Skincare & The Science of Slow Building — Surbhi Vyas on Ek Soch

Where It Began

Surbhi grew up in a small village in Rajasthan. Her mother ran a beauty parlour, and Surbhi spent her childhood watching what happened there — not the treatments, but the women receiving them. Women who walked in feeling inadequate. Women who cried. Women whose relationship with their own appearance was one of consistent disappointment rather than care.

Her mother's approach to that disappointment was not to promise faster results. It was to teach maintenance — the understanding that skin responds to consistency and patience over time, not to products that claim transformation overnight. That philosophy, absorbed before Surbhi had the vocabulary to articulate it, became the foundation of everything Celénor is built on.

The professional path that followed took her far from Rajasthan — through pharma, med-tech, agri-tech, and retail, including years working in Singapore. The turn toward building her own brand came from a single casual conversation with an investor who said simply: I will invest in you. The effect of that sentence was not excitement. It was the sudden, clear realisation that fear and self-doubt were the only things standing between her and starting.

Ten Years of Formulation, Ten Months in a Lab

Celénor did not begin with a manufacturer's catalogue and a brand name. It began with approximately a decade of Surbhi experimenting with formulations at home — testing, adjusting, discarding, and beginning again. When she moved into a professional laboratory setting, she spent ten months and went through over fifty formulations before arriving at products she considered ready.

The standard she was working toward was specific: international quality, comparable to established European luxury skincare brands, but made in India. Not inspired by them. Comparable to them.

She is pointed in her criticism of how most Indian skincare brands are actually built. Manufacturers offer bulk catalogues of pre-existing formulations — copy-paste products that can be white-labelled and launched quickly. Trend-driven gimmicks replace genuine research. The result is a market flooded with products that carry sophisticated branding and deliver undifferentiated performance.

Celénor's differentiation is in the formulation layer itself — newer-generation technologies, external lab testing of every batch, and full FDA and regulatory compliance at every stage, regardless of the additional cost and time that compliance requires.

"Over fifty formulations. Ten months in a lab. International quality — made in India."

What Indian Consumers Are Getting Wrong About Skin

Surbhi's diagnosis of how Indian consumers relate to skincare is direct and consistent with what she observed growing up: skin is treated reactively, not proactively. Problems are ignored until they become serious. And skincare itself is frequently treated as a fashion category — something that follows trends — rather than as basic maintenance for the body's largest organ.

The consequences of this mindset show up in specific ways. The uncritical adoption of Korean skincare routines designed for different skin types and climates. The use of steroid-heavy or ingredient-unclear night serums without understanding what they contain. The overuse of active ingredients like salicylic acid that, applied daily rather than on alternate days, damage the skin barrier they are meant to support.

Her recommended routine is deliberately simple. A mild face wash morning and night. A mask when needed. A suitable toner. A quality hyaluronic acid or niacinamide serum from a brand whose formulation transparency can be verified. Moisturiser and SPF. Consistency over complexity — applied every day, without exception, over months.

For adult acne specifically, she adds a point that most skincare marketing avoids: diet, hydration, and gut health are not secondary factors. They are primary ones. A topical routine applied over a poor nutritional foundation will underdeliver regardless of what the products contain.

"Skin is the body's largest organ. Treat it like maintenance, not fashion."

What Celénor Is and Is Not

Celénor's initial product line is focused on skincare: a face wash, a radiant velvet-finish serum, an enzyme-based silk-like scrub, a moisturiser, an SPF, and targeted serums for adult acne — distinct from hormonal teenage acne, which requires a different intervention.

A second haircare line is in development with international collaborators, covering scalp-focused products, shampoo, conditioner, and a split-ends solution — again targeting the same standard of texture and performance she applies to the skincare range.

The brand is positioned explicitly as gender-neutral. Skincare, in Surbhi's framing, is for human skin — not for women's skin, not for Indian skin as a monolithic category, not for Korean skin as an aspirational template. The products are formulated for diverse Indian and global skin types because that is the actual customer base, and because narrowing the positioning to one demographic is a marketing decision that has no scientific basis.

The Brand Name Nobody Could Convince Her to Change

Celénor is a name Surbhi was advised to change repeatedly. She refused each time.

The name blends celestial beauty — rooted in a lifelong fascination with stars, galaxies, and childhood memories of stargazing in Rajasthan — with a French-influenced register that signals the luxury positioning she is building toward. Both elements are intentional. The celestial reference is personal. The French-rooted tone is a deliberate marker of the shelf she wants Celénor to occupy — not metaphorically, but literally.

Her five-year vision is for Celénor to sit on shelves in Europe alongside established European luxury skincare brands, carrying the same credibility — while remaining rooted in the maternal recipes and heritage that gave the brand its reason to exist.

Packaging is part of that vision. She describes wanting designs that are airless for hygiene, low-waste in construction, and so considered in their aesthetic that a Celénor jar makes any surface it sits on look better. The detail about lids — she wants fewer lost lids and more usability — is small but telling. It is the kind of observation that comes from actually thinking about how a product lives in someone's daily life, not just how it photographs.

"Celénor — celestial beauty, rooted in Rajasthan, built for the world."

Thirty Years to Feel Beautiful

Surbhi shares in the conversation that it took her nearly thirty years to feel beautiful herself. The reasons are not dramatic — they are the quiet accumulation of upbringing, financial anxiety, and the absence of emotional and financial education that she identifies as a common experience for Indian women.

Fear of loans. Lack of confidence in her own capability. The internal noise of self-doubt that she eventually learned to name, examine, and set aside.

She describes the D2C brand-building process as inherently slow and research-heavy — and frames that slowness not as a limitation but as a structural advantage. Her formulation: slow is the new fast. A brand built on a strong foundation, genuine consumer understanding, and patient iteration is more durable than one launched quickly on trend and marketing alone. The quick launch gets attention. The slow build gets loyalty.

"Slow is the new fast. The quick launch gets attention. The slow build gets loyalty."

What She Tells Every Woman Founder

Surbhi's closing message to women who are building or considering building something is compact and unambiguous.

You are enough. Stop over-explaining yourself in rooms where your presence and your work are explanation enough. Cut the emotional noise — not the emotion itself, but the drama that surrounds decisions and delays action. Work silently and consistently. Develop emotional intelligence alongside financial independence, because both are required and neither substitutes for the other.

Chase your dreams without guilt and without self-doubt — not because the path is easy or the outcome guaranteed, but because fear and self-doubt, as she discovered in Singapore over a casual investor conversation, are the only things that were ever actually in the way.

"You are enough. Fear and self-doubt are the only things that were ever actually in the way."