The Beauty Founder Who Wants You to Stop Trying to Fix Your Face

By HTE Founder, Erin Hughes.

There is a peculiar contradiction at the heart of Mukti.

She has spent almost three decades creating skincare products, yet she will tell you there is no miracle in a jar.

She works in an industry fuelled by our desire for better skin, yet she thinks many of us are using far too much of everything.

She founded a beauty company, yet increasingly finds herself questioning one of beauty’s oldest and most profitable ideas: that the face looking back at us needs fixing.

Mukti is perfectly aware of the contradiction.

“I’ve never pretended I’m standing outside the industry I criticise. I’m in it. I built a company inside it.”

And perhaps that is what makes talking to the founder of Mukti Organics interesting.

This isn’t someone throwing stones at the beauty industry from a safe distance. She has spent almost 30 years inside the machine, formulating products, watching ingredients become trends, seeing new terminology appear on labels and witnessing entire categories emerge around women’s anxieties.

She has also spent those same years ageing.

Her hormones have changed. Her skin has changed. Her understanding of both has changed.

And somewhere along the way, her philosophy became less about correcting the face and more about understanding the person living inside it.

Open the average skincare enthusiast’s bathroom cabinet and you could be forgiven for thinking healthy skin requires an advanced degree.

Acids. Peptides. Retinoids. Vitamin C. Ceramides. Exfoliants. Essences. Serums. Oils. Masks.

Then comes the truly difficult part: working out which of them can be used together.

TikTok has not exactly simplified matters.

A 15-second video can introduce an ingredient you’ve never heard of on Monday and have you wondering whether your entire skincare routine is obsolete by Tuesday.

Mukti thinks we’ve reached the point where the pursuit of better skin can actually make people more anxious about it.

“Achieving healthy skin was never supposed to require a spreadsheet,” she says.

It might be the most useful skincare advice you’ll hear all year.

Because while beauty has become extraordinarily good at teaching us what to add, Mukti is increasingly interested in what happens when we subtract.

Her approach when someone’s skin is struggling is not automatically another active, another serum or another step.

It is an audit.

Empty the bathroom cabinet.

Work out what is actually necessary.

Then build the routine back up.

The instinct, she says, particularly when something suddenly changes in the mirror, is to do more. Ageing, hormonal changes, breakouts and sensitivity can all trigger the same response: intervene.

Her instinct now is often the opposite.

“Strip back and simplify before you add on.”

That philosophy sounds almost rebellious in an industry built around the launch of the next thing.

When did ageing become something we could fail at?

There is another word Mukti would happily remove from the bathroom cabinet.

Anti-ageing.

She describes herself instead as “pro-ageing”.

The distinction matters.

Because hidden inside the language of anti-ageing is an extraordinary proposition: that something every human being fortunate enough to live long enough will experience is somehow an opponent.

Once ageing becomes the enemy, Mukti argues, the evidence of it becomes evidence that we are losing.

A wrinkle.

A grey hair.

A hormonal shift.

A face that no longer looks exactly as it did at 27.

“Ageing isn’t a malfunction to correct,” she says.

What bothers her particularly is the timing.

The moments when many women begin questioning their appearance most intensely often collide with enormous biological and psychological transitions: pregnancy, motherhood, perimenopause and menopause.

These are chapters in which a woman’s body can suddenly feel unfamiliar. Skin changes. Hair changes. Sleep changes. Hormones change. Sometimes her sense of self changes too.

And right there, waiting for her, is an industry with a solution.

Or twelve.

Mukti has come to believe that what women are buying in those moments is not always skincare at all.

It might be control.

Reassurance.

Confidence.

Hope.

A sense that something can still be made predictable while everything else seems to be changing.

“She’s not really shopping for a serum in that moment,” Mukti says.

That sentence changes the conversation.

Because suddenly the bathroom cabinet isn’t really about beauty.

It’s about psychology.

