Founder and Managing Director of Earth's Answer | Research Analyst | Product Marketer | Author | Blogger | Brand Consultant
In a treatment room in Melbourne, the same skin damage kept walking through the door. Different clients, different price points, different brands, and yet the patterns repeated. Years of recognising the effects of products and underlying health issues on skin meant Marie Jane Lewin could often look at a face and read it backwards: what had been applied, what had been done to it, what the label had promised. Research informed the theory. The skin showed what happened in practice.
Twenty-Six Years, One Company, No Handover
Marie Jane Lewin is the founder and managing director of Earth’s Answer, the Australian skincare and wellness company she started in 2000 and has run for twenty-six years without ever handing the formulation work to anyone else. She has developed more than 130 proprietary formulations and treatments and written two books, The Skin Remembers and The Power of Finding Beauty. What defines her is not only what she makes, but the standard of evidence she expects behind it.
Before the Boardrooms, There Was Formulation
Her formulation story had begun long before the boardrooms. Her commercial career started at Sizzler, running training and operations development for the Jardine Group in the late 1980s, mentoring more than 500 staff across the network and holding accreditation standards three years running. It taught her something that never left: consistency is a system, not a talent.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, she built a commercial career on contract across corporate, healthcare, government and not-for-profit sectors. She negotiated national and global agreements and worked with senior decision-makers like
BHP, Rio Tinto and Ansett Airlines, alongside health networks, government departments and national charities. Eighteen years of it. Her work spanned corporate restructuring for expansion, acquisitions, mentoring, internal systems and the protocols that allow organisations to scale and thrive.
By twenty, Marie Jane was already selling skincare as a sideline while building a very different commercial career. Earth’s Answer was founded in 2000, formalising that work into a dedicated skincare company. From there, her formulation and commercial experience continued to inform each other in ways a specialist in either field might have missed.
Her study continued alongside her work. In 2012, she studied epigenetics and the control of gene expression at Melbourne University, followed by nanotechnology the following year. She has also undertaken further ongoing study in molecular genetics. The coursework gave scientific language and context to principles she had already been applying through years of formulation.
In 2014 she opened Body Soul Emporium, an advanced skin treatment centre and spa in Greater Melbourne, where her established formulations and treatment approach became the foundation of thousands of professional treatments.
More recently, she took her commercial experience outward, serving three years as partner and VP Asia Pacific at LG Partners Global, helping beauty and wellness brands reach export markets through a network spanning more than 100 countries. She has been particularly deliberate about backing female founders trying to scale internationally.
The Formulation No Outside Party Has Ever Seen in Full
Most founders in this category outsource manufacturing and hope the contracts hold. Marie Jane’s commercial experience had taught her not to place a complete proprietary formulation or process in the hands of any one manufacturer. She separated the critical stages of production so that no external party ever held the complete formulation or the complete process, and brought final production in-house. It kept her intellectual property intact across 130-plus formulations built over twenty-six years.
The second decision was refusing to build around whatever ingredient the market was celebrating that season.
“Not isolated actives, but coherent formulations that work in alignment with the body’s innate processes.”
That position now reads as mainstream. She held it before the industry had the vocabulary for it, which is the point she keeps returning to.
“What we call ‘innovation’ is often just ancient biological intelligence rediscovered.”
At Body Soul Emporium, she performed and supervised more than 18,000 professional treatments across a wide range of skin conditions and age-management applications. The volume gave her something no ingredient study can supply: recurring damage patterns she could trace back to other brands’ products, specific actives and specific procedures. The centre was named Most Highly Recommended Spa in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
That accumulation of evidence produced a blunt view of where the industry keeps failing.
“Strong data on a hero ingredient does not automatically validate the finished formulation.”
It is a distinction the sector has been slow to make, and she pushes it further than most are comfortable going.
“I am equally concerned by the limited long-term evidence around repeated biological intervention, including potential effects on cellular signalling, gene expression and DNA integrity.”
Ask her for an example and she reaches for exosomes, currently among the most marketed technologies in professional skincare.
“A synthesised exosome-like vesicle is not automatically biologically equivalent to a naturally produced exosome. Recreating the vehicle without reproducing the biological cargo can be like getting into a car, turning the key, but having no fuel to drive it.”
The results argue for the position. One documented client presented with visible facial and neck laxity and loss of definition. After a single treatment using Marie Jane’s proprietary BRT Bio-Rewind non-invasive system, the change in facial contour and jawline definition was documented photographically. No surgery. No injectables. The formulation and protocol behind it remain hers, and closely held.
What the Skin Remembers
She spent eighteen thousand treatments reading faces for evidence the marketing had left out, while using the formulations and treatment approach she had already built. She could have stopped there and become a critic. Instead she protected the thing she had already built, stage by stage, so nobody could take it. The industry sells the promise of a molecule. Marie Jane Lewin sells the result on a face she has already seen a thousand versions of.
Skin remembers everything done to it, which is exactly why she has spent twenty-six years being careful about what she asks it to.
Marie Jane Lewin is the founder and managing director of Earth’s Answer, based in Melbourne, Australia. She develops proprietary bio-active skincare formulations and professional treatment systems through Earth’s Answer, alongside broader work spanning global speaking, longevity, innovation and global business strategy. To connect with Marie Jane or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile.
