Art of Intentions with Jeanette Thottrup, Founder of Seed to Skin
Jeanette Thottrup speaks about skincare the same way some people speak about food, farming, or even hospitality. Everything starts at the source.
Long before launching Seed to Skin, Jeanette was immersed in the world of fashion, living a fast-paced life that eventually pushed her to reevaluate her relationship with health and wellbeing. After turning to natural medicine during her own fertility journey, she became fascinated by the untapped potential of botanical ingredients and frustrated by how disconnected much of the beauty industry felt from the ingredients themselves.
That curiosity eventually led her to Borgo Santo Pietro in Tuscany, where she built both a laboratory and a working herb garden with the intention of growing, harvesting, and transforming ingredients as thoughtfully as possible.
In this edition of Art of Intentions, Jeanette reflects on why true skin health takes time, what transparency actually means in practice, and how slowing down has shaped not only her approach to beauty, but the way she moves through life as a whole.
When you first started building Seed to Skin, what were the non-negotiables you refused to compromise on?
When I first started building Seed to Skin, I felt there was a clear divide in the skincare world that I couldn’t ignore. On one side, you had science-led formulations that delivered results but often lacked purity and connection to nature. On the other hand, natural skincare was beautifully clean and sensorial, but too often it didn’t truly perform.
I didn’t believe you should have to choose between the two.
For me, the missing piece was not just combining nature and science but rethinking where efficacy begins. It starts with the quality of the raw material: fresh, potent botanicals grown in clean, living soil. Before biotech, before complex processing, there is the plant itself. That’s why creating a “herb house,” a place where we could grow, harvest, and transform these botanicals at their peak, became essential.
By working this way, and combining it with rigorous formulation and clinical testing, we’ve been able to prove that you can have both: true natural integrity and visible, measurable results.
That was the foundation and it still is.
Dive deeper
