Trilogy
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Long before they sold skincare, Sarah Gibbs and Catherine de Groot were in the business of selling oil by the barrel. Gibbs ran a company that extracted plant-derived ingredients for the supplement and cosmetics trade, and a co-operative in Africa approached the sisters about processing rosehip oil for bulk export. They got very good at moving it wholesale around the world, and somewhere in that trade came the realization that the ingredient they were shipping by the drum was more interesting than the buyers downstream were letting on. The leap from commodity supplier to consumer brand is the part of the story the marketing tends to skip, and it is the part that matters: the founders understood rosehip oil as chemists and traders first, fans second.
That origin shaped the brand's stubborn insistence on batch-by-batch verification. Rather than treating rosehip oil as an interchangeable bottle of seed oil, every production run ships with a certificate confirming the level of the essential fatty acids that actually do the work, a quality-control habit that grew directly out of the founders' years grading oil for export. From an opening lineup of five products the range expanded past forty across face, body and hair, but the rosehip oil has always been the anchor and the rest of the catalog orbits it.
The brand grew up alongside the broader 'natural skincare' moment of the 2000s and 2010s, when consumers began reading ingredient lists and rewarding plant-forward formulas. Trilogy's pitch fit that mood without tipping into fearmongering, which is part of why it traveled well beyond New Zealand. The fair assessment is that this is a genuinely well-made plant oil brand whose strength lies in the quality and verification of its hero ingredient rather than in proprietary technology. Rosehip oil is a legitimate fatty-acid-rich moisturizing oil, not a retinoid, and Trilogy is at its most honest when it stays inside that lane.
- Founded
- 2002
- Origin
- New Zealand
- Parent company
- CITIC Capital
- Heritage
- Legacy (20+ yrs)
- Type
- Clean beauty
- Verdicts
- 0 Strong choice · 0 Good choice of 3 assessed
- Top-rated
- Trilogy Vital Moisturising Cream
- Website
- Official site →
All Trilogy Products
More about Trilogy
Founded in 2002 in New Zealand by sisters Sarah Gibbs and Catherine de Groot around rosehip oil; NZ's first NATRUE-certified skincare brand (2012) and owned since 2018 by Hong Kong's CITIC Capital via Trilogy International Limited.
Its efficacy case rests on ingredient profiles rather than brand-specific clinical trials.