Seed to Skin

The brand grew out of a personal crisis rather than a business plan. Jeanette Grøn Thottrup, a Danish former fashion designer, spent years struggling with infertility and, having exhausted conventional options, turned to natural medicine, an alkaline pH diet and organic herbs; she credits that regimen with the eventual birth of her son and with reorienting her life toward natural healing. That conviction had a physical home: in 2001 she and her husband Claus had discovered a derelict 13th-century estate, Borgo Santo Pietro, in the hills near Chiusdino, Tuscany, and restored it into a luxury hotel anchored by a 300-acre organic farm. Skincare was the logical next harvest. Rather than buy botanical extracts on the open market, Thottrup wanted to grow her ingredients, control their potency and process them fresh, which led her to partner with Dr. Anna Buonocore, a scientist holding a University of Siena doctorate spanning both pharmacy and cosmetic science. Together they spent roughly five years developing what the brand calls Green Molecular Science, an approach designed to act on three fronts at once, the skin's surface, its deeper layers, and the microbiome, while keeping every formula fully non-toxic. The first research lab gave way in 2018 to a purpose-built facility steps from the fields, completing a genuinely vertically integrated operation: a botanical is grown, picked and formulated within the same estate, a rarity at the luxury end of the category where 'farm to face' is more often marketing than logistics. The result is a small, deliberately exclusive line whose price reflects that hand-grown integration as much as positioning. Distribution stayed selective, anchored by Liberty London and high-end spas, and the brand remains inseparable from the place that produced it, a working Tuscan farm rather than an anonymous laboratory.

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