HALENE No. 01 Serum with a fresh babchi sprig and purple flower on cream linen

THE PART NOBODY WARNS YOU ABOUT

The flaking, the sting, the weeks of looking worse.

Retinoids ask a lot of your skin before they give anything back. The first weeks bring the redness and the peeling, the tight patches along your nose and jaw, the burn when moisturizer hits raw skin. Dermatology has a name for it, retinoid dermatitis, and a whole protocol for surviving it: start slow, buffer, skip nights, wait it out. Some skin settles. Some never stops reacting.

So people stop. Or they never start.

This is the quiet story behind retinol. Not that it fails, but that the road to results asks more than a lot of people can give. We built HALENE for the ones who got off that road, and the ones who were never willing to get on it.

HALENE The Routine, the three bottles in a row from morning to night

WHAT WE WANTED

Retinol's results, without the part that makes people quit.

We were not looking for a softer retinol. We were looking for something that could stand next to it on results and drop the irritation. The research kept pointing at one ingredient: bakuchiol, a compound from the babchi plant that behaves like a retinoid in the skin without being one.

Dried babchi seeds in a ceramic dish on cream linen

THE HEAD-TO-HEAD

Measured against retinol, it held its own.

In a 12-week randomized, double-blind study, researchers put 0.5% bakuchiol against 0.5% retinol. Both reduced wrinkle area and pigmentation, with no measurable difference between them. The retinol group reported more stinging and scaling. The same direction on results, with less of the part people dread.

Dhaliwal et al., British Journal of Dermatology, 2019.

See the full research
HALENE No. 03 Overnight Cream with a fresh babchi sprig and purple flower on cream linen

WHAT WE MADE

Three steps. One active. No retinoids.

No. 01 Serum, No. 02 Eye Cream, No. 03 Overnight Cream, built around bakuchiol, without added fragrance or retinoids. A routine simple enough to actually keep, because the one that works is the one you don't abandon in week three.

Shop The Routine

WHERE WE DRAW THE LINE

We would rather be exact than loud.

The research behind bakuchiol is published and independent, and we stay careful about what it does and doesn't say: these are studies of the ingredient, not trials of our finished products. We don't call HALENE clean. Clean is a marketing word. We tell you what is not in the bottle, and why. For the studies in full, read our Research & Evidence page.