Lifestyle
These L.A. musicians investigated a medical mystery. What they discovered launched a new skincare line
The love story of musicians Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger and Mike Einziger was fortified in a lab.
After meeting through a mutual colleague in 2010, the Santa Monica-based couple’s courtship began the following year, as they were collaborating with Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer on a series of film scores. Einziger is best known as the founding guitarist of California-based rock band Incubus. His wife is a renowned composer and violinist for artists including Jethro Tull, Ringo Starr, Dave Matthews Band and Stevie Nicks.
The couple had been seeing one another for only about a year when together they stumbled upon a medical mystery. It resulted in a thrilling scientific discovery, the founding of a biotech beauty company called Mother Science — and their own unique happily-ever-after.
“It was an unexpected journey,” said Simpson-Einziger.
“We were simply trying to answer a series of unanswered scientific questions,” her husband added.
It all began in 2012 when Simpson-Einziger developed a fungal infection while traveling abroad. A classically trained violinist by trade, she was performing with composer A.R. Rahman in India when she noticed lightened patches of skin on her back and under her bra line. They resembled “loosely drawn flower blooms, with rounded edges,” she said.
After consulting her dermatologist, Simpson-Einziger was diagnosed with a temporary fungal infection called Tinea versicolor, which can lighten or darken skin pigmentation as a result of humidity.
“It’s an imbalance of the microbiome,” Simpson-Einziger said. “The condition was harmless, it resolves on its own and [I was told] that the lightened patches of skin would all go back to normal. But I got so curious.”
“We learned pretty quickly that there were no real hypotheses about how this was happening.”
— Mike Einziger, co-founder of Mother Science and Incubus guitarist
Armed with an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Virginia, the former physics and chemistry teacher pored through science journals like Pigment International and Chembiochem to find articles that better explained the science behind her skin condition. She then began to wonder if whatever had caused it could also be used as a skincare aid that reduced dark spots.
She enlisted the help of her then-fiancé, Einziger, who also happened to have a background in science. He had recently completed the two-year Special Student program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he studied cosmology and evolutionary biology. He still had access to the university’s considerable research databases, which meant he could help her look up articles on Tinea versicolor. Soon, he joined her obsession.
“There was tons of literature to research, but nothing coming at it from our perspective,” said Einziger. “We learned pretty quickly that there were no real hypotheses about how this was happening.”
Though they still couldn’t prove it, Simpson-Einziger’s theory that her skin condition could be of use in the beauty world kept them both up at night.
“I actually had a nightmare that somebody took her idea,” he said.
It was then, in 2015, that he called Dr. Jonathan Sackier, a family friend and biotech and medical entrepreneur, who co-invented robotic surgery.
“I taught his daughter violin lessons when I was a recent college graduate living in Virginia,” Simpson-Einziger said.
“We went to [him] fully prepared that we were going to get laughed out of the room,” Einziger added.
Sackier remembers the couple’s uncertainty during the phone call. “Ann-Marie was in the background, whispering, ‘He’s going to think we’re idiots,’” he said. “[Mike] asked if I could identify what it was about the fungal infection that was causing depigmentation and having identified it, could I synthesize or somehow isolate the chemical so that we could do something to impact pigmentation disorders.”
A surgeon by specialty, Sackier connected them with his colleague, Timothy Macdonald, a scientist and professor emeritus of chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Virginia.
“I have taken many projects to him over the years,” Sackier said. “I call him ‘Dr. No,’ because he always says, ‘No, that doesn’t make sense. No, that won’t work.’ When I told him this, he went, ‘Holy moly, that’s impressive.’”
Macdonald began advising the couple and helped connect them with a North Carolina-based research organization called PharmaDirections. The drug development company helped design a scientific program to explore various compounds that had caught the Einzigers’ attention while researching.
After countless studies, they discovered that a naturally occurring molecule that had co-evolved with the human microbiome, Malassezin (pronounced mal-uh-say-zin), could be beneficial for sun spots. While the molecule was identified and named in 2001, the Einzigers were the first to recognize that Malassezin could be valuable in the context of skincare.
“Malassezin is made from a yeast,” said New York-based dermatologist Dr. Amy Wechsler. “When someone has the yeast infection on their skin, the skin often bleaches temporarily.”
The couple filed an application to patent the discovery in 2016. (It was officially granted in 2018.) They then worked with a team of scientists including cosmetic chemist Susan Goldsberry and beauty innovation entrepreneur Tim McCraw to develop Malassezin into a topical serum after previously manufacturing it through a separate process called chemical synthesis.
