our story.
founder, formulator, and the woman who stopped saying sorry.
across a table.
i was sitting at a busy coffee shop with my good friend, a marketing strategist who'd built her own fashion brand on the side.
we'd both come straight from full days. her: a corporate marketing job and her own business after hours. me: injecting patients between school drop-offs and schedule changes. she was there to help me name my skincare line — a line i'd been formulating for four years and almost named something else entirely. two days earlier i'd had a meltdown over that name. it just didn't fit what i was building anymore, and i didn't know what would.
so there we were. same table. almost two hours in. both of us tired in the way women get tired when they've been on all day for everyone else.
and i said it.
"i'm so sorry for keeping you here."
i meant it. i felt awful for taking up her time — time she was happily, generously spending on me.
she looked at me.
"why are you apologizing? i want to be here."
we both stopped. and then we both started to cry. not just because we were tired. because we suddenly heard ourselves — and every woman we knew — in that one small word.
she said, "why do women apologize so much? i look at you, you dress so beautifully and unapologetically, but you say sorry all the time."
"apology," we said. at the same time.
that was the name. the rest of it — the ēne, the typography, the way it would feel — came together over the next thirty minutes. we played with fonts, plays on the word, what it could mean.
we met again a few weeks later to build out the rest of the brand. and from that day forward, something in me changed. i started unapologetically receiving help. from her. from other incredible women in my life. a shift happened that i'm still feeling.
apologēne is named for the word i stopped saying that night. and for the version of myself that started showing up after.
the missing piece.
i've been a physician assistant for nine years. i graduated in 2017 and started in surgery before finding my way to aesthetics — which is where i've been ever since.
at pout medspa, i specialize in injectables: restylane, sculptra, dysport. i also do microneedling for skin improvement. we don't offer lasers. the results are too inconsistent, and our medspa is built around one principle: efficiency in results. tried-and-true injectables, less downtime, real change.
but every time i finished a treatment, i felt a missing piece.
i wanted my patients to have real post-procedure care. their lips needed arnica and ceramides to heal faster after filler. their skin needed arnica and centella after sculptra and dysport to bring the swelling down. their bruising needed something built for the face — not a body gel, not a generic balm.
and there was nothing on the market that did this. nothing.
so i decided to make one.
four years.
the journey to apologēne started four years ago.
at first, i thought i'd be able to find what i was looking for. i couldn't. the options were either an arnica gel that left lips drier than they started, or basic petroleum jelly doing the bare minimum. anything labeled "medical grade" was overpriced — hundreds of dollars — and still left my patients with nothing real to show for it.
i could not stomach asking my patients to spend that kind of money for that kind of result. it didn't fit my business model. it didn't fit my conscience. (i don't offer lasers because their results are inconsistent. i wasn't about to put my name on a product that was the same.)
so i went to manufacturers.
most of them told me the same thing: it would be cheaper to white-label something they already made and put my name on it. that just didn't feel right. so i kept searching.
i went through manufacturer after manufacturer in the u.s. none of them were willing to do the actual work of formulating with the ingredients i knew would work. they wanted me to compromise the formula to fit their molds.
then i met with another friend — a mastermind at sourcing — who connected me with a korean manufacturer. they saw the vision. they understood the ingredients. they didn't ask me to compromise. they perfected the formula.
once the formulation was right, the rest of the brand came together in six months. the name from the coffee shop. the manufacturer who finally listened. it all started clicking into place.
the piece i'm most proud of: the daily lip balm has the healing properties my own lips needed. i've struggled with dry lips my entire life. i finally found something that worked — and it was my own product.
it got even better when my patients started telling me they loved it too. not just for after their appointments. for every day.
that's how i knew.
for every woman.
i want you to feel confident when you put this on. calm. like caring for yourself isn't a luxury or an indulgence — it's the part that matters most.
i made this for the woman who just got home from her appointment and isn't hiding what she had done. she's not pretending. she's just taking care of herself after — the way she should have been taught to from the start.
the appointment was the first part.
the part that matters is what comes after — when you look in the mirror and feel good. when you stop scrolling past your own photos. when you stop apologizing for your choices, your appointments, the version of yourself you're becoming.
finally, unapologetically, visible.
in five to ten years, i want apologēne on shelves where women shop. because every woman deserves to feel confident in her skin. every woman deserves to take care of herself without hiding it, or apologizing for it.
that's the whole point.
jasleen kaur, pa-c founder, apologēne