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Hedge Fund to Skincare: Better Skin After 40 with Systems and Dosing
Topics Covered
- Why "what's the hero ingredient?" is the wrong question to ask about a formula
- Skin longevity defined: preserving skin structure and cellular function across decades
- The CALM framework — collagen integrity, antioxidant balance, lipid barrier, mitochondrial function
- Generic collagen versus bioactive collagen peptides, and why 2.5g can outperform 20g
- The collagen cofactors most people skip: vitamin C, zinc, selenium, silica
- Why glutathione and NAD+ are poorly absorbed, and what to support instead
- Antioxidants as a network: why mega-dosing one nutrient blunts the others
- Therapeutic dosing, and the arithmetic problem with 96-ingredient scoops
- Heavy metal contamination, certificates of analysis, and third-party testing
- Ingredient sourcing, using creatine as a worked example
- Why nutrient status determines how well lasers and microneedling heal
- Skin as a low-priority organ and an early signal of systemic stress
Episode Notes
From Pharmacy to Wall Street and Back
EmilyYou started in pharmacy, went into finance, and ended up back in the science. Tell us about that path.
LilyI went to pharmacy school and earned my PharmD. I practiced for a few years and I just didn't love it. It wasn't a good personality fit. So I decided to pivot. I went to business school at Wharton, and Wharton is a really finance-heavy school, so I very naturally followed the herd to Wall Street. I started at Deutsche Bank, did a year of consumer investment banking, then pivoted to markets. The last fifteen years I've been on the market side — initially fixed income, then equities, and most recently helping to run a machine learning hedge fund on the non-investment side.
LilyAnd as I was doing that, I entered my 40s and started noticing changes in my skin and my health. We also live in an age where biohacking and longevity supplements are very trendy. I was trying to figure out what actually makes sense and what is just marketing hype. I speak the language, so I was able to dig into the literature and ask: what actually has clinical backing?
The 20-Pill Problem
LilyI formulated what I call a skin longevity blend. The challenge was that it was literally a bowl of pills. I would put all my pills into this bowl, bring it to my office, and the hope was that I'd take some of them throughout the day.
EmilyHow many pills are we talking about?
LilyAbout twenty. And I couldn't take them. It turns out that 40% of adults globally have trouble swallowing pills. So I started opening the capsules and mixing them into water, which was absolutely atrocious because it's bitter. Grape seed extract, for example, is extremely bitter. I'd try to put electrolytes into this disgusting concoction and down it.
LilyAt some point I got so frustrated. I thought: I should be taking this blend, it has a lot of human clinical evidence behind it, and it's good not just for skin but for cognition, cardiovascular health, eye health. But I can't do it. Why doesn't a product exist that's one scoop daily, but for skin health and antioxidants? So I decided to create it — for myself. I'm an accidental entrepreneur.
Skin as a Low-Priority Organ
LilySkin is a low-priority organ. If your body is stressed in any way, if it's lacking nutrients, if it's fighting an infection, all the resources go to the critical organs first — your brain, your heart. Your skin is the last thing your body cares about.
LilyThat's why whenever you start seeing dryness or redness or irritation, it's your body talking to you. It can be a later-stage signal, or it can be an early one: something is off, look inside. We think of skin as surface, as topicals. In reality it's a reflection of what's going on internally, and it's the whole body, not just the face.
What Skin Longevity Actually Means
EmilyHow would you define skin longevity?
LilySkin longevity is the preservation of your skin structure and cellular function as you move through the decades. We talk about health span as the quality of the time you're alive. Skin span is the quality of your skin as you move through life. The idea is to support the biological pillars that drive skin aging, so you can have skin that's as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
LilyI'm 46, and I got a VISIA scan of my face that came back with a skin age of 36. That's what you want — your skin age younger than your chronological age.
The CALM Framework
LilyWhen I dug into the research I zoomed out and asked: what are the drivers of skin aging? The acronym is CALM. C is collagen integrity. A is antioxidant balance. L is lipid barrier. M is mitochondrial function.
