CHRISTINA AND MARY TRIVISONNO
Co-founders, Chick | Age: 21
Skincare is having a moment. Generation Z has made "Get ready with me" TikToks a social media touchstone, and teenagers spent 19% more on skincare last year than they did in 2022, per a report in December by investment bank Piper Sandler.
Two 21-year-old sisters at Washington University, Christina and Mary Trivisonno, developed the Chick skincare line because of their brother’s medical experiences and mother’s discoveries about microbiomes. The goal is to create products that use live biology to strengthen skin, collaborating with scientists to create formulations that keep probiotics living, shelf-stable and efficacious.
Christina participated in last summer’s Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship Launchpad internship with Ice Cream for Bears, a brand sweetened with honey instead of processed sugar. Last fall, she won the center’s IdeaBounce competition, was a finalist for the Olin Business School’s Big IdeaBounce elevator pitch competition, and was a finalist at Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at DePaul University’s Pitch Madness in Chicago.
Mary was an entrepreneurship program intern at Cortex St. Louis and had a WashU Pershing Fellowship in Non-Profit Leadership. Last fall, she participated in the Skandalaris Venture Competition and won in the exploration funding category, graduated from Cortex’s Boot Camp, won an IdeaBounce competition and was a teaching assistant for microeconomics and marketing courses.
How do probiotics help with skincare products? What's the science? There are 185-times more bacteria on just your skin, inhabiting what is called your skin microbiome (“micro” meaning tiny, “biome” meaning environment), than there are humans on Earth! These bacteria get a bad rap, but most are actually healthy or neutral and not responsible for breakouts. When your skin is at its healthiest, these bacteria cohabitate your face in harmony. However, when pathogenic bacteria and external irritants infiltrate your skin, it shows. Acne, irritation and dryness are common symptoms of an uprooted microbiome. In an imbalanced ecosystem, treating skin issues with harsh antibacterial ingredients (found in most cleansers) strips both bad and healthy bacteria. Without probiotics present on the skin to fight off pathogens, pathogens from the environment can more easily infiltrate the skin, causing persistent long-term acne with just brief periods of short-term relief. Chick seeks to address the underlying problem of imbalance by reintroducing healthy bacteria to the skin that can fight for themselves to prevent pathologies.
I remember there being a shampoo on the market that included yogurt in the 1970s that failed — is skincare different? We have found throughout our journey that most “probiotic” offerings on the market are not actually probiotic. Particularly in skincare, most other brands in the probiotic space are actually postbiotic. Postbiotics are the beneficial byproducts produced by probiotics during their life cycle. These include compounds like enzymes, peptides and fatty acids. Though postbiotics have skin benefits, especially pertaining to aging, they are not actually live bacteria and therefore lack the ability to actively compete with pathogens and rebalance the microbiome. We incorporate each member of the probiotic family (prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics) into our product line to allow for the full benefits of the probiotic family. Think of your skin as a garden, where prebiotics are soil, probiotics are the actual living plants and postbiotics are the oxygen these plants release.
Tell me how research and development went, in terms of lab work and regulation. Research and development was really fun because it involved a lot of trial and error and problem-solving. Like I (Christina) mentioned before, “probiotic” offerings currently on the market are mostly using metabolites rather than actual live probiotics. The space is pretty unexplored and there was not much of a road map. Our first big challenge was to find a way to keep a probiotic living and active but also stable in a skincare product. Typical skincare products — like cleansers, moisturizers, and creams — usually require some sort of preservative/stabilizer that would actually end up killing a probiotic because of the combination of oil and water. If you could find some way to avoid using harsher ingredients such as these, it would then create a bit of a Catch-22. The bacteria need moisture to survive, but if the moisture content is too high and keeps the bacteria living and active, it would be difficult to keep stable.
As the bacteria continue to grow, it would change the very makeup of the product itself (similar to how kefir tastes different as it ferments on your table throughout the week). This would not make for a very stable or feasible skincare product, and a product like this would probably fail to even pass the stability and microbial testing necessary to make it to the shelf. So our first big challenge that we had to overcome was to find a way to keep probiotics live and active without killing them but also stable on the shelf. Another challenge we faced during product development was selection of probiotic strains, which involved a lot of poring through studies and academic research and collaborating with microbiologists to narrow thousands of potential strains to the best possible blend to benefit the skin and treat various pathologies. Finally, the process involved a lot of collaboration across different scientific disciplines to create a product that made sense from a microbiology, chemistry and dermatology perspective.
What's it like working as a team of sisters? It is so much fun! We have always been super close. We originally chose to attend WashU to play basketball together. We always knew during our basketball recruiting process that we wanted to go to college together and play on the same team, so we only considered schools that recruited both of us. Of all those places, WashU had the best opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs, and we always knew we wanted to start a business together. Even though we’re twins, we honestly have pretty different personalities that go together well. We make a good team and have a lot of fun.
Skincare is obviously having a moment: how long do you think it will last, and do you think sales volumes will decline at some point? How are you planning contingencies? Because skin is so closely tied to identity, confidence and self-image, we think there will always be a strong need and desire for skincare products. However, we think consumer preferences will continue to change dramatically over time. There is a ton of data demonstrating shifts in consumer preferences away from conventional skincare towards cleaner and more natural products, science-based approaches, products offering multiple benefits in one and health-focused marketing. We think that Chick covers all of those bases and is prepared as preferences continue to shift more strongly in this direction.
What do you like about skincare? There's a lot of ink spilled about beauty standards, et al, but I wonder how you two think of the product you're selling. My favorite thing about the product we’re selling is that it shakes up the very nature of the skincare industry, shifting the focus from skin sterilization to skin strength and encouraging a focus on genuine health and long-term wellness rather than the concealment of perceived flaws. Our product aims to re-arm the skin’s natural defenses to help the skin fight for itself, which is a drastically different approach to current methods that actually harm the skin in the long-term by uprooting the microbiome and stripping the skin barrier through an overuse of toxic or synthetic ingredients. By addressing the microbiome, we address the cause of the problem rather than just symptoms. Today's beauty industry often promotes a narrow and harmful message, urging us to fix supposed imperfections and aspire to unattainable ideals, especially through damaging means.
At Chick, we challenge these notions. The idea for our brand was inspired by our brother Marc (whose nickname is Chick) and his journey with probiotics. But Marc being the inspiration for our brand extends well beyond just the nature of the product. Marc has shaped our entire perception and understanding of beauty, showing us beauty in the bigger picture and beyond narrow standards.
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