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Sabrina Tan put her best face forward despite life’s early curveballs.

SABRINA TAN CEO & FOUNDER, SKIN INC

It started with a vision some might dismiss as too grandiose: build a Singapore brand and go global. Thirteen years on, Skin Inc founder Sabrina Tan has checked off every milestone she set her sights on – and more.

With over 200 points of distribution globally, Skin Inc is a runaway success. So much so that even billionaire investors such as Mistletoe CEO Taizo Son has come knocking on her door. While Tan declines to disclose Son’s investment quantum, the 45-year-old lets on that “it’s strategic enough for Skin Inc to leapfrog to the next digital age in e-commerce.” It is also not every day that entrepreneurs land investors without having to whip out their pitch book, especially for someone like

Tan whose beginnings were anything but easy.

We’re not talking about how she started Skin Inc in 2007, a year before the economy collapsed under the weight of the global financial crisis. Neither are we discussing how she powered through jet lag and physical hardship (“I threw up so much because I was just so fatigued”) as she shuttled between Singapore, Los Angeles and New York to take the brand global. And never mind that once back in Singapore, she still had two young children to raise.

Instead, let’s begin with Sabrina, the toddler who was accidentally dropped on the head when her cousin failed to cradle her securely. “They rushed me to the ICU. I nearly died,” says Tan, who couldn’t walk and talk until she was four years old. And, to this day, she is almost completely deaf in her left ear.

“My mother changed the course of my life. She fought for me to be in a normal primary school when experts said that I should be in a special one.”

Her parents divorced when she was 12, marking the beginning of a “chaotic childhood” where her mother single-handedly raised four children while running a chain of beauty salons called Sabrina Beauty Centre.

It is perhaps that sense of moxie that rubbed off on her for Tan is not one to deal with the cards she has been dealt. In an industry dominated by conglomerates with milliondollar marketing budgets, Skin Inc is the David to the Goliaths. What it lacked in celebrity style power, it made up for with the simple promise of a product that delivered results, winning consumers over with its made-in-Japan serums.

Skin Inc’s latest product, Serum Glow Filter, is also customised to each customer’s skin tone.

Part skincare, part makeup, it diminishes redness and minimises the appearance of pores. A tie-up with fashion label Self-Portrait saw models strutting down the runway at New York Fashion Week 2020, their makeup-free faces all dewy with Skin Inc’s latest innovation.

The fashion and beauty cognoscenti may have given their nod of approval, but the one whose approval would have mattered the most, Tan could not get. Her mother, who passed away seven years ago, was the one person she would have loved to see in the front row. “She collapsed at home and I rushed back to do CPR on her. It’s ironic.

She breathed life into me and there I was, breathing life into her.” Her mother passed on in the hospital’s resuscitation room and Tan went into shock.

“I couldn’t cry for three months. Then reality sank in and I wailed the hardest in my life…I really miss her. I wish she could see how far I’ve come.”