Kate Bosworth Swears By This New Retinol Serum To Fade Her Melasma

Everywhere you look these days you’ll spot the term “clean beauty”, which is ironic considering it’s nearly impossible to determine what “clean” even means. It’s up to individual brands (at least in the United States) to establish their own criteria for safe, clean, and green ingredients. So when you find a brand that is holding itself to a higher standard, *and* your skin looks amazing after using its products, well, that’s something worth shouting from the rooftops. That’s why when word got out that actor and skin care fanatic Kate Bosworth (who has had luminous, enviable skin since her Blue Crush days) had partnered with Juice Beauty for the brand’s newest retinol serum, it was clear something exceptional was in the works.

“It's important to our company as a whole to be sustainable,” Juice Beauty founder Karen Behnke tells TZR about her brand’s commitment to clean formulation. “We just moved to a completely solar powered corporate headquarters and distribution center, and even our farm is solar powered.” Now, just in time for summer when most beauty consumers (including Bosworth) are battling hyperpigmentation and texture issues, Behnke has debuted the new Stem Cellular Anti-Wrinkle Overnight Retinol Serum

“The whole stem cell collection idea launched from my being a triathlete,” Behnke tells TZR. “I kept hearing about stem cellular injections for recovery and thought about how it could repair skin. Now, those were human cell injections and obviously we wanted to use plant stem cells.” So the Juice Beauty team did just that, finding one of the leading stem cell research groups — a division of the University of California — to help with the final formulation. “We already had our amazing booster which is a vitamin C with essential fatty acids, but we always wanted to do a retinol,” Behnke says. The result was the 2% bio-retinol and 0.5% retinol encapsulated in evening primrose, which showed a 67% reduction of dark spots in 56 days, and a 28% reduction in measured wrinkles at 42 days in clinical evaluations.

As a longtime skin care lover, Bosworth appreciates this type of efficacious product that also prioritizes sustainability and higher standards of clean. She explains that, “I ended up having melasma when I was in my early twenties — at about 21 — so I sort of began a skin mission before I think many women feel like they need to start paying attention to their skin due to aging or wrinkles. Because of that, I had to really start understanding products, ingredients, and how they work and why they work. Skin care is something I’ve long been super passionate about, so I can’t just align with any product.”

Aside from wearing a physical SPF every day to block the sun’s rays (as opposed to a chemical formula that absorbs them and disperses them throughout the body as heat, which can trigger melasma) using a daily retinol like Bosworth does can help to fade those dark melasma marks and ensure that the skin is even-toned and glowing.

It was also the actor’s work with KIND.EST, the self-curated creative platform that Bosworth launched in 2020 to promote more compassionate social interactions, that inspired Behnke to work together for this latest skin care launch. Bosworth reveals that the idea was conceptualized two years ago following her grandmother’s passing. “She was the real matriarch of our family,” she says. “And when she passed I began to feel very disconnected to my normal day-to-day life. It was just a very strange out-of-body disconnect with time, and I just sort of birthed this desire to connect more and to communicate in a more authentic way.”

Having worked in Hollywood for over two decades, Bosworth definitely knows the pressures (and criticisms) that accompany fame. “I kinda thought if I could create a space online that revolutionizes the idea of kindness as becoming cool rather than something that's a little bit saccharine or cheesy, then I was onto something,” she says. But Bosworth reveals that maintaining that authenticity has presented challenges. “It's not easy to be vulnerable,” she says. “It's really a real challenge. And as Brené Brown says, ‘There is no courage without vulnerability and there's no vulnerability without courage.’ So those two things are synonymous. Every time I post something on the site that’s extremely transparent, before I press publish, I feel like I’m stepping off a cliff. But I trust that it's going to connect with people, and when it does, it brings me a massive amount of fulfillment.”

In addition to personal anecdotes, KIND.EST is also the go-to for Bosworth’s family recipes, podcast recommendations, and, of course, more beauty tips — a place where it’s cool to be kind, to each other, and the planet.

If you’re looking for a new retinol serum that can provide a Bosworth-level glow, check out a few of the top formulas below.

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