Sesderma

The pharmacy counter where Gabriel Serrano grew up shaped the company long before the laboratory existed. His grandfather ran a pharmacy in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and his father practiced as a family doctor, so medicine and compounding were the family trade. At nineteen he left for Spain to study, eventually earning a doctorate in dermatology, and in 1976 he opened his own clinic in Valencia. It was there, treating patients, that he ran repeatedly into the same wall: the actives he wanted to prescribe existed, but the products carrying them barely penetrated the skin.

That clinical frustration, not a marketing brief, is what produced the laboratory in 1989, founded alongside its professional sister brand Mediderma. Serrano's fixation on the delivery problem led to the company's defining bet on liposomes, microscopic lipid spheres that wrap an active and ferry it past the skin's barrier. The approach reached full expression in 2008, when Sesderma rolled out complete lines built on nanotechnology-scale encapsulation, a genuine technical leap that let unstable or poorly absorbed ingredients work harder at lower irritation.

That engineering shows up across the range as a consistent philosophy rather than a slogan. Liposomal vitamin C in the C-Vit serum, encapsulated azelaic and tranexamic acid in Azelac RU, and the glycolic Acglicolic line all exist to solve penetration first and concentration second; the company even claims its liposomal azelaic acid outperforms the free acid by a meaningful margin. More recent work extends the idea into novel carriers such as chitosan-coated liposomes used in sun protection.

The payoff for shoppers is a pharmacy brand whose science is the product, not the packaging. The trade-off is that proprietary encapsulation makes head-to-head comparison hard and the catalog sprawls. But the through-line, born at a 1976 clinic, has stayed remarkably intact: getting proven actives where they actually need to go.

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