Danielle Gronich and Kayleigh Christina on what to leave out

Danielle Gronich spent more than ten years on acne treatments that never lasted before she opened a clinic devoted entirely to acne. Kayleigh Christina was the patient who became her partner. Their brand, CLEARSTEM, is made for skin that breaks out and ages at the same time, and it is defined as much by what it never uses as by what it does.

Danielle Gronich lived with cystic acne for more than ten years. She tried antibiotics, birth control and laser treatments, went through three rounds of Accutane, and each time the breakouts came back. She set aside plans for medical school, trained as a licensed clinical esthetician, and in 2014 founded San Diego Acne Clinic, now based in La Jolla, a practice that works on acne and nothing else. One of her patients, a nutritionist named Kayleigh Christina, had already been through doctors and dermatologists without success. Gronich cleared her skin in under two months. In 2017 the two of them founded CLEARSTEM.

Today the brand describes itself as the acne line that bridges internal and external skincare, through supplements and topicals with no pore-clogging ingredients, ever. Its homepage puts the customer in a single line: for breakouts and aging at the same time. It remains self-funded. BeautyMatter reported in 2025 that 95 percent of its revenue came direct to consumer, and the brand’s store locator now lists 611 Target stores across 46 states. Its two best-known products cost the same and work from opposite sides of the skin: a bakuchiol moisturizer and a daily capsule.

Most profiles of CLEARSTEM linger on the treatment-room meeting and the speed of the growth. What held our attention was a list. The brand’s Standards page names twenty groups of ingredients it never uses, from parabens and petrochemicals to benzoyl peroxide, the drying active that many acne products are built around. Behind that sits a library of more than 200 pore-clogging ingredients the founders screen out. For a magazine that reads ingredient lists closely, it is a useful correction. Plant-derived and acne-safe are not the same thing, and the word clean says nothing about what happens inside a pore.

The ingredients that do make it into a CLEARSTEM formula are chosen as much for what they avoid as for what they do: bakuchiol without the peeling of retinol, mandelic acid without the sting of faster acids, sulfur in place of benzoyl peroxide. In conversation, Gronich speaks as the clinician and formulator, Christina as the nutritionist and former patient. Both keep returning to the same idea. Clear skin, in their telling, starts with subtraction.

Thank you both for making the time. Danielle, you were 28 when your third round of Accutane failed. What did that round teach you that the first two had not?

Thank you for having us. It taught me that the medication was never going to reach the reason I was breaking out, and that nobody was looking for the reason. The side effects were harsh, my vision was getting worse, and the acne came right back, just as it had before. That is when I started saying something I still believe: the skincare industry is broken, and so is the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to treating acne.

So I left my corporate job and studied cellular biology and genetics. I had planned on medical school, and I chose to train as an esthetician instead, because I realized what I wanted didn’t exist: a true acne specialist who addressed internal and external triggers. So I became that person.

In 2014 I opened San Diego Acne Clinic, and it only does acne. That focus turns you into a detective. You look at what someone puts on their skin and what is happening inside, and you remove triggers one at a time. And we never tell people to give something up without offering an alternative.

Kayleigh, you came to the clinic in your mid-twenties, and Danielle cleared your skin in under two months. What did she do that nobody else had?

I tried every clean skincare product, every DIY hack, and every clinical recommendation out there. Nothing worked. I felt invisible, until I found Danielle. I had multiple health issues at the time, and as a nutritionist I knew a lot was happening underneath my skin. What I had never seen was anyone look at the face and the body as one problem. Danielle looked at all of it: what I was eating, what I was putting on my skin, what my hormones were doing. In under two months I was clear.

When she began developing her own skincare line, I jumped on board immediately. I brought the nutrition background and an obsession with high-quality ingredients. She brought the clinic and the results. It was the perfect match. Most people will never make it into a treatment room in La Jolla, and we wanted to help more of them get the skin they had stopped hoping for.

Danielle, your Standards page opens with a plain sentence: “Your Skincare Shouldn’t Break You Out.” You have said many pore-clogging ingredients are still common in clean beauty. For a reader who assumes plant-based means gentle, where does that go wrong?

It’s not just what’s in our formulas; it’s also what we leave out. We avoid over 200 pore-clogging ingredients, many of which are still rampant in “clean” beauty. A product can be organic and still clog a pore. Natural tells you where an ingredient came from. It tells you nothing about what it does inside a follicle.