They began testing to see if it could benefit melanocytes, the skin cells that produce melanin, the dark pigment in question. The couple used their personal savings to fund the initial research.
“I justified it as, ‘How much would I pay for an education where experts in the field teach me how to characterize a molecule and then commercialize it?’” Simpson-Einziger said. “That one-on-one education was worth what we put into investigating this molecule.”
They brought on beauty industry veteran Edna Coryell, McCraw’s daughter, as co-founder and CEO of Mother Science in August 2017 to oversee further research and development, which involved in vitro studies, 3D cell cultures, ex vivo skin testing and genetic analysis. Coryell had never brought a new ingredient to the market until Malassezin.
“It is very rare,” said Coryell. “Truly, as we were going through [the process], it was writing the playbook for this.’”
The Einzigers also collaborated with Dr. Pearl Grimes, director of the Vitiligo & Pigmentation Institute of Southern California, who specializes in vitiligo and pigmentation disorders.
“This is somebody who’s been looking at Tinea versicolor for decades,” Einziger said. “Her first reaction was, ‘How did you guys figure this out?’”
“I was 100% fascinated,” Grimes said of reviewing their initial in vitro studies. “The science [and] the concept was disruptive.”
Grimes assembled a clinical program, which led to proof-of-concept data that’s since been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Academy of Dermatology and Journal of Drugs in Dermatology.
She went so far as to take a skin biopsy from her own elbow for lab testing. Using VISIA skin analysis technology, she found that the serum helped fade hyperpigmentation on the sample.
“That’s when I really knew that it worked,” Grimes said. “I used it in a stubborn area, and I could clearly see via photographic documentation that it was responding.”
“Having holes punched in my face was an ultimate act of belief in what we’ve made.”
— Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger, co-founder of Mother Science and violinist
Einziger also biopsied a patch on his arm for Grimes to analyze. “We felt responsible,” he said. “Mine was done before we even did the human clinical study.”
Simpson-Einziger joked that she too “put real skin in the game” after she said she had her face punch-biopsied — a procedure in which an instrument is used to remove a deeper skin sample — three times.
“Having holes punched in my face was an ultimate act of belief in what we’ve made,” Simpson-Einziger said.
Once the Einzigers confirmed that the data supported their initial hypothesis in a human clinical study, they moved forward with a business plan for what eventually became Mother Science. (It joins the couple’s two other co-founded businesses, including Mixhalo, a networking technology company for live events.)
Mother Science — named as a nod to French physicist and chemist Marie Curie — was born as a result of raising an initial round of approximately $3.2 million in seed funding from a small group of venture capitalists and angel investors, including Hawktail’s Michael Polansky and Drew Houston, the co-founder of Dropbox. After more than six years of research, Malassezin became the DNA of Mother Science, which officially launched in 2023 with its first product, Molecular Hero Serum ($89). The product is meant to reduce hyperpigmentation and brighten skin.
“It’s a powerful antioxidant,” Simpson-Einziger said. “When we started testing, we learned that Malassezin happens to offer superior protection against hydroxyl and peroxyl free radicals, which are [some of] the most damaging. We had this molecule that was going to do something marvelous in protecting the skin.”
A second product, Retinol Synergist ($96), was released earlier this year. And Molecular Genesis Barrier Repair Moisturizer ($68), featuring Malassezin, will be released on Jan. 7.
“Malassezin is really versatile, as it’s able to target hyperpigmentation, improve the skin’s moisture barrier and provide potent antioxidant protection without any irritation,” said Connecticut-based dermatologist Dr. Mona Gohara, who is also an associate clinical professor at Yale University. “The beauty of it is it’s gentle but also highly efficacious.”
In 2016, the same year the Einzigers filed a patent for their scientific discovery, the couple married. They are now parents to four children including a nearly one-year-old son. Because their courtship intersected with their scientific passion project, they consider Mother Science their fifth child.
“We had a lot of people who said, ‘You don’t want to do this. This is too hard. It’s going to take years.’” Simpson-Einziger said, pausing. “I remember thinking, ‘Years don’t scare me. I have a baby. I’m going to have to take care of a human for 18 years.’ There are no guarantees when you have a child how they’re going to turn out, but you do it out of love, out of passion, and it makes your life richer.”
While the couple continues to grow Mother Science’s product lineup, Simpson-Einziger is most proud of their process of discovery itself.
“We’re excited about contributing to science, and having that legacy as part of our brand,” she said.
