Walk through any beauty store today and you will find hundreds of skincare products competing around the same ingredients: vitamin C, niacinamide, retinol and hyaluronic acid. For a new skincare brand, making another serum is easy. Building a brand people remember is much harder. That is where Poshan Skincare is trying to play a different game.

Founded by Rhea Goenka Jalan, Poshan is building what it calls “Modern Desi Beauty”, combining skincare science with Indian ingredients, cultural references and a distinctly Indian brand identity. Beneath the colourful names and playful campaigns is a more serious bet: can science built around Indian skin become the foundation for a new beauty brand?

Rhea has spoken publicly about growing up around the idea that beauty meant fair and flawless skin. Poshan takes a different approach. Instead of asking Indian consumers to fit into an existing definition of beauty, the brand wants to build products around Indian skin, its tones, textures and concerns. Its positioning sits between traditional Indian beauty knowledge and modern biotechnology, which the company captures in the line “from nani’s nushke to lab notes.” The goal is not to replace traditional knowledge with science, but to bring the two together.

One of Poshan’s key differentiators is its Skinbiotics™ technology. The company says its ingredients are sourced from their native habitats and then bio-fermented before being combined with clinically proven actives. Poshan says its formulations are designed to support the skin microbiome while remaining suitable for sensitive skin.

This matters because cultural branding alone is easy to copy. A competitor can copy a Hindi product name, colourful packaging or the “desi” look. Proprietary formulation work, R&D and accumulated product knowledge are much harder to replicate, and that is where Poshan is trying to build a deeper layer of differentiation.

Poshan’s product names do not sound like typical skincare products: Dhoop Ki Rani, Befikar Begum, Aankhon Ka Taara and Chaand Ka Tukda. The brand takes familiar Indian expressions and turns them into product identities.

Its sunscreen, Dhoop Ki Rani, plays on the familiar Indian warning to stay away from the sun and turns it into a more playful relationship with sun protection. This is more than packaging. It gives consumers a way to remember the product, and in a crowded skincare market, memorability matters.

Many of Poshan’s campaigns do not look like conventional beauty advertising. According to the company, one pre-launch campaign covered a Mumbai auto-rickshaw with Poshan stickers and turned it into a moving teaser, while another built a desi chaat-stall-style pop-up with bright signage and playful menus.

Poshan also says it emailed multiple beauty editors with no guarantee of coverage, and that those emails eventually led to organic features in Vogue and ELLE. Then there was comment marketing. When a creator posted about alcohol-free sunscreen, Poshan joined the conversation, introduced its own sunscreen, sent her the range and received an organic post after she tried it.

The pattern is clear. Instead of relying entirely on conventional advertising, Poshan keeps experimenting with unconventional ways of getting attention. For an early D2C brand, those small experiments can matter. The company is not just buying attention, it is trying to earn it.

Poshan has also shown something most brands avoid: failure.

In one campaign, the company showed a failed experiment on national television. According to Poshan’s own account, the experiment was intentionally presented as a failure to show how many iterations and reformulations went into getting its products right.

For a science-led brand, the failed experiments become part of the story behind the product. Instead of simply saying “trust us, our scientists know what they are doing,” the brand shows part of the process.

Poshan also took an unusual approach to celebrity marketing. The brand worked with actress Anya Singh, but the central idea was almost the opposite of a typical endorsement: don’t trust the celebrity, trust the scientist behind the formula.

A celebrity can give a brand reach, while science can become part of its credibility story. Poshan is trying to use the first without letting it replace the second.

Poshan operates under Biome Laboratories Pvt Ltd, the company named on its website. Biome Laboratories was also the entity that won the Breakthrough category at the 2023 BEAUTY&YOU Awards. The award carried a $50,000 prize for innovation in active ingredients addressing key areas for Indian consumers.

The awards were created by Estée Lauder Companies’ New Incubation Ventures in partnership with Nykaa to discover and support Indian beauty founders, innovators and creatives. Biome Laboratories was recognised alongside Keva Fragrances in the Breakthrough category.

Separately, Poshan’s LinkedIn page describes the company as a biotech-driven D2C skincare startup funded by Estée Lauder New Incubation Ventures and Nykaa.

Rhea has shared an unusual story about Poshan’s fundraising.

According to her public account, she entered Zee’s Ideabaaz expecting that the highest valuation Poshan could receive was around ₹6 crore. She nevertheless asked for ₹1 crore for 5% equity, implying a ₹20 crore valuation.

Rhea says Archana Jahagirdar of Rukam Capital agreed to invest on the spot. During the paperwork, investors learned that Poshan was backed by Estée Lauder, after which, according to Rhea, they proposed an even higher valuation. She says the round eventually closed at more than four times the valuation she had initially expected.

The interesting part is not simply the valuation. It is how the company’s scientific positioning and association with a major beauty ecosystem became part of the fundraising story.

At its core, Poshan is a D2C skincare business. Its website currently sells products across sunscreens, serums, cleansers and eye care, alongside routines and bundles.

The model is straightforward: a consumer discovers the brand through one product, tries it, and can eventually move into a larger skincare routine. Since skincare is a repeat-purchase category, the long-term opportunity lies in turning a first purchase into a recurring habit.

Poshan still faces the same fundamental challenge as every D2C skincare company: getting attention is not the same as building a business.

The brand can create memorable campaigns, earn organic creator posts, appear in publications and build a distinctive identity. But eventually, the numbers matter. Do customers come back? Does the product deliver what it promises? Can customer acquisition costs remain sustainable? Can the company scale beyond its current D2C audience? And can its science remain a genuine advantage as competitors become more sophisticated?

Those questions will determine how far Poshan’s model can scale.

The interesting thing about Poshan is not simply that it makes Indian skincare. That category already exists.

The more interesting bet is that Indian culture, biotechnology and brand-building can become one integrated business model. The science gives Poshan a product story. The cultural language gives it memorability. The unconventional marketing gives it attention. And the R&D behind its formulations could give it a harder-to-copy layer of differentiation.

A Hindi product name can be copied. So can a chaat-stall campaign or a colourful Instagram feed. But building the science, brand and consumer trust together takes much longer.

That is the real business Poshan is trying to build: from nani ke nushke to lab notes, from Dhoop Ki Rani to Skinbiotics, from a Mumbai rickshaw to a biotech lab.

Poshan is betting that Indian beauty does not have to look foreign to feel premium.