The Future of Skin Longevity: A Smarter, Health-First Approach

Chapter 1: What Is Skin Longevity?

Rachel Welcome to the Experience Health podcast. Today I have Dr. Lily Shapiro — a pharmacist and the founder of ATIKA. She developed a novel approach to skin health and skin longevity. Lily, why don’t you tell us what skin longevity is and how it differs from anti-aging?

Lily Skin longevity is different from anti-aging. When we talk about health span, we talk about the quality of life you live. Skin longevity is about the skin span: the quality of your skin for as long as you’re alive. The question isn’t “how do I reverse wrinkles?” It’s: how do I keep my skin the healthiest it can be for as long as possible?

Lily The framework I developed has the acronym CALM. C stands for Collagen integrity — the scaffolding under the skin that holds your face and body up. If that matrix is depleted, no serum can fake firmness long term. A is for Antioxidant balance. Skin is constantly exposed to UV light, digital light, and the reactive oxygen species we produce just through living and breathing. If that load isn’t controlled, aging accelerates — and it doesn’t matter how many steps your topical routine has. L stands for Lipid barrier — ceramides and barrier lipids that determine whether skin can hold hydration. And M is for Mitochondrial function — cellular energy, which is critical for repair, turnover, and recovery. Everything depends on it.

Chapter 2: Why One Ingredient Is Never Enough

Rachel Since the first letter is collagen — why did you build a new category of skin supplements instead of just another collagen product?

Lily Collagen is great — but it’s one pillar out of four. Our bodies are systems, and things don’t work in isolation. You can supplement with collagen and see some effects, but if you combine it with its cofactors — vitamin C, zinc, selenium — you get something meaningfully different. Vitamin C stabilizes the collagen helix. Zinc and selenium support the enzymes involved in making new collagen. And for any of these processes to happen, your cells need energy. That’s the mitochondrial pillar. If you approach it in a siloed way, results plateau. It’s all interconnected.

Lily Why do most brands focus on one hero ingredient? Because a single ingredient is easy to explain and easy to sell. Biology doesn’t work in isolation, but marketing does.

Chapter 3: The Founder Story — From Wall Street to ATIKA

Rachel How did you get here?

Lily I’m trained as a pharmacist, but pivoted to Wall Street after business school — Wharton — and spent 15 years in finance, most recently helping run a machine learning hedge fund. I didn’t mean to become an entrepreneur. When I entered my 40s, I started seeing skin texture changes and significant hair shedding. I asked: what should I actually be doing? I went to the clinical trials. Biotin is a perfect example — known as a beauty supplement, but there’s no clinical data substantiating that claim unless you’re deficient. I wanted to understand what actually works, how it relates to other systems, and what I should be supporting.

Lily I came up with a cocktail — of pills. About 20 of them. I couldn’t swallow them all, started opening capsules and mixing them in water, which was vile, then adding electrolytes to mask the taste. That was the moment: enough. I need to create something I actually want to take. Something like AG1, but for skin health specifically — one scoop, tastes good, all the right ingredients at all the right doses. Thus was born ATIKA. When I started taking it, I reversed some of the periorbital wrinkles. My hair was growing thicker and faster. I left Wall Street to bring this to the world.

Chapter 4: VERISOL® — Why Not All Collagen Is the Same

Lily The collagen I use is VERISOL® — a trademarked ingredient from Germany, from a company called Gelita. It’s the only collagen I know of with seven human clinical trials specifically for skin, with statistically significant results. The mechanism: when you take collagen, it doesn’t go directly to your skin. It serves as a messenger. It travels to the skin and has a special affinity for fibroblasts — your collagen-producing cells — because of its structure as specific di- and tripeptides. It reaches the fibroblasts and tells them: make more collagen. That’s a signaling mechanism. It’s very different from just eating protein and hoping some of it ends up as collagen. I use it at 2.5 grams — not 20 grams — because that’s all you need of the specific signaling sequences.

Chapter 5: Ceramides vs. Hyaluronic Acid for Real Hydration

Lily When people talk about skin hydration, hyaluronic acid comes to mind. But it’s a humectant — it pulls moisture from deeper layers of skin and possibly from the environment to give you temporary plumpness. It’s like throwing water at a brick wall. It’ll be wet, then it dries out. Ceramides work differently: they seal the cracks so moisture can actually stay. Mechanistically, completely different approaches.

Lily Your skin’s outermost layer — the stratum corneum — is about 50% ceramides. When you take ceramides orally, you help replenish the ceramides in your lipid barrier in a lasting way. I use Ceramosides™ — a trademarked ingredient from France with strong human clinical data. People are reporting much improved hydration within two to three weeks. The hair feedback has also been remarkable — reduced shedding, faster growth, even eyelash growth in some cases.

Chapter 6: GLP-1, Skin, and Internal Nutrition

Lily GLP-1 users are a population I think a lot about. When total food intake decreases, nutrient density decreases. They’re ingesting less protein, fewer fats, fewer nutrients overall. So they start to see skin and hair changes — because skin and hair are low-priority organs. If you have nutrient scarcity, your body shuttles resources to vital organs: the brain, the heart, the liver. It’s not going to concern itself with the vitality of your skin. For GLP-1 users, ATIKA is an incredible adjunct. Topicals are great — but they work on the surface. You need to nourish from the inside and the outside.

Chapter 7: Results, Timelines, and What to Expect

Lily I guide people to 90 days. Having said that, people are seeing results within the first month. A 52-year-old man who had struggled with rosacea his whole life said it cleared up in less than three weeks. Mechanistically it makes sense: 10 antioxidants are preventing the inflammatory cascade by targeting oxidative stress upstream. Hydration improvement — from the ceramides repairing the lipid barrier — within two to three weeks. Wrinkle improvement takes longer. For me, 12 weeks to see a nine-point improvement in periorbital wrinkles on a VISIA scan.

Lily If I could leave people with one thing: skin is a low-priority organ. If your body is stressed or nutrient-deficient, it will divert resources away from your skin. When you see changes in your skin, a lot of times that’s your body communicating with you — telling you something is out of balance. Support your body from within. That’s where the real work happens.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.