ElastiK° Skin | Founder Story
WHY I CREATED ELASTIK° SKIN: THE STORY I HAVE NEVER FULLY TOLD
THE SHORT VERSION
- I lost nine stone using GLP-1 medication. It changed my health, my confidence, and my future.
- But my skin changed too. My face looked older, my skin felt drier, and my body skin started to feel different in ways I had not expected.
- I searched for skincare that understood GLP-1 skin. I found anti-ageing products, firming creams, and generic routines, but nothing built for the specific biology of rapid weight loss.
- So I created ElastiK° Skin. A transformation skincare brand built around the real skin changes people experience on GLP-1 medications.
- This is the fuller story. The mirror moment, the research, the community, and the reason this brand exists.
There is a version of this story I have told many times.
The version where I lost nine stone using GLP-1 medication, noticed that my skin was not keeping pace with the transformation happening in the rest of my body, searched for a skincare brand that understood what I was going through, could not find one that genuinely did, and so decided to build it myself.
That version is true.
But it leaves out most of what actually matters.
It leaves out the specific moment I knew something had changed in my skin that was not going to change back on its own.
It leaves out the months of research, the conversations with formulators, and the clinical literature I worked through while trying to understand what was happening at a biological level, not just what I could see in the mirror.
It leaves out the community of 400,000+ people who had been following my journey, and who were experiencing exactly the same things I was, without any clear answers.
This is the fuller version.
The one I have not sat down to write until now.
1. NINE STONE, ONE YEAR, AND A MIRROR I COULD NOT LOOK AT
I started GLP-1 medication after years of trying approaches that delivered modest results and then plateaued.
The experience of rapid, sustained weight loss was extraordinary.
Transformative in the most literal sense.
Within the first few months, I had lost more weight than I had managed in years of conventional effort.
The physical changes were obvious.
The psychological changes were profound in a way I had not expected: the return of energy, mobility, and genuine optimism about what the next decade might look like.
And then, somewhere around month four or five, something else began happening.
My skin started changing.
Not in one dramatic way, but in several ways at once.
Quietly.
Without the context I needed to understand what was happening.
My face looked older.
Not in the way faces age gradually, but in a way that felt sudden and disorienting.
The temples were more hollow.
The cheeks had lost a fullness I had not consciously noticed until it was not there.
The skin on my arms had developed a quality I had only seen described as crepey, and I now knew exactly what that word meant.
My skin also felt different.
- Tighter
- Drier
- Rough in places it had not been rough before
- More reactive to products I had used for years
I had achieved something extraordinary. And the face looking back at me in the mirror did not feel like mine.
I want to be careful about what I mean.
I was proud.
Genuinely, deeply proud.
The weight loss was real and meaningful and health-changing.
I am not telling this story as a cautionary tale about GLP-1 medications.
I am telling it because the complete picture of what this transformation involves, including what it asks of your skin, deserves to be told.
Nobody had told me.
And that absence of information, I would come to understand, was a problem waiting to be solved.
2. THE TRANSFORMATION NOBODY WARNS YOU ABOUT
WHEN THE WEIGHT CAME OFF BUT THE CONFIDENCE DID NOT FOLLOW
There is a particular emotional experience I have heard described hundreds of times by members of my community.
These are people who followed my GLP-1 journey through @my.journey.with.marc across Instagram and TikTok.
The weight comes off.
The numbers on the scale move in the right direction.
People around you notice and congratulate you.
And then you look in the mirror and feel a disconnect between what the world is celebrating and what you are seeing.
Your body has changed.
Your face has changed.
And the face that changed is not always the face you expected to see.
This is not vanity.
It is a genuine psychological experience that can sit alongside the pride and joy of transformation.
It is also almost entirely absent from the clinical literature, prescribing information, and the conversations many people have before starting treatment.
I built a platform of over 400,000 friends by talking honestly about my journey, including the parts that were not straightforward.
The messages I received about skin changes told me this was not a niche concern.
It was widespread.
People losing significant weight on GLP-1 medications were navigating some version of it.
SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING THAT DID NOT EXIST
I approached the search for GLP-1 skincare with the same rigour I brought to the weight loss itself.
I read the clinical literature on what GLP-1 medications can do to skin at a biological level.
I learned about dermal white adipose tissue, adipose-derived stem cells, collagen fibre disorganisation, barrier compromise, and increased transepidermal water loss.
