About us

SkinTheory is an app that helps people solve their skin issues, and most of all their acne. But really it’s an app about helping you feel in control of your skin. That is what it has always been about.

My name is Conor and I used to struggle with severe adult acne, mostly throughout my early twenties. It was crippling for my confidence and I always felt powerless to solve it. I tried everything. I went to the dermatologist countless times and worked through benzoyl peroxide, tretinoin, Differin and Accutane… more than once.

The acne kept coming back and I didn’t know why. It took some time, but the way I solved this was to actually get scientific about my acne.

The Scientific SkinTheory Method

This is basically the core of SkinTheory. I’ve tried to build and design the app around this principle.

1. Make a hypothesis about what is causing your acne, or what might fix it. For example, do nothing to your skin for a fixed number of weeks.
2. Track the results by taking pictures and noting down how your skin feels every day.
3. Analyze the results after at least 2 weeks (dermatologists recommend 6 to 8). See if your hypothesis made an improvement, or try something else.

Either way, now you have provable knowledge about your skin and can be more sure of yourself.

It's not easy

The two hardest parts of this process are:

1. Sticking with a routine through the bad times. Sometimes skin is purging.
2. Isolating other environmental factors that might be affecting your skin. For example, if you are stressed, your skin might break out even if you are doing everything right.

SkinTheory is designed to help you with both. It helps you stick to a routine by showing you results often and more clearly, and it helps you isolate environmental factors by keeping your notes and hypotheses in one place.

What worked for me

For years I did this process in a hacky way by putting photos in Flickr, so they wouldn’t show up (embarrassingly) in my camera roll, and with one super long note in Google Docs.

Long story short, it took a year or two before I really found what worked for me. I had been too intense with my skincare products. I needed to moisturize more and keep my skin clean without stripping all the oils away. The neat thing was discovering that the most effective solution was removing things from my routine, not adding more expensive potions and lotions, which is not a common approach in the skincare world.

Conclusion

I really wanted to share this process, so I built the first version of SkinTheory in 2019 to little fanfare.

Slowly, over the years, we’ve added more and more users and more and more features. My goal is to help people through the time in their lives when they have acne, or skin they’re not happy with, because it can be quite harrowing. From the outside the acne might not look that bad, but internally it can be really tough. We’re building this app to be a safe and interesting place to feel in control of your skin.