Greetings from Kabana’s Founder, Erik Kreider

I originally founded Kabana Skin Care because I wanted to give the world healthy, safer and more effective sunscreens. As a strawberry blonde child, I would get painful sunburn all too easily. At an early age, I became a regular sunscreen user out of necessity.

I’ve always been passionately interested in science and its power to make human life better. I chose to study Biochemistry at Stanford University, where I earned both a Bachelors and Masters in the discipline in four years. I continued my education in industry by joining a pharmaceutical startup spun out of a laboratory I worked in during my graduate work at the Stanford Medical Center. There I helped develop dermatological applications for the technology, invented and patented new chemistries, and managed a clinical trial for an anti-psoriasis drug formula.

The purpose of that company was to deliver drugs via human skin. Through this experience I realized chemicals found in pharmaceutical preparations and mass-marketed products that we all use regularly, particularly sunscreens, get absorbed into the human body very easily and at alarmingly high concentrations. Since these these chemistries are not part of our normal physiology, they contaminate our bodies and impact its normal performance. It became all too clear to me that our bodies become more and more like an ecosystem impacted by an oil spill. Just as oil destroys the ecology of an estuary, so too do the common petroleum ingredients in mass-marketed personal care products pollute and damage the internal systems that keep us alive. These ingredients may not be immediately harmful – in fact most are defined as ‘safe’ when studied for weeks or months. But the long term impact is what I find very worrying; foreign chemicals consistently and adversely damage natural biochemical processes, yet they’re never studied for safety over the decades you might use your favorite sunscreen. That’s scary to me as a biochemist, because it represents a very real, yet entirely unnecessary, risk to our health.

The obvious alternative was to make products using ingredients that have identical chemistry to those naturally found in our bodies. In this way skin care products could be both nourishing to the human organism as well as protective of our skin. Kabana personal care products embody exactly this concept of purity and health.

Aging and disease are cumulative processes. It’s a matter of exposure – junk in the products we use, and lifestyles we choose – it all adds up and accumulates inside of us until something breaks. We eventually wear out completely, but it seems less and less possible to just die of ‘old age.’ There’s more often some causative event, cancer and heart disease being the primary killers; both are related to chemical exposure, associated oxidative processes and the damage caused to our bodies. We need to clean things up. That’s what I’ve done in Kabana – I make sure you’re living as clean as you possibly can through the personal care products you use, because I call attention to the things that aren’t obvious in your lifestyle yet desperately need cleanup help. Given that most of us today try to live clean by eating more organic foods and choosing healthy lifestyles, personal care products are now the primary offender when it comes to polluting your body. Petrochemical sunscreens are public enemy number one. Period.

In Kabana I’ve created products that have simple, effective, nourishing ingredients – not chemical-nonsense, endocrine disruptors or bioaccumulating agents. There’s enough stress in our lives. I want you to understand everything we put in our formulas because that’s the only way you can really feel confident and secure in choosing safe, healthy personal care products for you and your family.

The equation is simple:

Kabana = Clean Body = Health, Youth & Longevity = Great Quality of Life

Love your skin. Kabana does.

Looking out for your good health,