Discover more from our Living Well series, spotlighting the routines, rituals, and perspectives shaping how today’s founders take care of themselves here. 

Living Well with Jeanette Thottrup

For those meeting you for the first time, how do you usually describe what you do today? I am the founder of Seed to Skin, a clean, high-performance skincare brand born out of our organic farm and dedicated laboratory in Tuscany. We bridge nature, the potency of organic, raw ingredients with green molecular science to create highly efficacious, sustainable products. I see myself as a farmer, researcher, herbalist, and formulator, and I aspire to be a biotech scientist. 

All working to translate the unique energy of our land into transformative skincare.

You’ve had such a multifaceted path, from fashion to wellness to skincare. How do all those chapters connect for you now? For me, it all connects very naturally now, even though it didn’t at the time.

I started in fashion and loved the fast-paced, creative world, but when I went through the experience of not being able to get pregnant, everything shifted. It made me reassess what truly matters and led me into wellness.

Studying natural medicine deepened my understanding of the body and the connection between inner and outer health. That’s when skincare really clicked for me. Skin isn’t separate, it reflects everything happening within us.

I still draw from my background in fashion, especially my sensitivity to texture and how something feels, not just how it performs.

Looking back, all of those chapters have come together. Everything we learn becomes part of our language, it just takes time to see how it connects.

When you first started building Seed to Skin, what did you feel was missing in the skincare industry that you couldn’t ignore? When I first started building Seed to Skin, I saw a clear divide in the skincare world that I couldn’t ignore. On one side, there were science-led formulas that delivered results but often lacked purity and connection to nature. On the other, natural skincare felt clean and beautiful, but didn’t always truly perform.

I never believed you should have to choose between the two.

For me, the real shift was rethinking where efficacy begins. It starts with the raw material, fresh, potent botanicals grown in clean, living soil. Before biotech or complex processing, there is the plant itself. That’s why creating our herb house, where we can grow, harvest, and transform ingredients at their peak, became essential.

By working this way, and pairing it with rigorous formulation and clinical testing, we’ve been able to show that you can have both: true natural integrity and real, visible results. That was the foundation, and it still is.

“Green molecular science” is such a distinct positioning. How did you arrive at that philosophy, and what does it mean in practice? Green Molecular Science emerged from a simple yet important realization: nature is incredibly powerful, but only if the skin can truly receive and use what the plant offers.

Early on, I saw that many natural ingredients were beautiful in theory but not always effective in practice because their molecules were too large, too unstable, or not sufficiently bioavailable to penetrate where they are needed. At the same time, conventional science was solving this—but often at the expense of natural integrity.

So the question became: how do we elevate nature without compromising it?

That’s where Green Molecular Science was born. It’s about understanding how to transform botanicals at a molecular level—through processes like fermentation, double extraction, and gentle bio-conversion—to make them more active, more stable, and more easily recognized by the skin.

In practice, this means:

+ Shrinking molecular size to enhance penetration
+ Increasing bioavailability so the skin can actually use the actives
+ Preserving the full intelligence of the plant, rather than isolating or stripping it down
+ Working with living processes, not against them

It’s not about replacing nature with technology, it’s about guiding nature to perform at its highest potential.

Ultimately, Green Molecular Science allows us to bridge what was once divided: the purity of natural skincare with the proven efficacy of advanced science.

You chose to build your own lab instead of outsourcing. That’s a big decision. Why was that non-negotiable for you? Building our own lab was never really a question, it was essential.

From the beginning, I wanted to control the entire journey from seed to skin. Not just the formulation, but the quality of the soil, the way the plants are grown, when they are harvested, and how they are transformed. You simply can’t achieve that level of integrity if you outsource every step.

But for us, it goes even further than having our own lab. We have the farm, a herb processing house, the lab, and a spa, all working together. We call it our skincare village. This ecosystem allows us to observe, test, and refine in real time. We can follow an ingredient from the field, through extraction and formulation, all the way to how it performs on the skin.

