Inside/Out - Rethinking Wellness Beyond the Product

By Giovanni Montanaro, Co-Founder of YUKARI Wellness & Skincare

When we started YUKARI, the idea of Inside/Out was relatively simple: skincare matters, but skin does not exist independently from the rest of our health. Over time, I have become increasingly interested in what that really means, particularly as the wellness industry itself is changing. We have spent years looking for individual solutions, another serum, another supplement, another treatment,  while perhaps paying less attention to the conditions in which our bodies are actually living.

Recently, while reading more of the work of Australian wellness expert Kris Abbey, I found myself returning to this idea. Abbey has worked across health, fitness, spas and wellness for more than three decades, and much of her approach is centred around making health practical for people who are busy, stressed and time-poor. That may sound obvious, but I think it addresses one of the biggest problems with modern wellness: a lifestyle only works if it can survive normal life. A program that works beautifully during a retreat but disappears as soon as work, children, travel and stress return has limited value.

This has influenced the way I think about YUKARI. We are a skincare and wellness company, but I don't want us to suggest that a product can somehow compensate for the way someone lives. Good skincare can absolutely support hydration, the skin barrier and appearance, but biology is interconnected. Research has shown that psychological stress and sleep deprivation can affect skin-barrier recovery, while poor sleep quality has also been associated with slower barrier recovery and greater signs of intrinsic skin ageing. That does not mean that stress is responsible for every skin problem, or that sleeping well will suddenly give someone perfect skin. It simply means that treating skin as an isolated surface is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.

The same caution should apply to the way wellness talks about inflammation. It has become one of those words attached to almost everything: food is inflammatory, stress is inflammatory, ageing is inflammatory, therefore we are encouraged to spend money eliminating inflammation. But inflammation is also a normal and necessary part of human physiology. The more meaningful issue is what happens when recovery, sleep, nutrition, movement and other aspects of our lifestyle are repeatedly compromised. Stress itself is not automatically harmful; biological stress responses can be adaptive in the short term, while persistent or poorly regulated stress can have very different consequences. The goal should not be to create a life without stress or inflammation. That is neither realistic nor biologically sensible. The goal is to create better conditions for recovery.

This is also where Japan has become particularly interesting to me. Not because Japan has discovered a secret formula for health, and certainly not because every Japanese tradition should be repackaged as a Western wellness trend. What interests me is how often wellbeing appears within ordinary daily behaviours rather than as a separate industry. Japanese public-health guidance itself places nutrition, physical activity, sleep and rest within the same wider framework of health promotion rather than treating them as unrelated categories.

Food is a good example. Traditional washoku is not simply a collection of Japanese dishes; Japan's Ministry of Agriculture describes it as a dietary culture shaped by rice, vegetables, seafood, seaweed, seasonality and a variety of accompanying dishes. Importantly, the official Japanese discussion around washoku also connects food with family, community and everyday culture rather than reducing nutrition to isolated nutrients. That distinction interests me. Modern nutrition often becomes an obsession with individual ingredients — protein, collagen, antioxidants, supplements — whereas traditional food cultures tend to be built around patterns repeated over decades.

Tea works in much the same way. Hojicha, sencha and other Japanese teas are not exotic wellness treatments in Japan; they are ordinary drinks incorporated into meals and everyday life. Japan's Ministry of Agriculture describes Hojicha simply as roasted Japanese tea and notes that Japanese teas are commonly consumed as part of daily eating.  For YUKARI, that is more interesting than making exaggerated claims about tea. The benefit of a ritual can also exist in what surrounds the product: boiling water, stopping what you are doing, sitting for a few minutes and creating a small transition in the day. Wellness does not always need to look dramatic to have value.

I think the same principle applies to skincare. Our Deep Recovery Bio-Cellulose Face Mask contains ingredients such as rice ferment filtrate, rice lees extract, niacinamide, ectoin, panthenol, squalane, sodium hyaluronate, beta-glucan and Ceramide NP. Those ingredients have a legitimate cosmetic purpose, and formulation matters. But I would rather describe the mask as one component of recovery than pretend it replaces everything else. If someone is sleeping four hours a night, constantly stressed, rarely moving and eating poorly, there is no credible skincare product that can somehow make the rest irrelevant.

This is probably the biggest change in how I personally see wellness now. For many years beauty was centred around the idea of correction: something is wrong, therefore something needs to be purchased to fix it. Wellness can easily fall into exactly the same trap. We feel tired, so we buy something. Our skin changes, so we buy something. We feel stressed, so another product or program appears. Some of those interventions are genuinely useful, but they should sit within a broader picture.

Perhaps a better question is not simply “What should I add?”, but “What conditions am I repeatedly creating?”

Are we sleeping sufficiently most of the time? Are we moving regularly? Is our diet generally varied and supportive? Do we spend any time outside? Do we have periods of genuine rest rather than merely changing from one screen to another? Do we maintain relationships and activities that give life meaning? And are the products we use supporting those foundations rather than attempting to replace them?

That, increasingly, is what Inside/Out means to me.

It is not an anti-skincare position. In fact, I think it gives skincare a much more credible role. We can develop thoughtful products, use well-understood ingredients and care about how our skin looks without pretending that ageing, stress or human biology can be solved from a bottle. We can also learn from Japanese approaches to food, tea, movement, bathing and everyday ritual without turning Japan into a wellness fantasy.

The direction I want YUKARI to take is somewhere between those worlds: evidence where evidence exists, tradition where tradition has value, and a realistic understanding that health is built through patterns rather than perfection.

A good product can help.

A good ritual can help.

But neither exists in isolation from the way we live.

And perhaps that is where the next chapter of wellness should begin.

Giovanni Montanaro
Co-Founder, YUKARI Wellness & Skincare