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Ask Dr. Brown, Fall 2023

RéVive Skincare, Renessence Haircare and Bays Beauty Boutique founder Dr. Gregory Bays Brown fields your questions and shares his thoughts regarding the state of skincare, hair care and beauty in our ‘Ask Dr. Brown’ quarterly Q&A which is part of our News section. His latest installment addresses skincare and hair care for the fall season and cooler temperatures.

Dr. Brown, what is the first thing I should do for my skin now that fall is here?
Evaluate its current condition. Are you dry? Oily? Blotchy? When seasons change, typically your skin does as well. If your skin has appeared normal all throughout the summer, a sudden onslaught of cold weather can turn you dry very quickly. If you’re typically oily the new season may make your skin a bit more normal. That stated, don’t be afraid to change up your regimen to meet your skin’s changing needs. And if you’re not sure what you may need/want to change, please consult our Product Specialist Diane Ernst via call or text at 502.413.0256, M-F 10am-5pm.

You’re a huge advocate for the use of products that contain sunscreen year-round, what are your recommendations for fall?
I’ve said it many times before, but it bears repeating: just because the sun and temperatures outside aren’t scorching as they were this past summer, skincare products that contain sunscreen protection are an absolute must in autumn (and of course winter, spring, summer), even on cool, cloudy days. My recommendations:

You also have an array of new products that address a variety of skincare needs and issues. Tell us more.
We’re constantly innovating with new products that address 21st century skincare needs and many of these are formulated with our signature peptides that are exclusive to the brand. They include:

  • Peau Magnifique Eye Concentrate Night – The ultimate eye-reviving nighttime treatment designed to transform the entire eye area. Its power trio of signature peptides – Bio-Renewal, Bio-Firming, and Bio-Volumizing – a unique combination only found in the Peau Collection, is effectively deployed via a hyper-targeted Advanced Drone Delivery system to treat the skin right where eyes need it most.
  • Fermitif Hand and Neck Renewal Creams SPF 15 and our new Fermitif Neck Renewal Night Cream give the hands, neck and décolletage – areas that are dead giveaways to the effects of aging – a smooth, taut, firm appearance.
  • Fermitif Chin Contour Instant Tightening Peptide – An innovative, contouring multi-peptide mask that instantly tightens and de-puffs the chin, jawline, and neck. Wear the mask securely around the jawline for only 20 minutes to help sculpt, tone, and define neck and facial skin to look firmer, lifted, and more youthful.
  • Enzyme Essence Daily Resurfacing Treatment – A dynamic bi-phase retexturizer that activates with a shake. Our signature Bio-Renewal Peptide joins forces with Papaya, Pineapple and Cranberry Enzymes to gently exfoliate and renew skin. While a blend of Squalane and Botanical Oils of Meadowfoam Seed, Camellia Japonica and Jojoba Seed delivers lightweight hydration.
  • Sensitif Calming Serum – An ultra-restorative serum with skin-calming ingredients and our signature Bio-Renewal Peptide to soothe skin, rebuild the protective skin barrier, and replenish moisture. Help improve signs of irritation including dehydration, visible redness, and dullness for an even, healthier-looking complexion. Especially effective for stressed or dehydrated skin, or after a skin treatment

Your hair care line Renessence has been referenced as ‘like skincare for your hair’. How does it work and what are your recommendations for amazing looking autumn hair?
As you assess your skin condition and determine its needs, you should do the same for your hair. First off eliminate months of heavy summer treatments, volumizers, you name it, from your hair and scalp by gently cleansing with a rejuvenating shampoo free of parabens and harsh sulfates. Our Renessence Follicle Forever Strengthening Shampoo is a daily cleanser that removes harmful debris – dead cells, oil, sebum, product buildup – which strangles the follicle and leads to unhealthy hair. Its unique blend of ingredients anchors the follicle for stronger hair with less thinning and shedding, along with a renewed, healthier scalp.

And just as It’s essential for your skin to be properly hydrated for a healthy, glowing complexion, your hair requires moisturizing on a regular basis too. With the change in temperatures outside, coupled with heated air inside, hair is vulnerable to these outdoor/indoor environmental variations, often resulting in drier hair and an itchy scalp. To ensure it stays healthy, soft and supple, our Follicle Forever Thickening Conditioner is a volumizing moisturizer that renews dry, dull strands as it delivers sensational shine and manageability. And last but certainly not least, Renessence Follicle Forever Renewal Serum works at the molecular level to stimulate dormant and/or dying follicles for immediate renewal and rejuvenation. The result: resurrection and maintenance of healthy hair growth.

Stay tuned for our next  Q&A with Dr. Brown, which will be all about maintaining glowing, gorgeous winter skin and hair with RéVive and Renessence.

