One Man’s Quest to Make Luxury Sunblock

Before he introduced his skin care line, Dr. Antony Nakhla, a Newport Beach, Calif. based dermatologist, would frequently vet the products his patients were using. More often than not, he was unimpressed.

“I was taken aback by how much these things cost and what was actually in them,” he said, sitting in a small outdoor area at the Whitby Hotel on a recent trip to New York. “If you buy a Lamborghini and you look under the hood, I can tell you why it costs this much,” he added. “With luxury products and skin care, when you look at the ingredient list, there’s really nothing in there of real value.”

Dr. Nakhla wanted to develop something worth the money. So in 2016, thinking of starting his own brand, he began researching ingredients. He created what he calls a “Peptide-rich Plasma” — a patent-pending mix of laboratory-produced extracts that he said are identical, on a molecular level, to what’s already in human skin. Peptides can help hide the skin’s signs of aging, which often become more pronounced as aging skin begins to lose collagen.

When he was satisfied with the formulas, with the high concentration of active ingredients and patented technology that is typically why certain brands cost more than drugstore ones, Dr. Nakhla invested several hundred thousand dollars of his own money to start his company, hoping that the business could go from “expensive science project to enterprise,” he said.

He named the company Eighth Day to express his view that, “you look best when you look like yourself, and that beauty transcends time,” he said.

But this comes at a cost, in this case a steep one: Products range from $85 for face cleanser that lasts 4-6 weeks, to $450 for a 50 milliliter bottle of serum that claims to improve a long list of aging-related skin woes, like wrinkles, reduced elasticity, loss of volume and dullness.

Despite their prices, his products seem to be gaining a following by word of mouth: When Eighth Day’s Regenerative Serum became available on the luxury beauty boutique and website Violet Grey, it “sold out three times in the first two months,” wrote Sarah Brown, the retailer’s chief brand officer, in an email (the company wouldn’t share the volume or sales figures). Investors are taking note. Last year, Elevate Beauty, a division of the private equity firm L Catterton that has minority stakes in companies such as DIBS Beauty, acquired a minority share in the company. (Neither Elevate or Dr. Nakhla would share the precise amount of the investment.)

Beyond Wrinkles

Dr. Nakhla has been based in California since 2006 but considers himself “an East Coast guy.” The son of Egyptian immigrants, he and his two older sisters grew up between Ridgefield Park and Jersey City. He knew he wanted to be a doctor by the time he went to college, and earned a degree in osteopathic medicine at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 2004. Mohs surgery (the process of removing skin cancer in precise stages, so as not to harm healthy tissue and minimize scarring) has become a big part of his work — he performs it on about 75 percent of his patients.

His collection’s most recent addition, the Rejuvenating Moisturizing Primer Broad Spectrum, is a zinc-based sunscreen without the chalkiness of many mineral products. At $140, the matte lotion is about 10 times the price of a tube of Banana Boat’s mineral sunscreen.

Does the world really need another doctor-founded skin care line?

“There are so many products by so many physicians,” said Dr. Seth Matarasso, president of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery. (Dr. Nakhla is a member of the organization, although Dr. Matarasso doesn’t know him personally.) “I think we’re almost cannibalizing — this physician claims this and this physician claims that. One doesn’t know who or what to believe.”

Many celebrity skin care lines are developed with the input of doctors, presumably with the notion that it lends credibility. Take, for example, Dr. Jean-Louis Sebagh, who worked with Cindy Crawford on her Meaningful Beauty line and appeared regularly in its frequently aired infomercials. Pharrell Williams’s skin care line, Humanrace, was tested by his dermatologist, Dr. Elena Jones; Rhode, Hailey Bieber’s brand, was made with input from Dr. Dhaval Bhanusali, a dermatologist, and Dr. Ron Robinson, a cosmetic chemist.

“People are not over the doctor thing,” said Larissa Jensen, the global beauty industry advisor at Circana, a research company devoted to consumer shopping habits. Sales of clinical prestige brands sold by retailers like Sephora were $723 million in the first quarter of this year, up about 8 percent versus the same period last year, according to Circana. In a consumer survey the company issued last May, nearly 60 percent of respondents said they sought out brands endorsed by a dermatologist or doctor.

Susan Martin, 49, a Manhattan-based event planner who loves skin care, is one of those consumers. When she’s shopping, she said in a phone interview, she looks for “Doctor things paired with clinical research that shows results.” She’s purchased products from Dr. Nicholas Perricone’s popular line, for example, and Kaplan MD, developed by a Beverly Hills-based dermatologist, among others.

But for customers to remain loyal, products need to perform the skin care miracles they promise. “At the end of the day, skin care is about efficacy,” Ms. Jensen said. “They’re looking for products that will work.”

Ms. Jensen added: “There is an inherent expertise that underlies clinical and doctor brands versus others.”

Beauty shoppers have increasingly higher expectations about the products they buy, fueled in part by the amount of information and tutorials, frequently from influencers, on social media and outlets like YouTube. “They’re getting into the technical terms, so we’ve got to make sure that we’re bringing product to them that has that efficacy, the high performance, and providing things that they’re looking for,” said Debra Redmond, who oversees the selection of beauty brands at Nordstrom.

When it comes to the habits of beauty shoppers, “A doctor’s name on a bottle might be the initial grab,” said Cori Aleardi, one of the founders of Elevate Beauty, but, she added, “they are not stupid.”