That immediacy is incredibly powerful. It means we are not relying on static data, we are constantly learning, adjusting, and improving.

In the end, it’s about proximity. The closer you are to every step of the process, the more truth, quality, and performance you can build into the product.

Sustainability is often overused in beauty. What does it actually mean to you in practice at Seed to Skin? Sustainability is a word that’s used a lot, but for us, it’s really about consciousness in everything we do.

At Seed to Skin, it’s not a separate initiative, it’s embedded in how we think, build, and operate every day. From creating our lab within the village to support the local community, to offering meaningful work and sharing knowledge, it’s about being part of a living ecosystem rather than extracting from it.

We work closely with small growers and local producers, both in Tuscany and around the world, supporting traditional practices and helping sustain smaller communities. It’s important to us that what we create has a positive impact not just on the skin, but on the people and places behind each ingredient.

And at the same time, we are constantly asking ourselves how to reduce our carbon footprint, how to grow better, produce more responsibly, and waste less.

For us, sustainability is not a claim, it’s a continuous responsibility

Can you walk us through what happens inside your lab that makes your formulations different from traditional “natural” skincare? Yes, what makes our formulations different actually begins long before anything enters the lab.

In traditional natural skincare, formulation often starts with pre-made ingredients. For us, it starts at the level of the plant, how it is grown, when it is harvested, and most importantly, how it is transformed before formulation even begins.

A large part of our work happens in what we call our herb house. This is where we carry out extractions, fermentations, and other bio-transformative processes on fresh botanicals. By the time an ingredient reaches the lab, it is already highly active, its molecules refined, its potency enhanced, and its bioavailability significantly improved.

So when we begin formulating, we are not working with raw or passive materials, we are working with living, intelligent extracts that have already gone through multiple stages of activation.

This completely changes the role of the lab. It becomes less about assembling ingredients and more about fine-tuning, balancing, and delivering these actives in the most effective way.

In essence, our formulations don’t start in the lab, they start in the field and the herb house, where the real transformation happens.

For someone new to Seed to Skin, where should they start? For someone new to Seed to Skin, I would always suggest starting with a few key products that allow you to really feel the philosophy on your skin.

At its core, our approach is about restoring balance, strengthening the skin, and working with its natural intelligence—so beginning with the essentials is the best way to experience that.

I would start with:

+ A gentle cleanser to respect and prepare the skin, like The Divine Cleanse
+ A serum to deliver active botanicals where they are needed most – The Biom’Sphere
+ And a face oil or cream to support and protect the barrier – The Midnight Miracle or The Cure, one of our best selling 24 hour creams.

From there, you can build depending on your skin’s needs, whether that’s more hydration, repair, or targeted treatments. But more importantly, it’s not about using many products, it’s about using the right ones consistently and allowing the skin to rebalance over time.

Seed to Skin is not an instant approach, it’s a long-term relationship with your skin.

What does your skincare routine look like right now, morning to night? In the morning, I wash with The Divine Cleanse, or if I really want glass skin, The Clarity Cleanse .

Then my all-time go-to The Dew Mist. It is like a morning coffee for the skin, and you see the instant difference in plumper, more refined skin.

Then the Light Source, or in the summer, often just the Biom’Sphere and the Light Time Recovery Eye Cream. 

At night here’s what I use in order. 

+ The Divine Cleanse
+ The Fermen’Tonic
+ The Alche’Mist™
+ The Night Source
+ Eye Time Recovery Eye Cream

What does “living well” mean to you now, compared to a few years ago? Living well means something quite different to me now than it did a few years ago.

Today, it’s much more about slowing down—really stopping and being present enough to understand the moment I’m in, rather than constantly moving towards the next thing. It’s about creating space to go deeper, to reflect, and to make more conscious choices in how I live.

I think much more about what I eat, how I nourish my body, how I spend my time, and the energy I surround myself with. It’s less about doing more and more about doing things with intention.

For me, living well now is about awareness, simplicity, and depth. Choosing quality over speed, and being fully present in the life I’m actually living.