Her own face became part of the education

There are things Mukti knows at this point in her life that the younger version of herself couldn’t have known, regardless of how much she studied formulation.

Some lessons required time.

“Everything I know about skin now, I learned the slow way, on my own face,” she says.

In her twenties, she thought good skin was something you achieved and then maintained.

Thirty years later, she sees it differently.

Skin, she says, is “a running conversation with whatever your body is going through”.

And the conversation keeps changing.

That idea feels almost embarrassingly obvious once you hear it, yet so much of beauty culture suggests the opposite. Find your perfect routine. Discover your holy grail. Solve the problem. Freeze the result.

But bodies don’t freeze.

Neither do hormones, lifestyles, environments or faces.

The skin that loved something five years ago may not want it now.

For Mukti, that has shifted the objective from perfection to responsiveness.

What is my skin telling me?

What has changed?

What does it need now?

It is a very different question from: What is wrong with my face?

Perhaps the most dangerous beauty words are the reassuring ones

Ask Mukti which beauty terminology she’d like retired and “anti-ageing” comes quickly.

But then the conversation gets more interesting.

She is equally suspicious of words that sound reassuringly clinical.

“Hypoallergenic.”

“Dermatologist tested.”

“Clinically proven.”

“Fragrance free.”

“Non-comedogenic.”

Consumers, she believes, have become surrounded by language that feels precise without necessarily telling them what they think it does.

The same problem exists around “natural”, “clean”, “organic” and “non-toxic”.

Her frustration is not simply that marketing exists. Mukti is, after all, running a brand herself.

It is that consumers rarely have the time or knowledge to interrogate every reassuring phrase printed on a bottle.

She wants them to become more curious.

What exactly was clinically tested?

On whom?

How many people?

Who certified the organic claim?

What does the brand actually mean when it says “clean”?

That curiosity extends to regulation itself. Mukti has strong views about the relationship between industry and the bodies involved in assessing ingredient and fragrance safety, and she believes consumers should be much more interested in how those systems work.

You don’t have to agree with every conclusion she reaches to recognise the bigger point.

We have become extraordinarily skilled at reading skincare labels.

Perhaps we need to become better at questioning them.

Skin doesn’t begin at the skin

There is another limitation to the bathroom cabinet.

It can only reach so far.

We talk endlessly about what we put onto our skin while giving considerably less airtime to what is happening underneath it.

Sleep.

Stress.

Hormones.

Diet.

Environment.

The slow biological shifts that arrive whether or not we’ve purchased the appropriate serum.

Mukti sees skin as inseparable from the rest of the body. That means a conversation about skin cannot end with ingredients.

It is one of the reasons she has become so interested in the skin barrier, and why Mukti Organics has continued revisiting formulations rather than treating a finished product as permanently finished.

Recently, she says, that has included rethinking the brand’s preservation approach in pursuit of formulations that better support the barrier, even when doing so wasn’t necessarily the easiest commercial decision.

She describes barrier support as her current “obsession”.

It also reveals something about the way she has built the company.

For Mukti, formulation is never really finished.

As the science evolves, the products should too.

Maybe we don’t need another product. Maybe we need another question.

Towards the end of our conversation, I ask Mukti what she would change if she could alter just one conversation women have about their appearance.

Her answer isn’t about wrinkles.

Or pigmentation.

Or pores.

It isn’t even really about skincare.

She wants to change the question.

Instead of looking into the mirror and thinking:

I need to fix this.

She would like us to become curious.

“I wonder what’s changed and why?”

It is a subtle shift, but perhaps a profound one.

One assumes failure.

The other invites understanding.

And after almost 30 years in an industry built partly on providing solutions, Mukti seems increasingly interested in whether women have been taught to identify too many problems.

Maybe the most radical thing a beauty founder can tell a woman is not that she has created something new to correct her.

Maybe it is this:

You are changing.

Your skin will change with you.

Pay attention to it. Support it. Understand it.

But you don’t have to declare war on it.

And you certainly don’t need a spreadsheet.