You Don't Know Joe...
But He's a Woman's Anti-Ageing Secret Weapon
You're involved, perhaps deeply, with Joe A. Lewis, even though the two of you have never met. Look in your medicine cabinet or handbag: if it contains a product with alpha-hydroxy acid, idebenone, or coffeeberry, then you're likely to be relying on Lewis to put your best face forward. The super-clever Southerner investigated these ingredients for some of skin care's most promising products -- MD Formulations, Prevage and more. That's why in the beauty industry, he's not just a chemist, he's the king of cosmeceuticals.
Lewis is a bit of an overachiever. He has 20 years' experience as a skin-care and pharmaceutical product formulator. While earning a degree in chemistry, he also majored in biology and physics, and minored in maths. That he's somewhat of a trade secret, and not a brand name like many dermatologists, has less to do with modesty than with his behind-the-scenes mission: to find new anti-ageing ingredients in scientific backwaters (read: academic laboratories that are often unrelated to cosmetic chemistry) and bringing them into the skin-care arena. The difference about Lewis is that rather than using his findings to build his own product range, which he has only just begun to do with his spa-brand Priori, he's made a living out of backing other businesses.
Portraits by James Salzano
