SkinGlow was founded in 2019 in Athens by Iro Kalogeropoulou, a cosmetic chemist with twelve years inside multinational beauty labs, and Léa Marchand, a French operations lead who had spent five years at a circular packaging start-up in Lyon. The two met on a panel about waste in the cosmetics industry at Athens Science Festival in 2018 — Iro spoke about the gap between what active concentrations actually do for skin and what brands claim, while Léa spoke about the 120 billion units of beauty packaging discarded globally every year. They discovered that they shared the same private frustration: the industry sells aspiration and discards the proof. Six months later they leased a 180m² lab and storefront on Pireos Street, hired one chemist (Markos Vlachakis), one designer (Despoina Anto