LilyCollagen integrity is the scaffolding of your skin. Everyone supplements with collagen, but not all collagen is created equal. And for collagen to actually form, your body needs vitamin C for the helix to stabilize, zinc and selenium for certain enzymes to work efficiently, and silica as a building block. If you're taking collagen without those cofactors, you're not optimizing the result.
LilyAntioxidant balance is about oxidative stress. We live and breathe every day, and those metabolic processes create reactive oxygen species. So does UV light, pollution, even digital light. If your antioxidant network isn't clearing them quickly enough, you get an imbalance, and it starts degrading your collagen and attacking your proteins and lipids.
LilyLipid barrier is the fatty outer layer. If it isn't intact, water evaporates. You can put on all the creams you want, but you'll still have dehydrated skin. Hyaluronic acid is a humectant — it pulls water in temporarily. The analogy I use is throwing water at a brick wall. It's wet for a little while until it dries out. A better strategy is to seal the cracks, and that's where ceramides come in. Your lipid barrier is 50% ceramides, 25% other lipids, 25% cholesterol. Replenish the ceramides and you've solved a big part of the equation.
LilyMitochondrial function is the energy piece. For all of these processes to work, your cells need energy. Support that and you're giving your body the fuel to make the changes.
Generic Collagen Versus Bioactive Collagen Peptides
EmilyEvery woman over 30 is obsessed with collagen. What's the difference between what's on the shelf and what actually works?
LilyThere are two types. Generic collagen — the big tubs sold everywhere — is amino acids. Incomplete proteins. You're giving your body raw materials and hoping some of it goes and makes collagen in your skin. There's no real reason to believe that protein ends up in your skin. It's like eating a piece of steak: your body needs protein, but you can't tell it where to allocate the resource.
LilyBioactive collagen peptides are very specific sequences of amino acids. How does your body know to make collagen? It senses certain sequences in your plasma. When your natural collagen degrades, it degrades into particular di- and tripeptides. Your fibroblasts, in the middle layer of your skin, have an affinity for those sequences. They see them circulating and say: we must be losing collagen, we need to make more. So you're effectively signalling to your fibroblasts.
LilyThe one I use is VERISOL®, made by Gelita in Germany. They have seven clinical trials specifically for human skin with very good results. And because it's targeted, you only need 2.5 grams, versus 20-gram scoops of generic collagen where you're flooding the system and hoping something sticks. It won't hit your protein targets — that's not what it's for. It's a signal.
LilyBut if you take VERISOL®, take it with the cofactors: vitamin C, zinc, selenium at minimum. I also include silica. Supplements are like an orchestra. Each one makes a beautiful sound on its own, but only when you take them together do you create a symphony.
Before You Book the Laser
EmilyWhat about Sculptra, lasers, microneedling?
LilyThey work. But think about what you're doing: it's controlled injury, and the benefit comes from the healing. So before you do these treatments, make sure your body has the nutrients and the building blocks to heal and get maximum effect. If you're nutrient-starved, the effect isn't going to be as pronounced.
LilyIt's like having major surgery a week after the stomach flu. You'd move the date, because your body isn't in the best place to go into a traumatic event and be set up for recovery.
Why Glutathione Doesn't Work the Way People Think
LilyAntioxidants have been studied extensively, and there's a lot of good data — not just for skin, but for eyes, hair, cognition, cardiovascular health. What a lot of people do, though, is mega-dose one thing: vitamin C, or vitamin E, or glutathione, or astaxanthin.
LilyAntioxidants work as a network. It's a relay race. When you overflood one node in the system, the others can't keep up and they get blunted. What you want is to support the entire antioxidant system. Like we take a multivitamin, take a multi-antioxidant.
LilyGlutathione specifically is a big, charged molecule. You can't bring it into your cells. But your body makes it endogenously. So my approach to oxidative stress protection is to support all the different antioxidant layers of the system and allow your body to make the glutathione itself.
LilyI went through roughly 300 clinical trials to work out which antioxidants to combine, and ended up with ten. Some have strong data for eye health, some for UV protection from an ingestible. You're not replacing sunblock — it's a bump to your protection. They work through different pathways: some on the lipid layer of the cell, some on the aqueous layer. Again, an orchestra.
