WHY SUNSCREEN?
It is probably the number one question I get asked, and strangely, it is still the question I find hardest to answer.
Because there isn’t really one neat answer.
There are about five versions of the story I could tell you.
But the truest one is probably this:
I think sunscreen chose me.
I definitely wasn’t the obvious person to build a sunscreen company. I didn’t grow up religiously wearing SPF. I wasn’t a chemist. I didn’t have family in beauty. I didn’t wake up one morning with a lifelong mission to revolutionise sun protection.
What I did have was a plan.
I have always been a planner. When I was younger, I remember being weirdly fascinated by Mao and Stalin’s Five-Year Plans. Obviously, highly questionable people, but I remember thinking: they certainly got a lot done.
So naturally, I decided I should have a five-year plan too.
I remember exactly where I was when I wrote mine.
I was living with my boyfriend at the time in this fairly miserable little house. Our bedroom was essentially a converted walk-in wardrobe because it was all we could afford. One night, after he fell asleep, I sat down with a pen and paper and asked myself what I thought was a very important question:
What do I want to be when I grow up?
My hypothesis was simple. If you found work you genuinely loved, something you could lose yourself in, then you had sort of cracked the code. You would spend such a huge portion of your life working, so surely enjoying that work had to be one of the biggest indicators of a happy life.
So I looked backwards.
What had I always been able to do for hours without noticing the time passing?
The answer was embarrassingly obvious.
Skincare.
I loved the language of it. The ingredients on the back of bottles I could barely pronounce. The science. The products. But most of all, I loved helping someone solve something.
Clearing their acne.
Helping them finally stick to a routine.
Finding the product that made them feel more comfortable in their skin.
At the time, I was working on the shop floor at MECCA, and there was something incredibly satisfying about someone coming back weeks later and saying, “That thing you recommended actually worked.”
That feeling stayed with me.
So I wrote out my very sensible life plan.
I would finish university. Work in beauty. Move to Melbourne, which in my head was the epicentre of beauty in Australia and New Zealand. Get into the MECCA graduate programme. Learn everything I could.
And then, when I turned 30 (which at the time seemed like an incredibly grown-up age) I would start an innovative skincare company with all my wise knoweldge.
There was only one problem.
I was impatient.
In 2018, I started working on my first idea: using technology to match people with personalised skincare. Customers would use a simple at-home kit to determine their skin type and then receive a tailored routine.
I wrote a tiny business plan. Researched it obsessively. Thought I had invented something extraordinary.
Then I discovered several people had already built much cleverer versions of exactly the same thing.
Not scalable. Not particularly original.
But I loved the process.
Then, about a year later, something happened that completely changed the direction of my life.
I was randomly assigned to a group project at university with a girl studying film and arts who happened to be taking one business paper.
We became friends.
One afternoon I was sitting in her flat getting to know her when she mentioned an idea she had started working on: a sunscreen spray for the scalp.
She had been trying to communicate the idea to a chemist but felt like nobody was taking her seriously or quite understanding what she wanted to make.
Somehow, almost immediately, I became her business partner.
And suddenly we were head-first in sunscreen development.
For the first time in my life, I felt naturally really good at something.
There were all these skills I didn’t even realise I had: research, branding, product development, communicating ideas, pulling people together, figuring things out when there was no obvious answer, and suddenly they all had somewhere to go.
I became obsessed.
Then we hit a wall.
Regulations. Testing. More regulatory barriers.
After more than a year of work, we eventually reached a point where we couldn’t get the product through the regulatory pathway we needed.
The constant brick walls put enormous pressure on the business and eventually on our friendship too. We parted ways as friends and business partners.
I remember taking about two weeks off afterwards.
I felt completely defeated.
But no matter I tried I was still dreaming and utterly obbsessed with sunscreen.
And that bothered me, because I still couldn’t properly explain why.
A very paitent friend asked me:
“Okay, but why sunscreen? What is the actual problem you’re trying to solve?”
And eventually, after being asked enough times, it came tumbling out.
Reapplication.
Why does sunscreen have such a short wear window?
Why are we applying something at 7:00 in the morning that often needs attention again only a few hours later?
What happens if you are wearing makeup?
What happens if you are at work?
What happens if you simply forget?
I remember looking at my friend and feeling that strange little shift when an idea finally clicks into place.
That was it.
That was the problem.
Everything else that would eventually become GLOWGUARD flowed from that one question.
It needed to sit beautifully underneath makeup because people actually had to want to wear it.
It needed to feel like skincare.
It couldn’t pill.
It couldn’t be heavily fragranced or distracting.
It had to fit into somebody’s real life.
But the central idea remained incredibly simple:
Could we make daily SPF protection last longer on the skin?
That became our obsession.
And I wish I could say that once we figured that out, everything magically fell into place.
It absolutely did not.
We worked with more than four sunscreen labs across the world.
We heard no constantly.
We raised money.
We spent some of that money very wisely and some of it, in hindsight, very unwisely.
People joined the company and people left it. Co-founders moved into different stages of their lives. Start-ups are not for everyone.
Every challenge seemed enormous while we were living through it, but almost every one prepared us for the next.
And somehow, through all of it, my love for GLOWGUARD never dimmed. To this day, I still put it on and am shocked it feels this good.
So when people ask me, “Why sunscreen?”
I think there are really two answers.
The first is purpose.
I think the reason I’ve been able to stay so resilient is because I genuinely believe this solution can make people’s lives better. When you believe deeply enough in what you’re building, you keep coming back to it, even when it would be easier to stop.
And the second and more unhinged answer?
I think building better sunscreen/s is my destiny.
Yours,
Melitta
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