Cōpḍī is Calling for Less Complicated Skincare

This new brand is creating multifunctional topicals for hormonal skin (without giving you 10 steps to follow)

There’s a lot of reasons to love skincare, but I think anyone in the industry can agree that we’ve made things more complicated (oftentimes to push the sale of more products). 

I also keep seeing a growing list of treatments we should apparently be doing if we want to age “gracefully”. And that’s assuming your skin stays relatively consistent. Which, for a lot of women, it doesn’t.

Pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause, and hormonal changes in general can completely change what your skin needs. Your skin can become drier, more reactive, or start breaking out in ways it never did before.

Afsheen Lalani and Samantha Benassai, the founders of Cōpḍī, saw an opportunity here. 

Instead of asking women to rebuild their skincare routines every time their skin changed, they wanted to create products that could adapt with them.

Afsheen also shared how after returning from a work trip postpartum, she realized she hadn't used any of the skincare products she'd packed with her cause it all just seemed like too much work. Meanwhile, her skin was struggling.

“I was standing at the bathroom counter looking at this lineup of things I owned but never used,” she says. “The problem wasn't that I needed more discipline or a better routine — the routine itself was the problem.”

I think a lot of us can relate to this, even outside of postpartum. We buy products because we genuinely intend to use them. And then somehow you end up with six different serums and a routine that requires enough thought that you don't really want to do it at all.

“Life is already complex, and beauty keeps trying to sell you a 10-step routine on top of it,” they shared. 

So they launched Cōpḍī with just two products (both are acne-safe, for those who always check).

Prep is a milky face mist that combines the functions of a toner, essence, and hydrating serum. It uses ingredients like sea fennel, multi-molecular hyaluronic acid, nigella, prickly pear, and mushrooms to hydrate, calm, and support skin that may be more reactive during hormonal shifts.

And Plump is a crema-gel for the face, eyes, neck, and décolleté that works as a treatment serum, moisturizer, and eye cream in one. The formula pairs biomimetic vegan peptides with niacinamide, tranexamic acid, centella, prickly pear, nigella, and other ingredients to support firmness, hydration, and uneven tone.

The founders refer to both as “edited essentials.”

“It's not about doing less for its own sake — it's about each product doing more,” they explain.

Which makes sense. Especially when you think about how many beauty launches are essentially another product designed to fit somewhere between two products we already own.

And if, like me, you’re curious about the name of the brand, well, let me give you the full breakdown. Cōpḍī means “book” in Gujarati and “to cover” in Italian, bringing together the two cultures that have influenced the brand.

Afsheen is also based in Los Angeles, where the products are manufactured while Samantha lives in Italy and leads the brand's creative direction. 

Additionally, their formulas incorporate ingredients connected to traditional botanical practices alongside newer biotech.

Nigella, also known as kalonji or black cumin, is one example. It's an ingredient tied to Afsheen’s Gujarati heritage that appears across the line. Prickly pear, an ingredient closely associated with Sicily, also plays a central role.

But Afsheen and Samantha didn't want to create a brand that treated botanical ingredients as inherently better than lab-developed ones.

“Botanicals carry the ancient wisdom,” they say. “But natural doesn't automatically mean gentle.”

They learned that firsthand while developing the formulas. An earlier version contained a higher concentration of nigella that ended up breaking them out, so they reduced it. I love their transparency and honesty!!

“That taught us something we kept coming back to: more of a ‘good’ or ‘natural’ ingredient can work against you,” they explain.

Overall, they see biotech as a way to bring more precision and consistency to the botanicals they're already interested in.

“The future isn't natural vs. scientific; it's using each to cover the other's blind spots.”

I like this approach because beauty spent so many years treating “natural” and “science-backed” as two completely different sides of the industry, when obviously skincare doesn't have to fit neatly into either camp. 

But the part that interests me most about Cōpḍī is the hormonal positioning. 

There are plenty of products marketed toward pregnancy or menopause, but Cōpḍī isn't treating these as isolated categories. The founders are thinking more broadly about what happens when skin changes throughout your life as a woman.

And a major misconception they want to challenge is “that hormonal skin is a problem to ‘fix’ rather than a reality to support.”

“Skin shifts across the month, across life stages, across pregnancy and beyond,” they shared. “Most routines are built as if skin is static.”

This feels like a subtle but important difference in how we talk about women's skin. There’s so much language around getting ourselves “back” after having a baby, or correcting every new thing that happens as we age. But there isn't really one permanent version of our skin that we're eventually going to figure out and maintain forever.

Samantha also shared how motherhood changed the way she thought about that.

“I became less interested in chasing a former version of myself and more interested in feeling comfortable and confident in the life and body I have now,” she says. “Good skincare should support that. It should help you feel cared for and more like yourself without demanding that you make beauty a full-time project.”

I think that's ultimately the more interesting idea behind the brand. Because It's not really about convincing someone that two products are morally superior to ten. Some people genuinely love a more robust routine, and I get it.

It comes down to questioning why complexity became so closely associated with taking better care of ourselves.

The founders also shared how they purposely made the packaging colorful and expressive, like beautiful objects someone would leave out on their bathroom counter.

“The maximalism lives in the object and the experience, while the customer's routine remains minimal,” Samantha shared. 

She also pushed against the idea that a simplified routine automatically has to come with the visual language we've come to associate with minimalism.

“Our routine is edited, but our identity is expressive.”

This is also where the founders' definition of luxury comes in.

“For us, time is the true luxury,” they say. Instead of constantly researching new products, testing them, adding treatments, and trying to determine what's working, they want the routine itself to require less thought. “Luxury is getting that time, money, and attention back.”

This idea is so hard hitting because beauty has become increasingly focused on optimization. There's always another treatment, injectable, supplement, device, or preventative step we could add.

Samantha let me know she isn't necessarily against any of those things. Her concern is what happens when you put them all together. It just becomes a lot. 

Cōpḍī is betting there are a lot of women who feel the same way.

Five years from now, Samantha hopes the brand will have “given people permission to do less, and proved that less, done well, outperforms more.”