Published in " businessoffashion " Link to the Article
Years after Brandon Truaxe, the trailblazing beauty founder, passed away, his partner Riyadh Swedaan has launched a skincare collection in his name.
On the surface, there is very little that seems sentimental about Tursian, a new-to-market skincare brand that sells, among other things, a tube of Y-3 Youth Restore Serum Concentrate for the matter-of-fact price of $300. Perhaps that’s an advantage in the current beauty market, with customers increasingly choosing value over vibes.
The brand launched direct-to-consumer earlier this month with 20 products, each tagged with a letter and number denoting the product’s benefit; the $300 serum, Y-3, is the third step in the brand’s anti-aging routine, for example. There’s also a line for brightening (R for radiance) and another for hydration (P for reasons unclear). Its high-science messaging is dense enough to be impenetrable, hence the easy-to-read numbers and letters. But there are few recognisable ingredients; not even a drop of hyaluronic acid. Its Y-3 serum is made with a cocktail of peptides and a muscle relaxant derived from the paracress herb.
Then you dig deeper, and the feeling starts to flow. Tursian’s founder, Riyadh Swedaan, was a former employee of the Canadian beauty brand Deciem, and more significantly the long-term partner of its late founder, Brandon Truaxe. Swedaan said that the brand name Tursian is a variation on a name Truaxe had before he moved to Canada from Iran in the mid-1990s. The brand’s capital T logo has an intentional slice removed.
“Brandon is the missing piece,” Swedaan told The Business of Beauty
Skin, Deeper
Swedaan met Truaxe in 2008 when the former moved to Toronto from Iraq for pharmaceutical school, five years before Truaxe would endeavour to launch 10 beauty brands under a parent company called Deciem. The entrepreneur’s legacy in beauty can be felt not only in the continued blockbuster success of brands like The Ordinary but in his commitment to transparency in skincare pricing.
According to Swedaan, he and Truaxe had long discussed Deciem’s approach to a luxury skincare brand, which would be something technology-minded — similar to Truaxe’s pet project Niod under the Deciem umbrella — but glossy, almost futuristic. Swedaan managed one of Deciem’s Toronto factories, but left the brand in 2020.
After three years of toiling on the formulas and details, he is ready to bring Tursian to life in his partner’s memory, investing handsomely in rare ingredients like antioxidant-rich Thai mushrooms or “velvet seaweed,” building labs in New Jersey and Dubai and stocking them with the latest and greatest manufacturing technology imported from Korea, Italy and the UK.
“We don’t include hyaluronic acid, or transamic acids, or alpha hydroxy acids or beta hydroxy acids,” Swedaan said.
Labour of Love
Even understanding the notoriously high-margin business of skincare, where companies are likely to spend more shipping a moisturiser than what goes into it, Tursian’s products are apparently, undeniably, expensively made.
Swedaan went on a world tour of ingredient suppliers, maxing out his passport twice; he boasts sourcing from Mexico, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, Switzerland, the UK and Vietnam. “Every ingredient in the world,” he said, “We have it in our formulas.” Some of the products in the line were almost too efficacious; Swedaan had to temper down three serums after their active concentration accidentally qualified them as pharmaceuticalgrade.
Though Truaxe is often credited with giving ingredients prime billing in every aspect of beauty products, from social media to packaging, Tursian still faces stiff competition in prestige skincare. Swedaan hopes to elevate the brand beyond the competition by forgoing commonly used skincare ingredients as a point of pride.
