After careful consideration
Written by Mariela Summerhays | Photos by Jen Steele
When we speak, Neada Deters is on the eve of moving homes. Onto a moving truck will go her unassuming Danish daybed, carefully unearthed from under a stack of furniture in a mid-century warehouse. After it, her two beloved Caprani lamps, sought after for years and found in quick succession — one on a road trip in Arizona, pulled over at a vintage furniture store. “I ended up taking it with me, but we ended up camping for five days after that. The Caprani took up all the space in our car,” she says, smiling.
In our overnight-delivery, an-app-for-everything world, Deters’ slow and considered attitude isn’t shared by everyone. “Not to sound like an old fogey,” she prefaces over a video call (she’s beaming in from her adopted home of New York; I am in our shared native Sydney).
“But there’s something that has happened in the past few decades, where we have lost an appreciation for where things come from and how they are made. I think we often forget that there are real people behind products that we interact with every day.”
The care and consideration the beauty editor-turned-skincare company founder takes into furnishing her home extends to her holistic beauty philosophy, which she attributes to her maternal grandmother. She picks up a photograph of her from its usual position on her desk and holds it up to the camera. A former beauty queen, her grandmother is unmistakably beautiful. As a child, Deters would watch as she stole precious moments for herself in the morning, before resuming her role as mother-of-five for the day ahead.
“She had these beautiful rituals of caring for herself,” Deters reflects, recalling glass bottles of Chanel and Clinique; of Jacquemus-reminiscent wide-brimmed hats to shelter from sun rays.
“But at the same time, she had a really great philosophy, which was that beauty isn’t what you show on the outside. It’s the way that you are. It’s how you treat people. And it’s the way that you carry yourself through the world.”
Deters hopes that her organic skincare brand, LESSE will encourage people to start their mornings gently, and to carve out minutes for themselves as she does, and her grandmother did before her. Founded on a philosophy that less is more, LESSE’s products are formulated over years, created with consideration in mind of how each will uphold the brand’s values of sustainability, integrity and representation.
Deters states that as many ingredients as possible are organically cultivated on land close to where products are manufactured in Canada. All the brand’s partners are verified ethical suppliers, with Deters having personal relationships with some of the family-owned farms from where the ingredients are derived. “We have to put people and planet over profit,” she asserts of the effort to have her company reflect her social values.
“Our world would be so much better if we were able to take that stand, and I do feel very honoured to be an independent brand in a time where people are becoming, I think, more socially conscious and sustainably minded.”
Formulations are centred around Australian botanicals, evolved over thousands of years to withstand the harshest of natural environments, rich in antioxidants and minerals. Developed to be sensitive to all skin types, LESSE is a non-binary skincare brand, intended for use by everyone — the Every Tone SPF 30, for example, was in development for four years due to Deters insistence that the non-nano zinc facial sunscreen should blend smoothly into even the deepest of skin tones.
By the time this story goes to print, LESSE’s latest product, the Calming Cleanser, will have launched. Designed for those with sensitive and hyperreactive skin, the tamanu seed, hinoki and rose-infused cleanser pushes forward LESSE’s mission to be inclusive, including through marketing. Unbeknownst to her at the time of casting, the model fronting the cleanser’s campaign imagery is, like her, Filipina; a touch of the beginning of Deters’ relationship with beauty being brought to her present.
“I had an idea that she was, but I wasn’t certain. And when she showed up and we talked about it…it just really was so reaffirming and just felt so good that that was where we were, because I never grew up seeing any Filipinas in any advertising or marketing materials, especially not for beauty.”
“You saw a very homogenous image of what beauty was, and that was something that was so important for me starting LESSE; to create a space where infinite modes of beauty are celebrated. Because we have for too long, I think, had these very archaic ideas of what it means to be beautiful.”
What I’m reminded of when speaking to Deters is that real beauty is already known to us, if only we make the space to observe and nurture it. Like a carefully-constructed daybed from another time, just laying in wait to be rediscovered and brought with us throughout our lives; or the passed-down values of beauty, from a grandmother to her granddaughter, to the world.
Photographed by Jennifer Steele on 35mm and 120mm film in New York City.