BiotechBeauty® Is the Brand Asking the Questions Other Makeup Companies Aren’t

Founder Alanna Tran can trace BiotechBeauty back to a specific kind of morning: 6am, half-asleep, applying makeup before an 8am lecture at UC Berkeley.

“My skin was often textured, red, and breaking out, and makeup became both something I loved and something I felt dependent on,” she says. It wasn’t really about how she looked. It was about whether she’d raise her hand in discussion, ask a question, or make eye contact with a classmate. “I loved makeup, but I hated feeling like I had to choose between the confidence it gave me in the moment and the health of my skin the next day.”

That push and pull—loving makeup but resenting what it did to her skin—was the gap she set out to close.

Tran’s path here has the quality of a butterfly effect. As a college student, she toured Beautylish and met its CEO, Nils Johnson, walking away struck by how deliberately his company treated beauty, education, and community. Years later, after launching BiotechBeauty and landing a spot in Ulta Beauty’s MUSE Accelerator, she was assigned a mentor for the program: Johnson again. “It felt so serendipitous,” she says. Now BiotechBeauty has landed at Beautylish itself—what she calls a return to the place that first expanded her sense of what beauty could be.

Studying biology at UC Berkeley, Tran trained as a cosmetic chemist, and that training shows up everywhere in how she talks about her products—less like a founder pitching a brand, more like a researcher defending a thesis. “My research background trained me to ask one question over and over: ‘But how do we know?’”

That instinct is why third-party clinical testing sits at the center of BiotechBeauty, rather than as a marketing afterthought. Tran is openly skeptical of typical industry language—claims borrowed from supplier-level ingredient data rather than tested on the actual finished formula people put on their skin. “A finished formula is its own system,” she says. “The way ingredients interact, the concentration they’re used at, and the delivery format all matter.”

The brand’s clinical work centers on three markers—skin barrier strength, clarity, and microbiome diversity—chosen because they’re foundational rather than niche. “When my own skin was struggling, it wasn’t just one thing,” Tran explains. “It was redness, texture, dehydration, breakouts.” That testing also spans Fitzpatrick skin types I through VI and a range of skin conditions, a choice Tran frames as a matter of consistency: if a brand is committed to shade inclusivity, its testing population should reflect that same commitment, not just its campaign imagery.

Biotechnology, in her formulations, isn’t a buzzword so much as a philosophy for ethical, sustainable products. For example, fermentation-derived squalane in place of shark liver or olive oil, vegan collagen built for purity and consistency. “I don’t want biotechnology in beauty to feel cold or intimidating,” she says. “I want it to feel like standing at your bathroom vanity, reaching for something beautiful, and knowing there’s a smarter, more responsible system behind it.”

Ask Tran what she’s proudest of, and she points to the BiomeBlush Multi-Stick—a product she calls “83% skincare” that still had to deliver the one-swipe pigment and all-day wear of traditional color cosmetics. It’s a small object carrying a large argument: that the tradeoff between performance and care isn’t actually necessary, if you’re willing to test for both.

What Tran wants for the industry, ultimately, is for her own standards to stop being unusual. “I would love to see that burden shift back to brands,” she says—fewer vague claims, more proof, less asking customers to do the homework.

It’s a vision that traces back to that 6am mirror in Berkeley, to a young woman who once felt she had to choose between feeling confident and feeling comfortable. Tran has spent the years since trying to close that gap, for herself and for everyone standing where she once stood. “That’s the kind of beauty industry I want to help build,” she says, “one where people don’t have to choose between joy, performance, safety, and trust.”

Shop BiotechBeauty, now available at Beautylish.