Materials alchemist and entrepreneur Lauren Bowker has built a career on innovation. First, she created a collection of environmentally reactive textiles and accessories with the pollution-sensing compound PdCl2 (Palladium(II) chloride) during her time at the Manchester School of Art. With her launch of innovation platform The Unseen in 2013, and its sister company and beauty brand The Unseen Beauty in 2014, came heat- and sunlight-reactive temporary hair color (Mychroma Hair) and “dual-reality” pigments that change hue under a camera flash (Spectra Eye Colour).
In short, Bowker has championed beauty created at the intersection of innovation, creativity, and radical change. Beauty that is uncompromising, unconventional, and unafraid of disrupting the status quo. But doing things differently doesn’t come without its challenges.
In 2024, after one year of investment negotiations and tricky financial timing, The Unseen's funding (and with it, a prestigious retail opportunity) collapsed. Bowker had to place the company into liquidation. “As a founder, it felt like trying to force a square peg into a round hole. There was a moment where the innovation could have been simplified to make it more commercial, but it never felt right. I remained committed to protecting the integrity of the work I’d spent years building, preserving it as a true creative and scientific breakthrough,” she told BeautyMatter.
She bought back The Unseen in June 2025 (with seven years of saved wages originally meant for a house deposit) and relaunched the company at Dover Street Market as a profit-for-purpose initiative, garnering over 25 million organic Instagram views and 60K new followers in one month alone.
The Unseen Beauty launched the Absorption Mascara and Eyeliner containing Algae Black pigment, made from upcycled algae to replace traditionally used carbon and reducing CO2 emissions by 200% in the process. The pigment, created in partnership with Living Ink Technologies, also became available B2B, becoming a tool for a sustainable ripple effect across the industry.
In the midst of this momentum comes a moment of rebirth: the April 2026 launch of EXIST. Her experiences with The Unseen proved to be a vital tool in building her second brand.
"The biggest lesson I learned on The Unseen was that innovation's great, but if you can't get somebody to walk over to the packaging in a shop or on the internet, they're never going to experience the innovation," she said. “They have to see the brand world first.”
While The Unseen Beauty was built innovation-first, the process was flipped on its head for EXIST. Bowker secured funding from high-net-worth angel investors to help make it happen and built an in-house team, including The Unseen alumni Rodrigo Scopel as Principal Creative Scientist, Mia Eccles-Jones as Community Manager, and Eszter Magyar from Makeupbrutalism as Art Director. Jessica Gregory, former Head of Design at Haeckels, completed the founding EXIST team as Executive Creative Director. Nick Gavrelis, former Senior Vice President of Global Product Development at MAC Cosmetics, and Frank Hiribarne and Anna Marcovici, founders of Impact Beauty Group, joined as consultants.
Coined the place “Where beauty begins again,” EXIST enters the arena with a sci-fi-esque aesthetic that maintains a human touch. Unlike The Unseen Beauty, EXIST was built to be a ritual of everyday use, or as Bowker puts it, “One imagines. The other makes it tangible.”
The brand’s debut product, Spacelip, is powered by a hydration complex built through Space Foundation–certified technology and cultivated aboard the ISS (International Space Station). At its core are extremophiles, resilient microbes that are able to thrive in extreme environments. One set was discovered in spacecraft assembly cleanrooms at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1999. These microbes have recently found application in skincare, where they create the core of a bioactive that can boost the skin’s own hyaluronic acid production by up to 300%, the brand claims. “Space-derived technologies are developed to protect astronauts working in extreme environments. In the beauty and personal care industry, those same solutions speak volumes for their proven effectiveness,” explained Frank Trevino Jr., Data Intel and Innovation, Space Foundation.
This hero hydration complex (offered by Delavie Sciences) is paired with Debut’s grapefruit-derived bio-naringenin to deliver an antioxidant effect. The product comes in two versions: Origin 001, with a shea butter base and a Givaudan co-developed fragrance reminiscent of the Earth; and Void 000, an unscented and lighter formulation made with rice wax. According to the brand, in a one-week clinical trial across 35 individuals, Spacelip resulted in 60% reduction in fine lines, 100% smoother skin, and 86% plumper lips.
When manufacturers told the EXIST team all-metal refill components couldn’t be produced, they 3D-printed their own. Spacelip is also the only lip balm grown in space, the brand claims. Housed in sculptural silver aluminum packaging reminiscent of a mix between a shark tooth and the alien ship in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Spacelip lands on Planet Earth as more than just a product. In fact, the language and imagery of EXIST read more like a manifesto than marketing, a call to arms rather than a commercial product.
In line with Spacelip’s focus on the possibilities of celestial creation, one of the brand’s Instagram posts highlights seven women at the forefront of interstellar exploration throughout history. Another, set to the infrared lens–shot Cwm Idwal valley in the Welsh Glyderau mountain range (which bears a resemblance to Mars), speaks to participation over perfection in shaping a future of beauty together.
The ideology on which that future is built is “no plastics, no composites, no compromises.” “Beauty is so close to the skin and you as a person. It's a place to literally show your values and what you stand for," Bowker says. Whether it’s the bio-grown hero ingredients, plastic-free packaging, or the promise to free beauty of the “same materials, same narratives, same ingredients” that have reigned supreme for decades—for all its scientific rigor, there is something beautifully earthborn about EXIST.
In a world where all things digital and machine-made have resulted in both significant advancements and setbacks, bringing sleek interfaces and advanced computer engineering back to the anthropomorphic premise of reconnecting with ourselves and our environment gives it a beating heart. Bowker isn’t afraid to employ the latest biotech or technology to shape better and riveting products, but the way she wields that power is always to the benefit, not detriment, of humanity.
“Everybody jumped into beauty and thought, ‘This is a money maker. Someone set up a business, let's put a famous face on it, and let's go.’ Then you end up with pollution and crap, unsustainable materials out in the world. The consumer doesn't want microplastics in a formula anymore. But everyone's still making it," she said.
EXIST was devised to fulfill a threefold premise: sustainable/clean materials, performance-level material innovation, and an expression-led brand. “No one's really doing all three [at once]. When you look at it as a matrix, that white space is huge," Bowker notes. The white space also has another important driver: material access, whether that is restricted through regulation or due to political issues, like the Iran war impacting the price of oil, which is used for packaging and ingredients like petrolatum, mineral oil, and PEG (polyethylene glycol). “I think it'll [the change] come from a brand rather than a laboratory or R&D house. The first brand that manages to educate the consumer that these materials are better by giving them something that performs better and is cleaner will open up a humongous market segment,” she added. “It’s like trying to build a new world.”
That world is continuing to grow. For summer 2026, the brand will release six tinted Spacelip shades and Equinox, a golden-hour bio-grown illuminator housed in an all-new bronze vessel in September 2026. EXIST may just be landing, but it’s sure to become a life force for the industry to reckon with.