Lori Howard
Pharmacist. Formulation scientist. Founder, EffectsRx, LLC.
- 30+ years pharmaceutical practice
- Veterinary pharmacy compounding, Kentucky
- Custom formulation development, national distribution
- Founder, EffectsRx, LLC (est. 2015)
- Registered agent, CoValence quality agreement
- FDA establishment listing, OTC product authorization
A scientist who built a career on making complex chemistry useful.
Lori Howard spent more than 30 years in pharmaceutical practice — an environment defined by precision, accountability, and the understanding that formulation decisions have real consequences for the people using the products. She worked across retail pharmacy, veterinary compounding in Kentucky, and custom product development that reached customers across the country.
That background gave her a distinct vantage point on the skincare industry: a trained eye that could read ingredient lists, assess mechanism claims, and recognize the gap between what a product promised and what it could actually deliver chemically.
What she saw was an industry that had prioritized marketing architecture over formulation rigor — one where the most sophisticated active ingredients were either absent from consumer products entirely, or present in concentrations too low to produce the mechanisms they were being sold on.
The motivationFrom frustration to R&D.
After leaving clinical practice, Lori set out to build what she hadn't been able to find as a consumer: a skincare formula developed with the same methodology applied to pharmaceutical compounds. Not a product designed around a hero ingredient for marketing purposes, but one where every component had a documented biological function and a rationale for its inclusion at its specific concentration.
The process took three years. More than 40 formulation iterations were developed and rejected before the final formula — the one that became the SkinTech Spin Trap System™ — passed her threshold. The standard wasn't "good enough for market." It was: does this formula do what the biochemistry says it should?
The answer, after three years, was yes.
“She cares more about making her formulas work than how to market them.”
— Brand Messaging Guide, SkinTech, 2019Pharmaceutical-grade standards don’t stop at the prescription counter.
Lori's core conviction — shaped by three decades in a clinical environment — is that the standards applied to pharmaceutical compounding should apply equally to products placed on skin daily. The skin is a metabolically active organ. What it absorbs has systemic effects. The casual approach to ingredient selection that characterizes much of the consumer skincare industry is, from a pharmaceutical standpoint, an anomaly.
Her formulation process reflects this: every ingredient in the SkinTech formula was sourced and evaluated for mechanism, concentration, interaction, and stability — not selected for marketing legibility or label appeal.
The result is a formula that does fewer things than most consumer products claim to do, and actually does them.
One scientist’s standard. Every brand downstream.
Every product sold under a SkinTech brand family label — regardless of how that brand is positioned or who it speaks to — carries the same formula developed through this process. The audience changes. The storytelling changes. The science does not.
This page, and this site, exists so that any consumer in any downstream brand can trace the product they're using back to its origin: a pharmacist who spent three years getting it right before she brought it to market.