Solara Suncare Founder Stephanie DiPisa Takes A ‘Skincare-First’ Approach to Sun Protection

After her kids had an allergic reaction, mom-on-a-mission Stephanie DiPisa wanted to create a better sunscreen. A health issue shaped the development process, and now her brand, Solara Suncare, can be found at retailers like Target and Neiman Marcus.

Walk us through your journey that led to developing Solara Suncare.

I actually don’t come from the beauty industry. I have three children. Two of them have allergies to the chemicals in sunscreen. While on vacation in 2016, we had a bad experience and it opened my eyes to the fact that we have to find a solution. Our dermatologist was recommending mineral, but back in that day, there weren’t a lot of options that weren’t sticky and unpleasant. So, as a mom on a mission, I did a ton of research and realized that this problem was actually super common with kids and with people like myself with sensitive skin. That’s where the idea was born: I really wanted to find a solution for my family.

I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease and I realized on that journey that what we put on our skin and in our bodies matter a lot—and believe it not, sunscreen has a lot of ingredients that are questionable to that health journey, and that’s really where the formulations changed from just creating another mineral sunscreen to “wait a minute, I think we can do this better, and I think we can infuse ingredients that are actually known to be healing and defending and nourishing. That’s really where things changed, and it became more of a skincare-first product with SPF benefits and that’s kind of where we are today.

Your brand is called Solara. What’s in a name?

Believe it or not, my kids came up with that name—and I love to tell the story because I know when you’re creating a brand, oftentimes, people will hire a branding agency or spend a lot of money on research and creativity…. We had a brainstorm and we were coming up with different words that meant “sun” and “sunshine” and that word came out and we thought, “Surely this must be ‘sun’ in another language of some sort. But it actually doesn’t; it just sounds like it does… From there, of course, I took it the next step and made sure that from a focus group standpoint, people understood the type of brand we were creating, …and of course all the important things like trademarking and making sure that we could actually use the name Solara Suncare.

Was your Lyme diagnosis the starting-off point for developing the brand?

No, that diagnosis happened in the middle of our R&D process. We had already had the idea, took forever to find a lab and a chemist who would take on an independent, small brand like our’s with such a big, regulated category of skin care. The process took a long time and during that time I did get really sick. The R&D process was long, but so was my health journey. There was a definite point in time where I wasn’t sure if this was going to come back to life with my medical condition, but it was right in the middle of that journey. And it was almost a blessing in disguise, because really what it did was help me understand ingredients, not just in skin care, but just in my life in general. I’m a huge fan of science and nature. I’m a huge fan of everything in moderation. But during that moment in time, I had to be extremely careful and critical so that my body could detoxify and heal. So, I became very curious about how to get to that point and worked with a lot of medical professionals to understand both eastern and western medicine. …To me, it made a lot of sense to re-look at the ingredient list and say, “I know we can do better here. I know we can put inside ingredients that our body understands and loves and are beneficial for defense.”