Dr. Brown’s RéVive 25th Anniversary Podcast

As part of the 25th anniversary celebration of Dr. Brown’s RéVive Skincare, he’s currently being featured on a 3-part masterclass broadcast on Dr. Ekta Yadav’s podcast, Skincare Anarchy. Click HERE to catch the first episode up now on Apple Podcasts.

And be sure to follow us on Instagram & Facebook for all 25th anniversary updates, specials & more!

WWD Beauty Inc. – Biotech Pioneer RéVive Celebrates 25th Anniversary

RéVive Skincare Founder Greg Brown and CEO Elana Drell-Szyfer on what has enabled the skin care brand to thrive for more than two decades.

These days, biotech is all the rage in skin care, but 25 years ago virtually no one was talking about it or tapping its potential.

One exception was Greg Brown, a Louisville, Kentucky-based plastic surgeon who was studying the impact of epidermal growth factor in the healing of burned skin and had an AHA moment. If it worked so well on wounds, why aging skin, too?

He teamed up with William Rutter, the founder of Chiron Corp., an early player in biotechnology that has since been acquired by Novartis, and thus was born RéVive. The brand started with a single product whose star ingredient was EGF, and even then, Brown was thinking big. “There are a number of bioactive molecules that have positive effects on the skin, and ultimately we would like to develop a whole line of bioengineered products,” he told WWD in 1997 when the brand launched.

Fast forward two-and-a-half decades, and Brown has done just that, building RéVive into a leading player in the luxury skin care sector. In 2008, the brand was acquired by Gurwitch Products, then a division of Alitcor which also included Laura Mercier, and in 2016, Shiseido acquired both brands. That was a quiet period for RéVive, when corporations and consumers were more focused on makeup artist brands than high-end treatment.

RéVive languished, but in 2017, Tengram Capital Partners bought the business from Shiseido, and Brown, too, reinvested in the brand. Industry veteran Elana Drell-Szyfer became chief executive officer. During her tenure, sales have doubled and profitability restored, with year-over-year growth said to be in the high-double digits.

In a period when many founders have stepped away from their businesses, Brown is as engaged as ever. “At our first sales meeting, Elana said it can be an awkward dance between a CEO and a founder, but we have waltzed,” laughed Brown, clearly relishing the resurgence of the brand he cares so much about.

RéVive is celebrating its silver anniversary with upgrading or extending its key franchises, this year, and it’s also firmly focused on the future, developing its international business in the U.K., China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Taiwan.

Beauty Inc sat down recently with Brown and Drell-Szyfer to talk all things skin care, survival and setting the scene for the next big chapter.

What are the qualities that have enabled the brand to survive for 25 years?

Greg Brown: When I started, a lot of my peers thought it’s an easy way to get rich quick. Well, no. You don’t get rich quick and it’s not easy.

I really never set out to have this business — I stumbled into it. I was researching burns and it was the birth of biotechnology and growth factors. We were able to show we could make burns heal faster and I had the idea that those same molecules could be applied to aging skin.

I started making a makeshift form of the product by dissolving growth factors in Elizabeth Arden’s Visible Difference, which my mom used to use. I did it as a way to market my fledgling aesthetics practice.

One of my patients was in retail and knew [former Neiman Marcus CEO] Burt Tansky, who had just launched Crème de la Mer at the store, and it did really well. We launched Révive as a single stock keeping unit in 1997 in all of Neiman’s doors.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Neimans. Long before e-commerce and social media — they were the preeminent retailer to hand-hold someone like me who had no idea of what they were doing and minimal amounts of money, because they wanted exclusivity and niche brands. It was fortuitous. One of the reasons we able to survive was because they held my hand. We were there exclusively for three years and slowly added SKUs. Our first retailer outside of NM was Space NK and I went to Saks four years later.

The fact that we have survived all these years is a testament to the quality and efficacy of the products and the relationship we have with our retailers. In those days, it was just a handshake. There was never a contract or anything like that. RéVive has had some owners who weren’t terribly attentive and it still survived because of that. When Elana and the Tengram team came along, the windows were opened again.

Elana Drell-Szyfer: I think that Dr. Brown staying is a big contributing success factor. The founder has been with the business all along; even if not in direct control, he has stayed with the brand and that is important. He’s always been involved with product efficacy, bringing in a scientific filter, creating relationships with researchers and ingredient manufacturers. That’s the most important ingredient and one that most brands can’t claim, that their founders have stayed for 25 years.

When we at Tengram started due diligence and talking to retailers, everyone said, the products are great, the customer is really loyal and we have such a good relationship with Dr. Brown personally. The way that relationship stayed was that he was involved — maintaining that touch with retailers and with customers, especially really loyal ones.

