Genetics is only a small part of it
Alessandra Zonari Scheel is a Brazilian scientist and co-founder of OneSkin, working with Carolina Reis Oliveira. The company’s approach starts from something most of the beauty industry avoids: grow actual human skin in the lab, and then measure whether a product does anything to it.
That distinction matters. Conventional anti-ageing creams largely work on the appearance of ageing — softening wrinkles, treating the effects. OneSkin set out to ask whether skin itself could be made measurably younger, and to test that claim on real tissue rather than on how a face photographs.
They took Marek’s skin during our visit — a sample lifted with adhesive rather than cut — to establish his skin age, with the plan of measuring again after several months of using the product. A before-and-after on his own body, which is precisely the sort of thing this quest was for.
But the moment from her interview that stays with me is personal, not technical. She grew up expecting to inherit her family’s illnesses: grandparents lost early to cardiovascular disease and cancer, a grandmother with Alzheimer’s. She assumed the same was coming for her because it was genetic. Discovering that the way we age is mostly not decided by genetics is what she calls the game changer.
She and Carolina moved out of San Francisco to Sausalito, and both describe the change as a longevity intervention in itself — not for the air, but for the people. In the city they never met their neighbours. Here there is a WhatsApp group for volleyball on Sunday afternoons. Her own morning is a sunrise run with San Francisco in the distance, and a swim in the bay once a week.