I understood, at a mechanistic level, what was happening and why.
Then I looked for products formulated around those mechanisms.
Every product I tried was designed for someone else's problem.
Anti-ageing products were built around the slow, gradual skin changes of chronological ageing.
Firming creams were formulated for skin that had never been through what mine was going through.
Some were good products.
They simply were not the right products.
They were designed for gradual ageing, not for the rapid, multi-mechanism structural challenge of skin adapting to the loss of nine stone in under a year.
No product I found acknowledged that distinction.
None had been formulated with GLP-1 skin specifically in mind.
The gap was real.
The market had not caught up with the scale of GLP-1 adoption.
And my community was already telling me they needed something different.
3. BUILDING ELASTIK° FROM THE INSIDE OUT
WHY THE NAME MATTERS
ElastiK° Skin is a brand of Renatus Collective.
The name Renatus is Latin for rebirth, a deliberate choice rooted in the nature of the transformation this brand was built for.
The degree symbol in ElastiK° was not an aesthetic accident.
It signals transformation, the same symbol used to mark a change in temperature or a shift in state.
Your skin, like your body, is in a state of transformation.
The degree mark acknowledges that.
Renatus means rebirth.
That is what this journey is.
I wanted a name that carried the weight of what this transformation actually means.
Not the clinical language of weight management outcomes.
Not the aspirational language of wellness journeys.
The real, lived experience of a body and a life genuinely changing.
WHAT THE SKIN IN EVOLUTION™ SYSTEM IS REALLY ABOUT
When I began working with formulators and cosmetic chemists to develop the product range, I had a clear brief.
These products needed to address the specific biological mechanisms of GLP-1 skin change.
Not the general mechanisms of ageing skin.
They needed to be for someone who had lost a significant amount of weight rapidly.
Someone whose skin barrier was compromised.
Someone whose collagen support had been disrupted.
Someone whose face had changed faster than their sense of self could keep pace with.
The Skin in Evolution™ System is a staged protocol because GLP-1 skin needs a staged protocol.
Not one product that tries to do everything moderately well.
A sequence of targeted interventions.
| Stage | Product | Why It Exists |
|---|---|---|
| Stage 1 | Hydration Continuum Gel | Because the first thing GLP-1 skin often loses is its ability to hold water. Before anything else, you restore the foundation. |
| Stage 2 | Collagen Architect Serum | Because peptides are one of the most direct topical responses to the collagen disruption that rapid weight loss can cause. |
| Stage 3 | ElastiK° LED Facial Mask | Because topical products alone cannot address everything. Light therapy adds a technology step to support the face and neck. |
| Stage 4 | Evolve Serum and Regenesis Complex | Because GLP-1 skin needs gentle renewal that does not overwhelm a sensitised barrier, and because body skin is affected too. |
| Stage 5 | Resilience Matrix Night Cream | Because the barrier needs to be sealed at night, when skin repair is most active, to make every other stage more effective. |
BUILT FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Every stage has a reason.
Every reason is biological.
That is what I mean when I say ElastiK° was built from the inside out.
THE COMMUNITY THAT MADE THIS FEEL URGENT
I built @my.journey.with.marc without a commercial agenda.
It began as a personal record of a transformation I was still in the middle of.
I documented what GLP-1 medication was doing to my body week by week, with an honesty that seemed to resonate in a space full of heavily curated content.
By the time I had 400,000 followers across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, over 80 million views, and a podcast that reached the Top 10 on Apple Podcasts UK, I understood something clearly.
The people following me were not passive observers.
They were in the same situation I was.
They were asking the same questions.
They were experiencing the same skin changes, the same disorientation, and the same absence of useful information.
I was not building a skincare brand for a market. I was building the product my community had told me did not exist.
That distinction matters.
ElastiK° was not conceived in a boardroom as a product-market fit exercise.
It was conceived in a comments section, in DMs, and in conversations with real people who had lost significant weight and were trying to understand what was happening to their skin.
The brand's commercial direction followed the human need, not the other way around.
4. WHAT I KNOW NOW THAT I WISH I HAD KNOWN THEN
If I could go back to the first week of GLP-1 treatment, before the weight started moving and before the skin changes began, I would give myself one piece of advice unrelated to diet or exercise.
Your skin is going to need support that your existing routine cannot provide. Start building that support before the problem is visible.