NAD+, Niacinamide, and Injectable Peptides
LilyNAD+ is similar to glutathione. It's a big, charged molecule, and there's no way for your body to bring it from your blood into your cells where it actually matters. When you do an injection or an IV, it gets broken down into niacinamide, and that's what enters the cell.
LilyThere are precursors you can take: NMN, NR, or niacinamide. Each has pluses and minuses. Niacinamide doesn't convert as efficiently as you get older, but in your 30s and 40s it's ideal, because it has a lot of skin benefits on top of the NAD+ contribution. I use niacinamide both topically and orally — two completely different mechanisms of action.
EmilyAnd the peptides everyone is injecting?
LilyPeptides have been around a long time; they were studied in Russia back in the 90s. Robust clinical data is still emerging for a lot of them, and it looks promising. But I don't have a strong view, because it isn't my domain and I haven't done enough work on it. I don't inject. The only peptides I take are collagen peptides.
Dosing Is as Critical as the Ingredient
EmilyWhat do most people get wrong — dosing, consistency, something else?
LilyDosing is as important as what you're taking. Here's the analogy. You run a marathon, I meet you at mile 26, and I hand you a glass with just enough water for one sip. Is that going to rehydrate you? Of course not. You need a dose large enough to make a dent, to correct the imbalance.
LilyIt's the same with supplements. If something promises 96 ingredients in a single 10-gram scoop, how much of each ingredient is actually in there? Everything is micro-dosed. It looks great on a label. It doesn't quite add up.
LilyThat's exactly why I had the bowl. I was taking doses supported by human clinical research. If I need four grams of something and I take five milligrams, what is that going to do?
Contamination, Certificates of Analysis, and Sourcing
LilyAfter dosing comes quality. A lot of products are contaminated and never get tested. You could be taking something full of lead or arsenic and you simply don't know.
LilyI've used ConsumerLab.com since the early 2000s. They do third-party testing. They check the label against what's actually inside — your label claims 500 milligrams, they find four milligrams in the capsule. That's an issue. Then they check for contaminants: cadmium, lead, arsenic, in powders and pills. It's behind a paywall, sixty or seventy dollars a year. If you care about your health and you're spending hundreds a month on supplements and gym memberships, you should be checking what you're putting in.
LilyYou can also request a certificate of analysis directly. If a supplement company doesn't provide one, that's a red flag. Greens powders in particular have a documented heavy metal problem, lead especially, and it traces back to sourcing.
LilyCreatine is the cleanest worked example. There are essentially two supply chains: creatine made in Asia, and creatine made in Germany. The German material is trademarked — Creapure® or Creavitalis® — and made by one company. Different brands put their label on the same active ingredient. Brands I respect have quietly switched from Creapure® to generic creatine monohydrate, and then I don't know the source. So I buy based on the branded raw material, not the brand on the tub.
Stress, Skin, and a Deliberately Minimal Routine
EmilyHow does everyday stress show up in skin?
LilySkin is a low-priority organ and an early signal — of stress, of malnutrition, of nutrient deficiencies. That's the through-line.
EmilyWhat's your own routine?
LilyEmbarrassingly bare-bones. In the morning I splash water on my face — I don't cleanse, because I don't want to strip the barrier. Then topical vitamin C. Vitamin C has good clinical data, but formulation matters enormously, because it oxidizes very quickly. You want it sealed, in a pump rather than a dropper, and stabilized. Give it two or three minutes to work in an acidic environment before layering anything else.
LilyThen a moisturizer, depending on the day, and always a tinted sunblock. Cloudy, raining, snowing, not going outside, in front of a screen — doesn't matter. Tinted sunblock, no exceptions.
These notes are an edited version of the conversation, condensed for readability. Statements about ATIKA reflect the formulation philosophy discussed on the episode and are not claims of medical benefit. ATIKA is a dietary supplement and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Advanced Skin Nutrition
ATIKA's once-daily foundational formula for skin longevity — 18 clinically dosed ingredients across collagen structure, lipid barrier integrity, antioxidant defense, and cellular renewal.
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