The Long Road to Jevie: How Three Decades of Plant Science Became a Skincare Brand Most skincare brands have a founder story.
Many brands start close to the product. A bad reaction to a moisturizer, a gap in the market, a weekend spent mixing oils in a kitchen. Jevie's story starts somewhere else. In university plant science departments across Japan and the United States, roughly three decades before the first bottle of serum was made.
To understand Jevie, it’s worth going back to the beginning. Because initially, skincare wasn't the goal at all.
Tokyo
Dr. Shahram Mesri's academic path begins at the University of Tokyo, where he earned his PhD in Plant Breeding - not the kind of degree that usually ends up on a skincare label.
Japan turned out to be more than just where he studied, though. Decades later it's also where Jevie's products are made, so there's a real thread connecting the place his scientific foundation was built to where the finished products come from today.
USA
From Tokyo, his education continued across the Pacific. He earned two master's degrees in agriculture, one from Mississippi State University and one from the University of Florida. By this point, his research background already spanned multiple countries, climates, and academic systems.
He wasn't collecting credentials. Each stage built toward something more specific: understanding plants as complex biological systems in their own right, not just as ingredients waiting to be used.
Biolink
With that academic foundation in place, Dr. Mesri founded Biolink. This is where his career shifts from studying plant science to building things with it.
At Biolink, his work included establishing suspension culture techniques for Gymnema sylvestre, developing more cost-effective plant culture media, and advancing tissue culture technologies that made large-scale plant propagation possible. He also developed plant extract-based dietary supplements, and pioneered a method for extracting highly purified curcumin from turmeric.
None of this was skincare. It was applied plant biotechnology, figuring out how to work with natural materials more commonly associated with synthetic chemistry. But that's exactly what gave Jevie something a lot of "natural" skincare brands don't have going for them: a founder who had already spent decades studying how plant materials could be cultivated, extracted, and applied with scientific accuracy.
Jevie
By the time Jevie launched, Dr. Mesri wasn't starting from scratch. The brand built on decades of research and development in plant science and biotechnology, bringing that experience into a new generation of natural skincare. The brand's serum, and the belief behind it that nature provides the best solutions, is less a starting point than a destination – the place all that earlier work was quietly heading, even before Jevie existed.
Two products carry that journey most directly.
The Curcumin is perhaps the clearest connection to Dr. Mesri's earlier work. Jevie's science materials credit him with developing technology for extracting highly purified curcumin from turmeric, a line of research that predates the brand. The current formula contains turmeric extract standardized to 95% curcuminoids, alongside green tea extract, pistachio seed oil and other plant ingredients.
The Serum carries the wider philosophy behind Jevie: using plant derived ingredients while applying the scientific discipline developed over his career. Formulated from wild-harvested cucumber and pistachio seed oil, without synthetic preservatives, it reflects the approach he had developed over decades of working with plant materials.
It's a long way from a plant breeding PhD to a bottle of serum. But followed step by step, it's less of a leap than it looks. Just one long line of research that, over time, found its way into skincare.
