Caroline Sims built Botanycl out of her own skin, which is to say out of years of living with acne and trying every harsh chemical the shelves could offer, watching them fail one after another while her confidence took a real beating. She was working in mental health at the time, delivering cognitive behavioural therapy for depression and anxiety, so she understood better than most what living in skin you want to hide does to a person underneath.
When the conventional route had thoroughly let her down, she did the thing her training had taught her to do, which was to go and read the actual evidence. Buried in the scientific studies she found a handful of plant-based ingredients with real research behind them, began taking them herself, and watched her own skin clear in a way that nothing from a chemist had ever managed.
That personal result became SkinClear Elixir, the plant-based supplement she launched in January 2018, which works from the inside by calming the hormones that drive so many skin problems rather than scrubbing away at the surface. It has since gathered hundreds of five-star reviews from people describing the very relief she had felt, and it won the backing of Peter Jones and Steven Bartlett on Dragons' Den.
Everything is made in a UK facility to strict standards, but the heart of it is much simpler than that, and it is the reason Botanycl sits so well on Women's Work. Here is a woman who solved her own painful problem properly, and then turned the solution into something that now does the same for thousands of others.