So our parents don’t go through what our grandparents did
Carolina Reis Oliveira is a Brazilian scientist and co-founder of OneSkin with Alessandra Zonari Scheel. The company grows human skin in the laboratory so that a claim about rejuvenation can be tested on tissue rather than argued about in marketing copy.
She is the clearest voice on this quest about why anyone does this work. Asked what she fears most about ageing, she does not talk about death. She talks about pain — the physical kind, and the other kind: the moment someone stops recognising their family and friends, which she describes as hard for everyone around them, not only for the person it happens to.
This is not theoretical for her. She has watched it with her grandparents. She has already lost her father. And she is explicit that what drives the company is not wanting to watch her mother go through the same thing — and then not wanting her own children and grandchildren to watch it either.
The lab work sits underneath that. During our visit they took a sample of Marek’s skin — lifted with adhesive rather than cut — to measure his skin age, with a plan to measure again months later. It is a small demonstration of the company’s whole premise: if you can measure it, you can find out whether it worked.
Like Alessandra, she moved out of San Francisco to Sausalito and counts it as a health decision — closer to nature, more sport, and a community where people actually know each other. Her own morning is the gym or a trail hike, and often a paddleboard on the bay.
The mechanism underneath all of it is hers to explain. The peptide OneSkin screened for gets into the skin and switches the cells’ own DNA repair back on — the repair that sunlight, pollution and time keep making necessary, and that skin gets worse at with age. Fewer cells then tip over into senescence, so there is less of the inflammation those cells give off, and the tissue can clear the ones already sitting there. What they measure afterwards is more collagen and a stronger barrier, with the healthy cells left alone.
And one of their results reaches well past skin. She describes a study in people aged roughly sixty to ninety who used the body lotion for twelve weeks: afterwards, markers of inflammation in their blood had come down. A cream, applied to the outside. Her conclusion is the plain one — anything that lowers inflammation is worth doing, and skin is part of that.
