What do you do after inventing hair dye that changes colour in response to temperature fluctuations, reflective eyeshadow that transforms under a camera flash, and pollution-absorbent clothing that shifts hues upon contact with carbon emissions? You release a lip balm grown in space, of course.

With her brand The Unseen, Lauren Bowker, inventor, alchemist and material scientist, created products so magical and rule-breaking that she was called a witch. Now she’s back with Exist, a new brand that’s just as innovative and bold, if slightly more accessible. “I always call Exist the older, wiser sister to The Unseen,” she says. “She’s been to university, gone around the block and decided ‘we can break the rules but we also have to do something that resonates’ because if people aren’t purchasing it, then you’re not really impacting everyone’s life.”

Exist launches with two iterations of ‘Spacelip’ lip balms. Origin 001 is a richer formulation scented with a fragrance co-designed with Givaudan (inspired by the smell of returning to Earth from space, more on that later), while Void 000 is an unscented and lighter, on-the-go formulation. That might sound like standard beauty brand fare so far, but then you get to the INCI list: both lip balms are made from a bioactive complex cultivated aboard the International Space Station – AKA an ingredient grown in outer space.

For over 25 years, NASA has been sending materials up to the space station to see how they interact within a zero-gravity environment. They are then brought back down to Earth, analysed and added to a library of extremophiles (organisms that can live and thrive in extreme conditions). Lysate – the ingredient in Spacelips – is one of these materials. After being left to grow outside of the space station for 18 months and mutating itself to survive the intense temperatures and pressures, the lysate adapted to have incredible healing properties. While NASA has been studying it for uses in healing wounds like anthrax burns, Bowker wants to make these properties applicable on a more everyday level.

“The lysate can supercharge the healing of hyaluronic acid within the cell in the skin, so it creates 300 times more hydration [than anything Earth-grown]. It is a fundamental switch to the body,” Bowker explains. “There’s a massive gap between everything coming out of research and what you can actually buy on the shelf. There’s all of this innovation, and it’s not being used in the industry. I want to be that bridge. I want to make extremophiles cool in beauty.”

Alongside the lysate, the lip balms contain sustainably sourced ingredients like bio-grown antioxidants derived from grass and bio-butters. They are housed in equally sustainable packaging – a fully metal, fully circular refill system that the team designed themselves after being told by manufacturers that it couldn’t be done. Inspired by shark teeth, vintage lipstick cases and the spaceships in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, they wanted to create something tactile and ergonomic, and which felt at the same time ancient and futuristic. “Like you could have found it in the desert and thought, ‘fuck have aliens been here?’” laughs Bowker (the team has tested it through airport customs and confirmed it does not get flagged).

The cosmos also informed the scent of Origin 001, which was created after conversations with astronauts who said the two things they missed the most while on the space station were pizza and Earth itself. “We’re not going to make a pizza-scented lip balm, so how do we bring that earthy scent into a fragrance? The main thing we wanted to capture was a nostalgic feeling, and that you are out in nature, in the grass,” says Bowker. Meanwhile, the campaign imagery for the launch pays tribute to the women who were responsible for calculating the incredibly complex and precise trajectories required for the Apollo mission to reach the moon, but who were erased from the images and story in the aftermath. “So we recreated the images. We selected these beautiful NASA archival pictures and replaced the men with women. We’re manifesting a better future,” she says.  

Upcoming (secret) launches, which follow later this year, are named after the first women in space. Also in the future are products that explore ingredients outside of space-grown material, though still ones that have survived extreme environments like volcanoes and the deep sea, thus giving them supercharged properties.  

For Bowker, The Unseen was all about proving that things can be done differently, and that ethos remains a central part of her new brand, as do the values of innovation, sustainable circular packaging, and clean, biogrown materials. “The beauty industry is fucked – the messaging is fucked, the packaging’s fucked, the materials are fucked,” she says. “I just want [The Unseen and Exist] to be a shining light of where the industry can do better, that proves the point that something can be done better through making it real.” The Unseen’s mascara made from a carbon-negative pigment derived from algae, for example, was the first to not rely on pigments from finite resources like crude oil and coal. “And then that IP is there for anyone, I’m not a gatekeeper.”

Because apart from continuing to invent the impossible and dream up the magical, ultimately, Bowker is just hoping to make an impact on the industry, people’s everyday routines and, hopefully, the world. “The fundamentals of Exist are making sure the planet exists, making sure the person can show up as they want to exist, and making the best product that there is,” she says. “Beauty is such a good industry to innovate in because you’re putting things on your skin, it’s so close to you, so emotional, that it’s the perfect place to create change within the world. And if you can get a massive amount of people to bet with their money on a better future, you’re going to get a better future.”