Hi, guys. Welcome back to Skincare Energy. This is Ekta. And today I have with me,

Yoshiko Ross Dalga, who is the founder of Juara Skincare. I'm so excited to have you on the

show, Yoshiko. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Ekta. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for having me. It's truly my honor. I want to start it off by you telling us how

you got into skincare and beauty because you have just such a beautiful line and I want our

listeners to know everything that went behind it. Sure, sure. I guess you could say I've been a skin

care, a skin health and sort of a health nut ever since I was a kid. I actually wanted to be a

dermatologist when I was a kid. And to be fair, it wasn't completely random. My father, who's a

kid, my father's from Germany, he is a chemist and he was, he worked in health care all his life.

And my mother is Japanese and, you know, Japanese women take very, very meticulous care of their

skin. So I grew up witnessing that. But, you know, I never really occurred to me that I could do

something with this passion and this interest. So, you know, I went through my education,

skin care or science unrelated, went to grad school, business school, where I met, where actually met

my business partner, Meta Mordaya, who's from Indonesia. And yeah, and I was fully on the track,

you know, I was looking at banking and strategy consulting. And then I noticed, wow, I'm spending

all my free time for stress relief. I'm spending it at a restaurant or at Sephora looking at

ingredients and products. You know, so what's going on? And I decided, you know, in the midst of

this whole recession and, you know, to basically ditch my job offer that I had. And did a total pivot

and decided I wanted to go into skin care. And my first brand was actually this French brand,

was beautiful line. But what happened also at the same time, I happened to live with my partner

business partner, later business partner, Meta Mordaya. You know, I broken up with my boyfriend

and I was homeless and she took me in, which I'll never forget. I love that, that's a good one.

...