Building a skin-care brand—an organic skin-care line, at that—ain’t easy, so we’ve really got to hand it to Mark Rice and Abbott Stark for gifting us with everything that is

Ogee

. If you’re a little behind, allow us to catch you up: Ogee is an organic-certified skin-care line that uses the jojoba seed as its hero ingredient, which is said to hydrate and penetrate the skin like no other oil can. Oh, and on top of that, they spent 10 whole years searching for ingredients until they landed upon jojoba—talk about dedication—all so that we can feel comfortable and confident about what we’re slathering all over our skin. Bless. Here, Mark Rice talks the major challenges and even bigger rewards.

The story behind Ogee:

“I’ve always been very entrepreneurial—I co-owned and managed [John Galliano] up until we sold it to LVMH. I was always interested in the fragrance side of the business, which led me into being very interested in the product side of skin care, as well. I thought about a line of naturally sourced fragrance and skin care, [and when] I was visiting Vermont, I met my co-founder, Abbott [Stark]. His background is developing skin-care products for some of the top-selling companies in the world—including developing organic formulas. His passion was organic skin care, [and] on my first meeting I proposed starting a skin-care company. That’s how it started.”

On the hurdles they faced creating an organic skin-care line:

“It takes a long time to develop a good and effective skin-care formula. We had the hurdle of creating a certified organic skin-care formula. The word

‘

natural

’

doesn’t really have a lot of definition around it, and the reason we wanted to do a certified organic line was that it’s a clear certification—there’s a lot of transparency of what the ingredients are and how they’ve been sourced. Once you do that, the certification has a lot of strict mandates on what you can use and what you can’t use, including a certain percentage of organic ingredients that have to be in there. The challenge was creating great skin-care formulas that really work, that were certified organic, and I think we did that really successfully through a lot of research and development, and test and trial.”

Why their main ingredient is jojoba oil:

“When [Abbott Stark] was developing these skin-care products, he spent 10 years looking for the best ingredients. He discovered jojoba oil because there was actually a shortage at one time in the world, and he was trying to figure out what made it so special. When he started looking into the science behind it, he found that it was actually the best oil for skin. It’s a different molecule than all other oils—it’s actually able to absorb into the skin much more easily [because] it’s very similar to our skin’s natural oil. For dry skin it’s very hydrating, and for oily skin, it actually balances the oil in the skin.”

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