The biology of GLP-1 skin change begins before you can see it.
The collagen disruption, dermal white adipose tissue remodelling, and barrier compromise can happen beneath the surface weeks before they appear visually.
By the time you can see Mounjaro face, the structural process may already have been underway for months.
I started skincare support too late.
I responded to what I could see rather than anticipating what the biology told me was coming.
Everything I know now about the mechanisms, and everything I built into the Skin in Evolution™ System, I would have applied from day one if I had access to it.
That is the purpose of this brand.
Not simply to sell a routine, but to give GLP-1 users the information I did not have, early enough to use it.
5. WHAT ELASTIK° SKIN STANDS FOR
We are a transformation skincare brand.
Not an anti-ageing brand that has been repositioned for a new market.
Not a wellness brand that noticed a trend.
A brand built specifically for skin going through the specific experience of significant, rapid, medication-assisted weight loss.
We are founder-led in the truest sense.
Not just because a founder's face appears in marketing materials.
But because every product formulation decision, every piece of educational content, and every aspect of the brand's approach to this category was shaped by lived experience.
We shipped to 30+ countries in our first weeks of trading, with zero paid advertising.
The community that grew around my GLP-1 journey became the first audience for ElastiK°.
They already trusted me because they had watched me go through exactly what they were going through.
We launched at InCosmetics Global in Paris in April 2026, the world's leading professional cosmetics ingredient event, because I wanted the brand grounded in formulation science from the beginning.
Not positioned as a lifestyle brand that happened to make skincare.
We are actively pursuing awards, engaging with press, and building a community of affiliate partners who are themselves on GLP-1 journeys.
The credibility of this brand must come from the experience of the people associated with it.
Not from the volume of its marketing spend.
6. A NOTE TO YOU, WHEREVER YOU ARE IN YOUR JOURNEY
If you have found this article through a search for Mounjaro face, GLP-1 skincare, or whether Ozempic can age your skin, welcome.
You are in exactly the right place.
Whatever you are experiencing in your skin right now is real.
The confusion about what is causing it is understandable.
The information available until very recently was almost entirely inadequate.
The disorientation of achieving something remarkable and still feeling like something is wrong is a specific, human experience that you are not alone in.
And the changes are, to a greater degree than most people realise, addressable.
Not all of them. Not all at once. And not by any single product.
But with the right understanding of what is happening and why, and the right protocol to respond to it, your skin can look and feel significantly better than it does right now.
You did not get this far to feel less confident in your skin. That is exactly why ElastiK° Skin exists.
Read the science. Understand the ingredients.
Start the right routine, early if you can, now if you have not.
And know that the product you are looking for was built by someone who needed it too.
Marc McKee
Founder, ElastiK° Skin
@my.journey.with.marc
07. ABOUT MARC MCKEE
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Platform | @my.journey.with.marc across Instagram, TikTok and Youtube. |
| Audience | 400,000+ followers, 100M+ organic views, and Top 10 Apple Podcasts UK in Health and Fitness. |
| Qualifications | MBA in Marketing, CIM Level 6 Diploma, Chartered Marketer, and 15+ years in PR, media, and digital strategy. |
| Brand | ElastiK° Skin by Renatus Collective Ltd. Launched April 2026 and ships to 30+ countries. |
| Recognition | Finalist in four categories at the UK Small Business Awards 2026. Featured in Entrepreneur UK, Belfast Telegraph, LADbible, and PA Media syndication. |
| Launch | Launched at InCosmetics Global, Paris, in April 2026. |
BACKGROUND READING
This article is primarily a first-person founder narrative. The scientific claims within it are supported in the linked educational articles and research below.
- ElastiK° Skin Editorial Team. What GLP-1 Medications Can Do to Your Skin. The GLP-1 Skin Journal, ElastiK° Skin.
Read the full GLP-1 skin guide - ElastiK° Skin Editorial Team. The Best Skincare Ingredients for GLP-1 Skin. The GLP-1 Skin Journal, ElastiK° Skin.
Read the ingredients guide - Paschou SA et al. GLP-1RA and the Possible Skin Aging. PMC, National Institutes of Health.
Read the source on PubMed Central - Ridha Z, Fabi SG, Zubair R, Dayan SH. Decoding the Implications of GLP-1 Receptor Agonists on Accelerated Facial and Skin Aging. Aesthetic Surgery Journal.
Read the source on Oxford Academic
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