She hopes Malassezin will one day be as universally known as Vitamin C and hyaluronic acid.
“I want people talking about Malassezin, not even about our brand, just about Malassezin,” she said.
In other words, she and her husband hope the ingredients of their products will be front and center — not themselves.
“Nobody is excited about coming to me for their skincare needs,” Einziger, who still regularly sells out stadiums with Incubus, said with a laugh. “I’m just a person who plays music who happens to be curious about the skin microbiome.”
Lifestyle
The spies on TV this fall are juggling work and family – just like the rest of us
In Netflix’s new spy series Black Doves, Keira Knightley’s character Helen Webb seems to be the perfect wife and partner for an up-and-coming official in the British government.
Beautiful and intelligent, she’s a warm mother to two cute kids, capable of hosting a holiday party for her husband’s staff in one moment and coercing the children to stop playing underneath a table in the next.
But Mrs. Webb is also a spy for a mysterious intelligence organization, feeding them information about her husband’s work all while managing the family’s affairs – and having an affair with another man. And when that affair is discovered by a “handler” from the organization – played with a matronly ruthlessness by Sarah Lancashire – she mostly has one question for Mrs. Webb:
Why was she sleeping with this man?
Mrs. Webb’s answer was a surprise, coming from an experienced spy. “I wasn’t working an angle,” she says through tears. “It was real. It wasn’t a job. It was…love.”
That’s right. After 10 years of marriage and two kids, Mrs. Webb fell in love with someone else while trying to decide if she still cares for her husband.
It’s a deliciously dramatic situation far different than the stories of detached, mostly loner spies like James Bond and Mission Impossible‘s Ethan Hunt.
Spies with families fill fall TV
Sure, there have been spy characters with families in films and TV before, from Harrison Ford’s turn as Jack Ryan in 1992’s Patriot Games to FX’s The Americans, which concluded in 2018.
But this fall has seen a veritable flood of stories about spies with spouses and children, trying to hold onto their families while balancing the demands of brutal, often dehumanizing jobs.
There’s Michael Fassbender’s CIA case officer Martian — I know, that name seems a little odd — in Showtime’s new series The Agency. He’s trying to reconnect with a teen daughter named Poppy (India Fowler) who wants to know why he was gone so much during his last assignment.
She asks if he got information from people by making friends with them.
“Friends are people you like,” Martian replies, wryly. “[These are more like] acquaintances.”
Poppy’s reply: “So you left us for six years to make…acquaintances?”
Ouch. Even bad guys have these issues. Like Eddie Redmayne’s character, an expert assassin in Peacock’s new series The Day of The Jackal. He’s married to a woman named Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) who suspects he’s having an affair because he’s so secretive. She has no idea her charming husband, who she knows as Charles, is actually a world-famous hitman.
By the time she’s discovered the secret room he built in their home for his disguises, multiple passports and assorted weapons, you’re left wondering why she doesn’t just run for the hills.
Spies with families are popping up in lots of series: Paramount+’s Lioness. Apple TV+’s Slow Horses. And the trend makes sense; for TV series looking to stretch compelling ideas across eight or ten episodes, the plotlines generated by family conflict can add a wealth of new storylines.
Each of these shows deftly uses spouses, children and loved ones to present a kind of spy thriller that feels different, with characters drawn so viewers can perhaps see a bit of themselves inside.
Everyday problems writ large
Their struggles can sometimes feel like ordinary challenges blown up into world-shaking espionage tales: spouses and children who don’t understand their demanding jobs, devotion to a vocation that damages them and their relationships, a growing sense of shame as their work keeps them from being present for the family.
These characters, even the villains, aren’t necessarily cold blooded killers. Nothing humanizes a character like seeing them care for someone they love. Indeed, that’s often the difference between anti-heroes and villains in such stories – the villains don’t really love anybody but themselves, while anti-heroes are driven by their connections to other people.
Even as you watch Redmayne’s The Jackal kill a gun maker to keep him from talking to the authorities, part of you is rooting for him to get back to Nuria and their son Carlito.
Particularly in the case of Black Doves, the romantic and family relationships add a significant layer to almost every major character’s arc – including Ben Whishaw, who plays a hitman acting as muscle for Knightley’s character Mrs. Webb. He also struggles with feelings about the family he could have shared with his own ex-boyfriend, who had a child.
Sure, there are times when these setups seem preposterous or overwrought. But spies with families are also passionate and oh-so-human. Which, in the end, makes for the very best kind of spy story.
Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: Our passion began in a mosque. Could our forbidden love last?