That was the problem when we started. Adult acne carries on well into our 20s, 30s and 40s, yet most acne products strip the skin and leave it looking older, and most anti-aging products rely on rich fillers that break you out. Nobody should be forced to choose.

So the list comes first, and plants don’t get a pass. If a botanical is on it, it doesn’t go in, however lovely it sounds on a label. We also built the Pore-Clogging Checker so anyone can run any brand’s ingredient list through it and see for themselves.

Kayleigh, you told BeautyMatter that “skincare isn’t just about the bottle.” MINDBODYSKIN, which the brand calls its number one bestselling daily capsule, has more than 1,300 reviews on your site. What is a supplement doing in an acne routine, and where does it stop?

Skincare isn’t just about the bottle. It’s about lifestyle, diet, stress, and even what time you work out. Breakouts often have internal roots: stress, blood sugar, digestion, deficiencies, hormones. As a nutritionist I couldn’t ignore that half, and in the clinic Danielle never did.

MINDBODYSKIN puts that internal half into a capsule: DIM to help with hormonal fluctuations, vitamin A, B5 for hydration, and turmeric, milk thistle and dandelion root to support the body’s own processes. It’s for anyone with acne-prone or oily skin who wants more control over what is happening.

It also has limits, and we print them. It does not address breakouts caused by pore-clogging skincare, so you still have to check what you put on your face. It isn’t for pregnancy or breastfeeding. Because 5-HTP can interfere with some medications, including SSRIs, we make MINDBODYSKIN 2 without it. And we ask people to give it three months. Your skin didn’t get here in a week.

HYDRAGLOW, the brand’s best-selling skincare product, is built on bakuchiol, an argan plant stem cell culture and squalane. Danielle, why bakuchiol rather than retinol, in a line meant to handle aging too?

Because I know what the alternative did to my own skin. An overhyped industry trend is the white cream version of Retin-A. It gets prescribed all the time, yet it has one of the worst pore-clogging filler agents in it, isopropyl myristate. That product destroyed my skin every time I tried to use it. Whatever the active was doing, the base was working against it.

Bakuchiol is a plant-based retinol alternative. It gives you what people want from retinol, smoother-looking texture and softer-looking fine lines, without the sun sensitivity, redness or peeling. The argan stem cells help with the look of plumpness, and squalane mimics the skin’s natural oils, so it protects the barrier without sitting heavy.

I think of it as our Goldilocks product: not so rich that it clogs, not so light that it leaves you thirsty. Use a generous amount on a clean face, neck and chest, morning and night, and let it absorb before sunscreen or makeup.

Benzoyl peroxide sits on CLEARSTEM’s never-use list, alongside coal tar, triclosan and formaldehyde-releasing preservatives. For an acne brand that is a pointed choice. Kayleigh, what did you want to put in its place?

Spot treatments in the past were typically just really aggressively drying. They either have benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid, and a lot of times alcohol denat, which can actually be further irritating. You end up with a dry, flaky patch on top of a breakout that is still there, and as we get older that dryness reads as aging too. So we focused on those problems. Our solution was combining sulfur, zinc and glycolic acid, which are far more calming on the skin. Our SULFUR SPOT&MASK is built on 5% sulfur.

What people don’t see is how long that takes. Every single one of our launches has been delayed, often by another six weeks, because something needed reformulating. From a marketing seat that is hard. But I would rather move a date than put out a product that breaks our community out. They trust us with their skin, and that trust is the business.

It’s not just what’s in our formulas; it’s also what we leave out.

Danielle Gronich

CLEARITY, the serum the brand calls the Blackhead Dissolver, pairs 8% mandelic acid with pyruvic acid and turmeric, and the directions ask you to leave it alone on the skin for at least ten minutes. Danielle, why mandelic, and why the wait?

Mandelic is the holy grail of acids for acne-prone skin. It exfoliates without the irritation people expect from an acid, so it suits a barrier that is already stressed. Pyruvic acid refines, and turmeric brightens and calms. Together they work on the look of congestion and texture.

The ten minutes matters. You apply three pumps to clean, bare skin at night, massage it into the face, neck and chest, and leave it. No rinsing. It needs that time on its own to absorb. Then follow with CELLRENEW or BOUNCEBACK.

I’m also honest about the start. If your skin is sensitive, or your barrier is damaged from years of harsh products, begin every other night. Some people go straight in every night, feel worse before they feel better, and can’t tell whether it is purging or irritation. Easing in avoids most of that. And keep it away from the eye area itself.

WWD quoted you both as saying, “Education is our first product, and it always will be.” Kayleigh, your tagline came from customers too. How did it start?

People kept telling us, “You changed my life.” So we turned that into our tagline: clear skin changes everything. Nobody invented it in a meeting. Our community said it to us first.

Education comes first because that is how Danielle cleared me. She explained what was going on, and once I understood it I could make better decisions on my own. We want everyone to have that, whether or not they ever buy from us. So we teach constantly: masterclasses online and in cities around the country, our podcast, the Pore-Clogging Checker, the full list of what we never use.

We also teach that you don’t have to choose. We always want to keep it both, acne and aging. That’s definitely a category we want to stay in and own. As we’ve moved into retail, the rule hasn’t changed. We want every retail experience to reflect the care we’ve built online.

Danielle, you told BeautyMatter that you “intentionally held off on outside funding” to keep control of your formulas, and you have said those formulas go through clinical testing with a follicular biopsy. What does that control buy you?

We intentionally held off on outside funding. We wanted to maintain control over our formulas and how we speak to our community. Nobody can ask us to swap in a cheaper emollient or rush a launch to hit a number.

That control lets us test the way we do. Our formulas undergo rigorous clinical testing using a follicular biopsy to make sure they are both non-comedogenic and non-acnegenic. Those are two different questions: whether a product clogs the pore, and whether it sets off inflamed breakouts. Our community needs both answers.

It’s also why we are specific. Phenoxyethanol is on our never-use list above 1%. Below that, it supports our natural preservative system, lets us avoid parabens, and is proven safe for sensitive skin. Anything made with water has to be protected, and I would rather tell you exactly how we do it. When someone discovers CLEARSTEM, we want them to feel like, “Finally, this brand was made for me.” Because it was.

Your two best-known products cost the same, $58: HYDRAGLOW and MINDBODYSKIN, which between them carry more than 2,400 reviews on your site. Kayleigh, if a reader is breaking out and noticing fine lines at the same time, where should they start?

Start with what you already own. Run your products through the Pore-Clogging Checker, including your makeup, shampoo and conditioner. It’s free, and for a lot of people it’s the biggest change they make. MINDBODYSKIN doesn’t address breakouts caused by pore-clogging skincare, so this step comes first.

Then the moisturizer, because everyone already uses one, so it’s the easiest swap. HYDRAGLOW is the product people tell us is the first moisturizer that didn’t break them out. If your breakouts follow your cycle or your stress, that’s when I’d add MINDBODYSKIN, and give it a few months.

And be kind to yourself while you work it out. We want to be the number one internal and external clear skin solution. But more than that, we want people to feel seen, heard and safe.

Closing note from the desk

What stays with us after this conversation is how little of it was about adding. Gronich’s story moves by subtraction: a prescription that failed three times, a white cream with the wrong filler, 200 ingredients that never reach a bottle. Christina supplies the context a jar cannot reach, from diet and stress to hormones. Together they make an argument this magazine finds persuasive. An ingredient earns its place by what it does in skin, and a plant gets no pass for being a plant.

CLEARSTEM set out to give people who break out and are starting to age one routine for both, without drying their skin or clogging their pores, and to pair it with the internal work a good acne clinic would do anyway. It does that with a short list of hardworking ingredients, a long list of exclusions and a steady habit of explaining itself. That is the brand, said plainly.

Product spotlight

HYDRAGLOW Plant Stem Cell Moisturizer, $58 for 2 oz, or $20 for a .5 oz mini. A daily moisturizer for skin that breaks out and is beginning to show fine lines, built on bakuchiol, argan plant stem cells and squalane. Apply a generous amount to a clean face, neck and chest, morning and night, and let it absorb before sunscreen or makeup.

MINDBODYSKIN Hormonal Acne Supplement, $58 for a single bottle of 90 capsules, or $46.40 on subscription. A daily capsule made to support clear skin from the inside, with DIM, vitamin A, B5, turmeric, milk thistle and dandelion. Take one to three capsules a day with food. The brand labels it unsuitable during pregnancy or breastfeeding and sells MINDBODYSKIN 2 without 5-HTP.