My story.
From an African childhood, through perimenopause - to the brand I wish someone had handed me at forty-five.
Hello, my name is Barbi — and I am the founder of Philogeni.
I grew up on the East African coast in the seventies and eighties. Lazy days on the beach, baby oil on fine skin, and the Indian Ocean a warm reprieve from the hot tropical sun.
No one spoke about sunscreen or skin cancer then. We lay in the sun until our shoulders blistered. I was lucky with my skin in those years; it never gave me any trouble. I modeled into my twenties, and even with everything I learned in that world about products and protocols, the truth is I lived an outdoor life under an African sun, and my skin carries the memory of it.
Skin wasn’t what brought me to this work. My body was.
In my mid-forties, things began to shift in ways I couldn’t explain.
I didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror, and nothing I tried touched it.
It started with my gut — I was eventually diagnosed with SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) — and moved into my joints, disrupting the active life I’d always lived.
The impact on my skin came last, and it came hard: seborrheic dermatitis on my face, body, and scalp; a pruritus so relentless it nearly drove me mad; eczema; a dryness I’d never known in over four decades.
It was a functional medicine doctor who finally named what was happening. This wasn’t a skin problem. This was estrogen decline. This was perimenopause moving through every system of my body, and the skin was simply the last place it had landed.
That changed everything for me. I trained as a menopause coach with Girls Gone Strong — not to coach other women, but to understand myself. I’d been formulating bath and body products for over twenty years, and had recently qualified as a cosmetic formulator with Formula Botanica. But until this point I had never built a skincare brand. There had never been a need. Now there was. I was searching for something that didn’t exist.
Philogeni is what I created. The name comes from two roots — phylogeny, the beginning of all things, and philogyne, for the love of woman.
Together they hold what I believe: that woman is the beginning of all things, and that this stage of our lives is not a decline. It is a transformation. We move from girl to woman in adolescence, and now, in midlife, we move from woman to sage. It is, in many ways, my own phoenix rising story.
The values that shaped PHILOGENI were already in me long before the brand existed. Raising four children, the eldest of whom is neurodivergent and highly reactive to chemicals and additives, taught me to live with a different kind of attention — to the ingredients in our food, the plastics in our environment, the quality of our water, and the things we put on our skin. Organic where possible, nothing toxic on the body, an unpolluted home. I’ve long been drawn to the Slow Food movement, to natural and organic ingredients, to sustainability not as a marketing word but as a way of living. PHILOGENI carries all of that forward.
This isn’t anti-aging skincare. It was never meant to be.
PHILOGENI is about feeling comfortable in your own body again. It’s about understanding where the dryness, the itch, the irritation actually come from — and meeting them with bio-intelligent care, holistically. It’s about simple rituals of self-care for women who have spent a lifetime giving to others, and who, perhaps for the first time, are ready to put themselves first.
We deserve to. No one else can do it for us.
With love,
Barbara
Founder, PHILOGENI Skincare Inc.