Allies of Skin Founder Talks Botched Surgeries and Skin Care

When skin-care brand founder Nicolas Travis decided to launch a beauty company, it was not just a business endeavor, but also a life-saving one. Marking an important step in what Travis calls his healing era, unveiling Allies of Skin provided the Singaporean businessman with a forum to share his own pain, while inspiring others to see that beauty is far from just skin deep.

After experiencing severe acne as a teenager, Travis found the beauty industry daunting and intimidating. Then, at the age of 19, he suffered a horrific accident in his bathroom, slipping over and breaking several parts of his face. Travis needed reconstructive surgery — but the surgeon he hired botched his procedures, leaving Travis suffering from necrosis, a condition that causes body tissue to break down and die.

Nicolas Travis at Age 17 Before the Accident

In the aftermath of that agonizing experience, Travis suffered from depression and attempted suicide before being referred to a therapist. It was at that point that he thought he might be able to harness his own trauma to help others suffering from the same distress.

“My therapist said, ‘OK, let’s list all of the things you want to achieve by the time you’re 30. What does that list look like?’ It was then I realized that if I was hating myself and crawling out of my skin every day, then maybe other people would feel that way,” he tells PS. “And I thought I could somehow channel that pain into helping people feel more confident or fearless in their skin.”

In the wake of his accident and his failed surgeries, Travis sought comfort in skin care, explaining that it felt like the only area of his life where he had any remaining control.

Nicolas Travis at Age 26 Post-Botched Surgery

“I had numerous failed surgeries, it was really bad, and it was like I didn’t really have anything else to do but take care of the skin,” he says. “It was the one modality that I could control. And it was then that I told myself, ‘OK, if I can’t control how I look, then maybe I can control how my skin looks.’ That was when it all started.”

Today, nearly two decades (and dozens of products) later, Travis believes it was predestined that he would one day launch his own brand to help others realize the power of “spiritual” beauty. After studying biomedical and pharmaceutical science, he was uniquely positioned to found a skin-care brand — and his initial business model was actually born out of an old college assignment.

“In grad school for my master’s thesis, I was doing a business plan for a startup skin-care line,” he says. “I had spent six months doing all the research. I spoke with labs and packaging supply; I did all the groundwork. I guess you could say that all roads lead to this. I think in this lifetime, this is my destiny.”

He worked a number of different jobs, but he couldn’t resist the overwhelming urge to revisit those business plans, and it was then that the first Allies of Skin seeds were sown.

Nicolas Travis Now

The brand develops multifunctional formulas that supercharge clinically-proven active ingredients (like vitamin C, growth factors, and retinoids) to create single products that provide numerous benefits.

Allies’ products — which include hero formulas like the Copper Tripeptide & Ectoin Advanced Repair Serum ($199) and the Retinal 0.05% & Peptides Repair Night Cream ($116) — help heal every kind of skin-care issue, from acne to severe scars. His goal is to inspire anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and hated what they’ve seen to feel a sense of hope.

“What I aspire to do with the brand is to create the most efficacious products that deliver the most visible results, so regardless of what stage of your life you’re at you see continuous improvement and you feel hope,” he says. “We try to spread that joy and that feeling of that feeling of hope. Especially in dark times, you need light.”

Charlie Lankston is a freelance beauty, fashion, and lifestyle writer and media strategist based in New York City, having relocated to the US in 2014 from her home in London. Charlie spent 10 years working at DailyMail.com, where she oversaw the website’s style, beauty, fashion, and lifestyle content. Charlie also appears as an on-air royal and celebrity correspondent.