Victoria tsai

This Harvard Business School graduate’s chance encounter with a modern-day geisha in Kyoto inspired her to create a line founded on the beauty secrets of an ancient tradition

Exercise or diet? When I’m in San Francisco, my exercise is running after my six-year-old daughter. When I’m on the road, I’ll occasionally do juice cleanses. I have recently been avoiding alcohol, because it’s bad for the skin, and salt, because it makes you look puffy. Favourite restaurant in the world? The Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. It’s so vibrant, even at dawn, and you can get fish fresh from the ocean. Red lips or smoky eyes? I’ve always loved a red lip—classic and glamorous. When Victoria Tsai met a geisha in a beauty store in Kyoto, she was blown away by the woman’s flawless, make-up-free porcelain skin and begged to be let in on the secret. The philosophies and teachings that the woman was to reveal—contained in a 200-year-old text on beauty—inspired the product line Victoria, a longtime sufferer of acute dermatitis and pregnant with her daughter Alea at the time, created later that year. Victoria focused on formulating simple, effective products made from gentle, safe ingredients. Nowadays she splits her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Japan, where she travels frequently to work with scientists, researchers and modern-day geishas to create formulas for the Tatcha collection. Beauty products you can’t live without? I live on airplanes, which pulls the moisture out of my skin, so I rely on our Luminous Deep Hydration Lifting Masks. They triple the hydration of the skin in just 15 minutes.

Is there any particular food that you believe has health and beauty benefits? The skin is the body’s largest organ, so anything healthy for the body is also wonderful for skincare. I particularly love rice, green tea and seaweed. Your beauty routine? In the morning, I’ll use our Kyoto Cleanse to purify and polish my skin, then moisturise with the Supple Moisture Rich Silk Cream. In the evening, I melt away the day with our Kyoto Cleanse, and then apply the Radiant Deep Brightening Serum and Ageless Enriching Renewal Cream.

The geisha taught me to gently exfoliate my skin every single day. When you polish skin like a jewel, it helps to shrink pores and lighten hyperpigmentation.