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.
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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 pharmaceutical-grade.
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.
But a more significant investment may be Tursian’s 12,000-square-foot facility just outside Manhattan in New Brunswick, New Jersey, replete with state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment, such as a machine designated just to print the labels on the brand’s square moisturiser jars. Manufacturing, formulations and design all occur in-house, with a main headquarters in Dubai, where most of the brand’s 35 employees work. Tursian declined to comment on how much it has spent developing the brand.
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Swedaan said he has taken no outside investment, and is the sole owner of the company.
He was one of the beneficaries of Truaxe’s will alongside senior staff like former chief executive Nicola Kilner. (Truaxe’s will was written months after the Estée Lauder Companies purchased a $50 million minority stake in Deciem in 2019). The value of his assets in personal property and real estate were estimated at north of $4 million in a letter appointing his estate’s trustee.
“To build the brand, you have to make sure everything is under your hand,” Swedaan said.
He has help in the form of Dia Foley, Tursian’s vice-president of brand and retail and another friend and collaborator of Truaxe’s, who worked on his pre-Deciem business Indeed Laboratories — and happened to live in his building. “He would come down at three o’clock in the morning banging on my door with an idea,” she said fondly.
Foley described Tursian’s target customer as someone looking for “solid, clinical results” who is not experimental in their skincare dealings. At the same time, Swedaan has the air of a mad scientist, his speech cycling through cosmeceutical topics at centrifugal speed. While his opinions on hyaluronic acid may be his own, others, like the focus on direct and transparent communication with the buying public, seem to be channeled from Truaxe.
“No school in the world could give you the experience he gave me,” Swedaan said. “Now I can translate that experience into a product.”
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