The other piece is that RéVive is really a brand as opposed to being an item business. There are a lot of successful brands out there, but when you start to dissect them, they may have a bunch of products, but they are really only known for two or three. This is very complete — there is a founder story, a proprietary science story, multiple bestsellers and hero franchises. The brand is well constructed. It doesn’t do well in just one category — our top 10 sellers are comprised of all different kinds of categories. All of those things play into why they brand has really survived.

Greg, many of your peers who founded brands in the same time period exited long ago. What has kept you engaged all this time?

G.B.: I see so many who just can’t take it. It’s hard. It is your baby. I don’t have children, so it’s been my creation. But I always could see the potential of the brand, especially in those years with Shiseido, when it was just three employees full time, including me. If RéVive were going to survive and become a global brand, which I hope it will, I felt it important for me to stay. And I reap the rewards. Elana and I have had a wonderful relationship and it has been so much fun for these last five years.

What were some of the key inflection points for RéVive?

G.B.: When we launched a $1,500 product [Peau Magnifique Youth Recruit Renewal System] — the world changed. That was and still is our most expensive product. It changed our top line so much and our numbers changed dramatically. It was a little bit like the Gilded Age then, around 2006-07, there was a lot of money everywhere. I had a lot of cold calls — people coming to visit me in Louisville, wanting to buy the business.

E.D-S.: It wasn’t just the price point that made it so different. It was the first four-week cure. The story is you can prolong getting a facelift — no downtime no trauma — if you restart your skin this way. The technology and the positioning were very different at the time.

G.B.: Another was our first Artbox, where we tapped an artist to create a collectible box filled with products. I’ve always been very interested in the visual arts. I used to think you had to be wealthy to love and collect art, but that’s not true — you just have to love it. We started with Donald Baechler. Then it was a new concept — I don’t know that anyone else was doing it then.

Selling the business was an inflection point, too. I didn’t want to do it. It was 2007 and we were doing great. In retrospect, it was lucky I did, but it was the most bittersweet day of my life. I made more money than I’ve made practicing medicine, but I was as sad as if there was a death in the family. But I don’t regret it now. History tells you the truth. It was the right thing to do.

E.D-S.: A key inflection point for me was when we bought the business. We looked at it as a huge opportunity. We said, here is this incredibly built brand, and our theory was that for eight years it really didn’t have a dedicated team. The team was integrated between Laura Mercier and Revive. It didn’t have 100 percent of the attention 100 percent of the time, and it certainly didn’t have 100 percent of the budget.

What we purchased was inventory, intellectual property and existing business relationships. The first question was how do you want to build the business — an infrastructure, a team, a culture. That was an inflection point because we got to decide how to do that.

Another critical period was when many of our traditional retailers started to face difficulty — within the first 18 months of our ownership, Barneys, which was a significant account, went out of business, and Neiman Marcus went through a restructuring, which made their footprint smaller. It had always been our strategy to build e-commerce. There was almost zero digital presence when we took over and there was a small specialty store presence, but that hadn’t been developed. Today Bluemercury is our largest retailer in the U.S.

The other inflection point is our entry into China and how that has influenced and changed the business, in a lot of great ways. We call ourselves a 25-year-old start-up. We’re focused on moving fast and being nimble, and having this exciting energy as the team and business grows — it feeds off of itself. Every two months or so, I feel like there is a new learning and development.

How has skin care changed over the last 25 years? Where do you see it going?

G.B.: I feel like I should have a sexy answer about genetic splicing and pills to stop facelifts, but I think it is much more simple and practical. If you look out the window, you see what is happening with the climate and our world. I think skin care will be really important as far as protecting us against the onslaught of things that are going to come. We call it Project Protect. Free radicals, UV rays, gamma rays — all are going to become more aggressive.

RéVive Skincare’s 25th Anniversary Celebration Kick Off!

CELEBRATION! Dr. Brown kicking off RéVive Skincare’s 25th Anniversary today, Wednesday, June 15, 2022.

From its acclaimed beginning here in Louisville (still the home of the doctor’s namesake online retail outlet) & the brand’s ascension as an international cosmetic skincare leader, stay tuned for much more as we celebrate our Creator/Founder’s globally-renowned products & story throughout the remainder of ’22, our silver anniversary year! Follow us here at baysboutique.com/& on Facebook & Instagram.

Dr. Brown’s Spring-Summer 2021 Skincare Tips

RéVive Skincare, Renessence Hair and Bays Beauty Boutique Founder Dr. Gregory Bays Brown – noted scientist/plastic surgeon/Louisville native – shares his top skincare tips for Spring-Summer 2021, as we gently emerge from the past year, one like no other. For further questions about Dr. Brown’s skincare/haircare/beauty regimen, please contact our product specialist Diane Ernst via call or text at 502.413.0256, M-F 10am-5pm.

