A single idea can open in countless directions. Points of View is a series gathering perspectives around a concept, with each participant choosing their own journey through questions, answers, and the imagination and marvels in between.
This edition explores standards — where they come from, how they hold up, and what it means to set, inherit, or push back against them. What follows is a closer look at how standards move from abstract ideals to lived decisions.
Here, we spoke to Roz Samimi, founder and CEO of banu skin, a line of products for acne-prone skin. Skincare is a category where the distance between a claimed standard and a real one is absorbed by the consumer — often one who’s already been let down before. Samimi founded banu after years of navigating that gap herself, which shapes how she thinks about what a standard actually has to achieve.
In this conversation, she gets into the specifics: what rigorous testing actually looks like, where the industry baseline falls short, and what it costs to build a protocol that holds up where the default doesn’t.
What’s a standard you refuse to compromise on? Why?
Our clinical testing protocol. Every banu product is tested on real people with acne-prone skin across all six Fitzpatrick skin types (making our products safe for all skin tones) at a third-party facility. After 28 days, if there’s any increase in papules [raised skin bumps], pustules [inflamed pus-filled bumps on the skin], or comedones [clogged hair follicles], the product doesn’t pass and we won’t launch it.
I refuse to compromise on this because having acne is already an emotional toll. When you have reactive skin, trying a new product can feel genuinely stressful — you’re bracing for the next breakout before you’ve even opened the bottle. My job is to take that anxiety off the table. If I’m asking someone with acne-prone skin to trust me, it’s my job to prove the product is safe for their unique skin type.
What does trust look like in a category where everyone makes the same promises?
Trust looks like showing the receipts and being honest about what our products can and can’t do. We publish our standards, we explain our clinical testing process, and we’re honest about what you can expect from our products. I’ll never promise a cure for acne, and I’ll never call a product a “miracle treatment.”
What’s the baseline standard in your category — and do you think it’s high enough?
The baseline is non-comedogenic testing — and no, it’s nowhere near high enough for people with acne. Non-comedogenic testing is typically done on the back or neck, not the face, which has more pores and oil glands. That means it doesn’t reflect the lived experience of acne-prone skin, and it doesn’t account for how a product behaves in combination with the rest of someone’s routine.
The category has been treating “non-comedogenic” as shorthand for “acne-safe” for decades, and it’s just not the same thing. So we chose to do it differently. We built our rigorous protocol from scratch, even though it would have been cheaper, faster, and industry-accepted to default to non-comedogenic.
Rigor looks like building the infrastructure to keep up — and being willing to update your own standards before the industry forces you to.
Is there an emotional standard underneath your product standard?
Yes — and it’s actually the standard I think about first. Acne is isolating. It chips away at your confidence in ways that don’t always show up on the surface. So the underlying emotional standard is just as important: You should feel seen, supported, and joyful using our products.
What does rigor look like when standards in your category are constantly evolving?
Rigor looks like building the infrastructure to keep up — and being willing to update your own standards before the industry forces you to.
We work with an FDA-accredited lab that doubles as our contract manufacturer, so ingredient sourcing, stability testing, and compliance all run through one partner. We brought on a regulatory consultant early who verifies our testing requirements. We partner with a dermatologist throughout R&D — not just for sign-off at the end, but for input on whether each formula is genuinely thoughtful in how it supports acne-prone skin. We test every formula with our community before we finalize it. And of course, we work with a third-party clinical testing facility for every product we launch.
Rigor also means staying curious. The science around acne is evolving — what we know about hormones, the microbiome, barrier function — and the brands that stay rigorous are the ones willing to revisit their own assumptions. I’d rather raise our internal standard ten times in five years than coast on what passed three years ago.
