The Moisturiser That Never Lasted an Hour
- My mother would put on a moisturiser and be dry again before the hour was out.
- We had the jars to prove it. A shelf of them. Every one bought in hope, used twice, pushed to the back.
- In 2017 I stopped buying and made her one myself. Thick, rich, closer to a salve than a lotion. It held.
- That jar is the entire reason Sunkissed exists. Everything after it — the name, the first four products, the thirty-five we make now — came out of one problem in one house.
Why the Cream Worked When the Others Didn’t
Most moisturisers are built for skin that is already fine. They sit on the surface, feel pleasant, and evaporate.
My mother’s skin was not fine. It needed something with weight to it — something that stayed put and kept working after the first hour. So that is what I made. Not a general product. A product for one specific problem, belonging to one specific person.
It worked. Visibly, and it kept working.
I remember thinking: if this is happening in my own house, it is happening in thousands of others. Not a niche. Just people whose skin does not match what is being sold to them.
That thought is the whole company.
Why We Called It Sunkissed
When I was small, my mother told me about Hanuman looking up at the sun, mistaking it for a ripe mango, and leaping to catch it.
Children keep strange things. What stayed with me was not the leap. It was the idea that the sun was close enough to reach.
Years later I had a page of possible brand names and none of them meant anything. The sun kept coming back, and for a plainer reason than nostalgia: sunlight does not choose. It falls on everyone equally, and on every skin tone it lifts a warmth that is already there.
You already have a glow. The products are only there to help it show.
Four Products. That Was the Whole Range.
Sunkissed launched with a body butter, a body moisturizer, a goat milk soap and a lip balm.
The body butter was my mother’s cream. The moisturizer was a lighter version for people who did not need that much. The soap was there because washing dry skin with the wrong thing undoes everything you just did for it. The lip balm was small, cheap, and the item people reached for first.
Four products looks like modesty. It was not. It was a rule.
A big catalogue makes a new brand look established, and looking established is worth something when nobody has heard of you. But a range built that fast is mostly filler — products that exist to occupy a shelf rather than fix anything. I wanted to explain, in one sentence and without pausing, why each product existed.
Four I could defend beat twenty I could not. That rule has not moved since.
Three Years Behind a Stall
For the next three or four years I sold at pop-ups and market stalls. Dozens of them.
You stand behind a table. Someone picks up a jar, turns it over, reads the back, puts it down. Most people put it down. And nearly every one of them tells you something useful on the way past, without meaning to.
Somewhere in there I stopped selling and started listening.
They told me what their skin was doing. They told me, separately, how it made them feel — and the second one mattered more. They talked about their hair constantly: fall, dryness, scalp trouble. That is the only reason hair care exists in our range at all.
And they described products they had been hunting for and could not find anywhere.
A survey answers the question you already knew to ask. A conversation hands you the one you didn’t.
The same gaps came up again and again — different women, different cities, the same missing thing. That repetition was the brief. When enough strangers describe the same absence, it is real, and it is worth formulating for.
The Range Grew One Conversation at a Time
Never in a planning meeting. Always because someone asked.
● Hair care — the request that came up most
● Toners
● Serums
● Creams
● Body care and body butters
● Soaps
● Lip care
Around 35 products now.
I want to be straight about that number, because thirty-five can sound like a strategy. It was not. The range is a receipt — a record of what people kept asking for, collected over several years. It is also why it does not look like a range someone designed in one sitting.
If you are new here, the goat milk soap is one of the original four and still one of the most loved things we make.
How We Decide What to Make: Listen, Understand, Formulate, Improve, Grow
Nobody wrote this on a wall. I worked it out afterwards, describing what had already been happening for years.
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Stage |
What it actually means |
|
Listen |
Not asking people what they would buy. Paying attention to what they are struggling with. It started with my mother and carried on across three years of stalls. |
|
Understand |
Dry skin is not one condition. Winter dryness and lifelong dryness need different things. The work is identifying which one is in front of you. |
|
Formulate |
Only then does anything get made. That first cream was thick because her skin needed weight. The formula follows the problem, never the reverse. |
|
Improve |
Nothing is finished at version one. You learn where a product falls short only after people have lived with it for months. |
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Grow |
Growth is the by-product of the other four. The range expands on its own, because people keep telling you what is missing. |
One Jar to Thirty-Five Products
|
One problem at home → one jar for my mother → four products → three years of listening → a range built from what people asked for → around 35 products today. |
Sunkissed did not start as a business idea. It started as a jar of cream for one person, and then a long run of conversations with people carrying problems of their own.
That is still exactly how it works.
Frequently Asked Questions
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When did Sunkissed start?
2017, with one formulation made for my mother, whose extremely dry skin was not responding to the body butters, creams and moisturisers we were buying.
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Why is the brand called Sunkissed?
It goes back to a story my mother told me as a child, about Hanuman mistaking the sun for a ripe mango. Years later the name earned a second meaning: sunlight brings out a natural warmth in every skin tone, and that glow belongs to everyone.
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How did Sunkissed begin?
At home. Nothing we bought was working on my mother’s dry skin, so I made her something rich and deeply moisturising instead. It worked — and made me realise how many people were living with problems nobody had bothered to solve properly.
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What were the first Sunkissed products?
Four: a body butter, a body moisturizer, a goat milk soap and a lip balm.
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How many products does Sunkissed have now?
Around 35, across hair care, face care, body care, cleansing, toners, serums, creams, body butters, soaps and lip care. See the full range here.
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What is the philosophy behind Sunkissed?
Listen, understand, formulate, improve, grow. Every product starts from a real problem someone described.
One Last Thing
Every product we make began as somebody’s problem. The first was my mother’s. The rest came from people who stopped at a stall and told me what they could not find.
If your skin or hair has been struggling with something, tell us. That is genuinely how most of this range came to exist.
See the full Sunkissed range, or read more about us .