“Wait, you dated her? She’s basically royalty,” said an old schoolmate of my first love when we realized our mutual connection. It was nearly a year after the breakup, but even hearing her name made my heart beat in staccato.
I was in my sophomore year at Scripps College in Claremont when our paths crossed for the first time. Trump’s inauguration and an air of accompanying pessimism hung in the air, so I combated my own doom through volunteering for our college consortium’s refugee advocacy network. During my first tutoring assignment, I couldn’t have looked more out of place. I’d never met a Muslim person before coming to college, and here I was, walking into the mosque in my skinny jeans with a tiny silver cross hanging around my neck.
It didn’t take long to notice one of the other volunteers, with her dark curly hair and tie-dye. She looked so at ease, and she was, cracking jokes with the moms in her native language and letting the kids strum on her guitar.
I was so anxious that day as I approached her, emboldened by her direct eye contact and easy smile. I was too shy and inexperienced to really make my interest known (plus, we were in a mosque after all). Still, we struck up a conversation about psychology, the subject in which we were both majoring. She saw past my nervousness (and my silver cross) and asked me if I wanted to get lunch together sometime.
What started as a casual invitation turned into a month of text-flirting during winter break across the ocean (me in my hometown on the East Coast, her on the other side of the world). When we returned to California, the mutual crush was in full force. We fell into quick love, the kind that led to us spending all of our spare time together. In a matter of a few weeks, plenty of my clothes were in her closet, and she was teaching me how to ride her longboard. She told me: “I know that I really like you because sometimes I forget how to speak English around you.”
That spring semester was one of all of my important firsts. First love, first relationship, first time exploring Southern California as an adult. Every so often, we would brave the traffic from the Inland Empire to West Hollywood in her Porsche SUV. It was with her that I first saw the sparkling lights of downtown Los Angeles from her family home in the Bird Streets neighborhood. Who wouldn’t be smitten?
Recreational weed had just been legalized, so we’d get takeout ramen and hotbox her room after she turned off all the cameras within the house (security that she assured me was to protect her and her family but that put me at unease nonetheless).
Adding to the thrill of first love was the fact that it was a somewhat hidden relationship. But secrets are only sexy until they’re not. Her family’s prominence in her home country, the illegality of her sexuality there, my own closeted status — they created invisible walls around and between us. I remember the night she pulled me behind her car on the way into a sushi restaurant, her face pale with fear at the sight of men who might know her father.
Despite the obstacles, we were still in love by the end of the academic year. She graduated, and we drove out to Los Angeles for our last few days together before she flew back home with her parents. We strolled along Venice Beach in the morning and ate lunch on the Santa Monica Pier. The Pacific stretched out before us, vast and indifferent. I wonder if it knew it was witnessing our penultimate act. When it was time for me to finally depart, she dropped me off at Los Angeles International Airport, and as I watched her disappear into the traffic, I felt part of myself disappearing too.
The end, when it came, was both catastrophic and achingly mundane. Stuck back in her home country with no way to return once her student visa had expired, she decided that long distance just wouldn’t work. For months, I cried so hard that I had strangers approach me to tell me that they would pray for me.
Eventually our planets crossed into each other’s orbit again — two years later. She was in L.A. for work, and I had just graduated. Time had passed but little had changed. We hiked Runyon Canyon, and our flirty conversation felt as easy as breathing. Ex-lover, lover — the labels blurred and shifted — and I felt like I hadn’t grown at all, still that same girl standing at the airport, watching her drive away. I knew then that this was no way to live, forever chasing after the same first spark.
During the years after our breakup, I had refused to really move on, which was precisely why I had to. It was time to cut the strings holding us together. I texted her: “i guess i kind of realized that i was still using you as a source of validation because i’m still insecure about a lot of things and until i can stop doing that i don’t think it’s healthy to keep you in my life.” A few lines on a screen, inadequate to express the complexity of what I was feeling, but true nonetheless.
I’ve fallen in love and experienced heartbreak several times since then. But nothing compares to the innocence of first love, that raw, unguarded vulnerability that comes before you learn how to protect yourself. There’s something beautiful about it, almost mythic in nature. Long after the love is over, its echoes remain, a reminder of who we once were and how far we’ve come.
The author is a writer and journalist based in Paris (though her heart is still in L.A.). She’s on Instagram @alien_angelbaby and Substack @postcardsfromdreamland.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. Editor’s note: L.A. Affairs won’t be published Dec. 13. You can find past columns here.
Lifestyle
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