
That changed the way I thought about research.
People can tell you very clearly what they dislike about something that already exists. But they cannot always tell you what should exist next.
So I started speaking to experts instead.
Makeup artists were especially interesting.
I spoke to incredibly talented artists and realised many of them simply did not use SPF in their professional kits.
Not because they did not believe in sun protection.
Because they did not trust how it would behave under makeup.
Pilling. Flashback. Texture. Finish. Sensitivity.
Every conversation added another layer to the brief.
Slowly, GLOWGUARD stopped being an idea and became something much more specific.
It needed to protect, of course.
But it also needed to feel beautiful enough that people actually wanted to use it.
It needed to sit underneath makeup without disrupting it.
It needed to feel more like skincare than the sunscreens people were used to.
And then one morning, another DHL parcel arrived.
There was nothing particularly memorable about the setting.
I was sitting downstairs in my friend’s living room by myself. I found a pair of scissors, opened the box and pulled out the bottle.
I put a small amount on the back of my hand.
And I knew.
It was silky and smooth in a way none of the others had been.
I remember my heart skipping slightly because my first thought was:
This does not feel like sunscreen.
I ran upstairs to the closest bathroom and immediately put it all over my face.
It felt comfortable.
Soothing.
Nourishing.
And for the first time after years of testing samples, I was not mentally creating a list of everything I wanted to change.
There was nothing I immediately wanted to fix.
It just felt right.
It felt like GLOWGUARD.
I think one of the strangest things about life-changing moments is how they really hit you like a bus. That morning, I had no idea I was about to open the final version of the product I had spent years trying to create.
If I had known, I would have had the whole team there.
Instead, it was just me standing in my friend’s bathroom, completely overwhelmed with excitement.
Later that day, a stranger came over to my friends house and I remember practically dragging her upstairs to the lab sample.
I wanted everyone to feel it. I wanted to watch their reaction.
Apparently, the happiness was written all over my face and it was contagious.
For weeks afterwards, I sang in the shower.
That probably sounds crazy, but euphoria is genuinely the closest word I can use to describe it.
After years of samples, setbacks, tiny improvements and wondering whether the product I had in my head was even possible, suddenly I was holding it.
And maybe that is the part I remember most.
Not the formula code. Not the DHL box. Not even the first swatch.
It was the feeling of finally recognising something I had spent years trying to create.
I had imagined GLOWGUARD for so long that, when it finally existed in front of me, it somehow already felt familiar.
Like meeting something you already knew :).
Yours,
Melitta
P.S: Pics from the archives:
