Skincare by texture, ritual and taste.
We cover skincare the way people actually meet it: by hand. How a formula feels on a fingertip and then on a cheek, how the jar looks on the shelf, and how a routine fits a morning, a gym bag or a hard year.
Six issues, layer by layer.
Second Skin launched in the summer of 2025 as the sensory and design title of VOL Collective, the independent editorial studio in New York. The first issue carried eight founder interviews, each with a texture study: the formula photographed in macro on glass, then on skin.
We treat pleasure as a real reason to buy and design as a real part of the product, and we still say plainly what a formula does and does not do. We describe before we judge, nobody is shamed for their skin or their shelf, and we say so when a beautiful object holds an ordinary formula.
Today 31,800 people read Second Skin each month, most of them in the US, and 8,700 get Texture Notes on Sundays. Sixty-eight percent say the way a product feels decides whether they finish it.
The people behind Second Skin
Daniel Mercer
Publisher & Editorial Director
Natalie Hayes
Editor-in-Chief
Vivian Hart
Executive Editor
Ramin Vandi
Director of Features & PartnershipsMiranda Walsh
Deputy EditorAudrey Rhodes
Commissioning EditorElise Moreno
Beauty EditorDeborah Shepherd
Contributing EditorChristina Rowe
Science EditorMiles Barrett
Fact-checkerApril Delgado
Copy EditorSydney Hamilton
Photo EditorAudrey Parrish
Art DirectorBrianna Vaughn
Picture ResearcherNoah Nolan
Contributing PhotographerValerie Carson
Social EditorLaura Reyes
Features EditorMelissa Whitaker
Features EditorJocelyn Hardy
Features EditorSecond Skin, year by year
- 2023
VOL Collective begins
VOL Collective publishes its first interview in New York. Its beauty editors keep asking founders the same question off the record: why does it feel like that?
- 2024
The texture library
We start photographing formulas in macro on glass and keeping notes on slip, sink and finish, in the same words each time.
- 2025
Issue 01
Second Skin launches in the summer with eight founder interviews, each with a texture study on glass and on skin.
- 2026
Issue 06 and the first Touch Table
The texture guides launch in July, from sunscreen that feels good every day to a night cleanse without the tight feeling. Texture Notes passes 4,000 subscribers, and this autumn readers try the formulas from Issue 06 on Walker Street with the founders who made them.