      •  The best products for puffy eyes? RéVive Skincare Masques des Yeux and Les Yeux. Both have hyaluronic acid which helps with volume loss which can add to the appearance of puffiness. Even though that sounds counterintuitive, bio-renewal protein promotes cell renewal and metalloproteinase inhibitors, which deliver firmness.
      • For men? I recommend our RéVive Moisturizing Renewal Night Cream, which can combat ingrown beard problems and oily skin and, for day ReVive Sensitive Renewal Cream both night and day, plus a cleanser followed by our toner.
      • What is Epidermal Growth Factor? A naturally-occurring hormone/protein which promotes cell renewal. As we age, biological processes naturally slow; by stimulating skin renewal we combat the signs of aging with EGF.
      • Why is sunscreen (SPF) so important? Sun spots are the scourge of UV sun rays…they develop slowly over a number of years. The most important aspect in treating them is sun protection and our ReVive Perfectif line of products which includes Perfectif Day and Night Serums, plus our new Perfectif Night Cream with Retinol, and Perfectif Day Cream SPF 30 will do the trick.

Dr. Brown featured in Australia’s Par Olive digital beauty & wellness magazine

Dr. Gregory Brown is the Founder of the exquisite RéVive skincare line. The curated skincare line was created from studying burn victims, their healing time and skin rejuvenation process as a Plastic Surgeon in New York City. His extensive knowledge in the field of Plastic Surgery, paired with the use of Nobel-Prize winning science produces extraordinary results in his clients around the globe. We recently had the pleasure of chatting with the wonderful Dr. Gregory Brown about all things anti-aging, the right skincare regime for someone in their 20’s and 30’s, the novel that changed his life and how nutrition determines the quality of your skin.

Dr. Gregory Brown, you truly are your own best brand ambassador with the most exquisite skin. Could you share your personal approach to your skincare and wellness regime?
One has to enjoy life, but I think everything in moderation; moderate exercise, a low glycemic index diet with an occasional splurge, abstinence from extremes, and be happy as one can be. Probably the single most important thing anyone can do for their skin is to wear sunscreen – especially in Australia. As a teenager I got a lot of sun and am now paying the price since sun exposure is cumulative over a lifetime. Moisturising is also key, dry flaky skin can also age someone over time.

How have you been spending your time in lockdown during COVID?
I have been on my farm in Kentucky. I have horses, chickens, dogs and cats and a garden so it has kept me busy, plus I’ve ridden my bike a lot on our country roads. I feel very blessed to have this as an option to my apartment in NYC where things were quite dire – I’m pleased that Manhattan is getting better and I plan on returning soon.

What sparked you to create the RéVive range and build your own skincare empire?
I never set out to have a skincare company, it grew out of research I did on burn victims while I was in training to be a Plastic Surgeon. Biotechnology had just come to the forefront in medicine and I was fortunate enough to have access to the newly bioengineered epidermal growth factors.

What are the two products in the RéVive range that everyone needs and why?
I always say if you could only try one RéVive product it would be our Moisturising Renewal Cream. The next would be sunscreen.

What are the essential skincare products someone in their 20’s and 30’s should be using to combat premature signs of ageing and free radical damage to keep skin looking vibrant and refreshed?
I think a skincare routine needs to be simple so that a person will commit to it over the long haul. Individuals in their 20’s and 30’s are experiencing a planet with growing environmental issues that didn’t exist when I was younger, so my recommendation would be; sun protection, moisturizer and a good antioxidant. At RéVive we have a wonderful environmental antioxidant booster, Defensif, that can be added in drop form to any cream – I highly recommend it along with the Moisturizing Renewal Cream Nightly Retexturizer.

Do you have a favourite book that has shaped your career, brand or life in any way?
Yes, the biography of Peggy Guggenheim, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim was pivotal for me with regards to collecting art, which is an important part of my life. Peggy Guggenheim amassed one of the most significant collections of the twentieth century with limited financial means since her father had lost most of her inheritance. She collected many masterpieces with limited dollars and appreciated a great sense of genius when she saw it. That she was able to amass such a collection, which let me know one doesn’t have to be a zillionaire or even wealthy to collect great art, which was a true inspiration.

Do you believe nutrition and wellness has an impact on skin health? If so, are there any foods or supplements you recommend?
I definitely believe diet has a huge impact on overall wellness and is closely linked with skin health. A low glycemic index and a well-balanced diet is so important. Glycation (sugar deposits) on proteins is ageing and contributes to diseases of old age such as; diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and more. Any carbohydrate that causes an insulin spike or is immediately absorbed can do this, for example, white bread, white rice, sugar, potato etc.

Lastly, where is your favourite holiday destination you can’t wait to travel to once restrictions are lifted?
Well, I really love my two homes in NYC and Kentucky. I will be so happy to get back to NYC!