Developed by Harvard and MIT scientists, Aramore, an incredible skincare brand focused on cellular longevity and the use of NAD+ technology to address aging at its source. Under the leadership of visionary entrepreneur and CEO Melisse Shaban, the brand strives to transform the skincare industry by combining biotechnology with effective skincare solutions. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Shaban to hear all about the Aramore collection, her background, and more.
Thank you for joining us. Please tell us about yourself.
I grew up in and around the personal care industry. My father worked at Revlon for thirty years, so I was raised listening to him and his colleagues talk about the brand and the business. The industry became second nature to me, though today I’d call myself fairly category-agnostic. I’m a lifelong New Yorker at heart; my whole family is from Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, and I’ve been a NYC sports fan for decades. These days I split my time between New York and North Carolina with my family. I love to cook (that’s my Italian side coming through), love to entertain, and love to travel.
What sets Aramore apart from other brands and who is your target customer?
Aramore is our brand, but it was developed under the parent company New Frontier Bio, a research and innovation lab. Our technology is built on fifteen years of skin biology research out of Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute and was developed with a renowned peptide chemist from MIT. At its core, Aramore is rooted in cellular biology, and we don’t consider ourselves to be traditional skincare, we’re a skin performance brand. We created a topical supplement that delivers NAD+ precursors to the cellular level to address the root cause of cellular decline in skin. Our proprietary complex was designed to stimulate cellular energy, penetrating all the way to the top of the basal layer of skin cells where most products can’t reach.
That’s what makes us different. Most skincare addresses aging from the outside in and we’re addressing it from the inside out. NAD+ levels naturally begin to decline in your late twenties, and that means the processes that keep skin cells healthy and energized start to slow down. Our approach is to stimulate NAD+ production in a way that supports the performance of your cells and the fitness of your skin.
My perspective on our target audience is not necessarily demographic. It’s more about consumers who believe in science and in their ability to affect their skin span and health span. Again, NAD+ starts to decline in your late twenties, and by the age of fifty, you’re producing about 50% less NAD+. Our products can be used as an intervention, but also protection. Think of it like sunscreen, it’s easier to stop the sun damage before it happens rather than correct it.
For those unfamiliar with it, why is NAD+ so important and how do you incorporate it into all your products?
NAD+ stimulates all living cells. Every cell in your body requires it, not just skin. This isn’t new science; there’s an enormous body of research behind NAD+, far more than newer ingredients like exosomes. Your skin barrier exists to keep bad things out and good things in, and NAD+ is essentially the battery that powers skin cells and supports a healthy skin barrier. Again, we start losing NAD+ quite early in life, and by fifty, we’ve lost about half of it. That means skin cells are no longer performing at their full capacity, and that’s not a skincare problem, it’s a cellular one. Aramore is the first clinically proven NAD+-boosting skincare designed to support cellular health and help reverse or prevent the signs of aging. We’re not treating how you look; we’re treating how your cells behave.
What is the significance of the brand’s name?
The brand is Aramore, but the company behind it is New Frontier Bio, which has a fascinating origin story. One of the scientific co-founders is Stephen Kennedy Smith, nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The company’s name is an homage to JFK’s “New Frontier,” his initiative around transformative change in poverty, education, and civil rights. In that same spirit, New Frontier Bio was named to reflect the idea that we can actively participate in impacting our own health span, lifespan, and longevity. Aramore, New Frontier Bio’s first consumer-facing brand, represents the greater idea that more commitment to science and innovation can deliver more years to our lives, and more life to our years.
Having worked in the skincare industry for so many years do you have any top beauty tips you could share?
Start early, and practice moderation. More is not more. You don’t need seventeen products to keep your skin healthy, and you don’t need to spend extraordinary amounts of money. The real key is a consistent, simple routine you’ll actually stick with. If I could speak for our founding scientists, who are much smarter than I am about this, they’d point to three skin health essentials: an NAD+ precursor, retinol, and sunscreen. Those are the key components you need to keep your skin cells healthy long term. Skin is your largest organ, and one of the few you can actually see, so we tend to judge it by what’s in the mirror. But we’re really aging from the inside out. That’s why that decline in cell performance starts earlier than most people think. It’s always much harder to reverse something than to prevent it in the first place.
Anything else we should know?
I believe we should meet all ourselves where we are. Chasing a certain age, or trying to look thirty years younger, isn’t something I think is helpful societally. There’s no shade on plastic surgery or other aesthetic choices, but I do believe that ‘healthy’ is always the most beautiful. When we look in the mirror each day, the goal should be to affirm ourselves and find the beauty that’s already there, rather than cataloguing what we’d change. Women especially tend to focus on what we want to fix rather than what we love about ourselves. If we spent more time on the latter, I think we’d find more joy. Don’t let others define that for you, define it for yourself. It’s a bit of a mental practice, and not always an easy one in our current environment, but it’s one worth building.
For optimal skin longevity go to https://aramoreskincare.com/.
