Winnie Harlow has launched Cay Skin.

The wonder brand — two-and-a-half years within the making — is concentrated on skincare, specifically sunscreen.

“I’ve tried all of it,” Harlow, 27, said of the product category. “I actually have worn sunscreen my whole life, especially having vitiligo and being from the Caribbean. My parents have all the time slathered sunscreen on me, , so it was something that was really dear to me and true to me.”

The Canadian model, born Chantelle Brown-Young in Toronto, was 4 years old when was diagnosed with vitiligo (when pigment-making cells stop producing melanin, which creates a lack of skin, hair or eye color). Harlow, who first appeared as a contestant on Tyra Banks’ “America’s Next Top Model” in 2014, has develop into a outstanding figure in fashion and embodies a recent standard of beauty within the industry.

With Cay Skin, named after the islands as a nod to her roots in Jamaica (where she spent her summers), she goals to share products “for everybody under the sun,” because the tag line reads. Her “aha moment” for creating the brand, she said, got here after an experience during a beach photoshoot within the Bahamas in 2018.

“It was from sun as much as sundown for 2 days straight,” Harlow explained. “And I’m Caribbean, but that Bahama sun is different, like blazing hot, and I didn’t realize that. I got onto set, and I had applied sunscreen before I even left because sunscreen has all the time been such an enormous thing for me. But once I got there…nobody wanted me on set to reapply sunscreen since the more I might put it on, I’d be purple. I’d be blue. I’d be silver. It was not an excellent search for the photo shoot. And so I complied.”

The identical transpired the following day, and when she got back to her hotel room on Day Two, she had a severe burn.

“I used to be so red, so swollen and in a lot pain,” she went on. “That they had to call doctors to come back to my hotel to present me injections for inflammation, for pain. It was really, really bad. And after that day, my vitiligo began to develop into more patchy. It was once perfect circles of white and the road of the brown and the white on my skin just flowed. After which the brown began patching on the white and the white began patching within the brown.…It was really bad sun damage.”

For launch, she unveils 4 products — with sunscreen that doesn’t leave a white or colourful solid: a $34 mineral face lotion with SPF 55; a $32 “glow” face lotion with SPF 45; a $32 body oil with SPF 30, and a $14 lip balm with SPF 30. Out Tuesday via direct-to-consumer, the brand may even be available online at exclusive retail partner Sephora on March 22, followed by 251 Sephora stores on April 1.

Products — formulated with ingredients that include sea moss and nectar, in addition to actives like niacinamide and hyaluronic acid — meet Sephora’s “clean” standard, are reef-safe, vegan, cruelty-free, non-comedogenic and dermatologist tested.

“It’s sticky, makes you gray, especially if you have got a darker skin tone,” Harlow said of the common, widely available sunscreen. “It looks horrible on our skin. I just saw this gap out there.”

Cay Skin is a partnership with Kim Perell, chief executive officer and founding father of 100.co, an AI-powered brand incubator.

“She’s family now,” Harlow said. “She’s such a boss. She’s someone I actually look as much as.”

The 2 have tapped Cassandra Devor as CEO (previously the senior vp of promoting at Charlotte Tilbury).

With the sunscreen market evolving to incorporate more variety and types offering protection with no white solid, what makes Cay Skin stand out?

“I believe you’ll see that Cay Skin will disrupt sun care from a packaging standpoint, from a appear and feel, from our campaign imagery, from the ingredients which are within the products and from the way in which we went about creating formulas which are for everybody under the sun,” Devor said. “Our mineral formula has a universal antioxidant tint that’s yellow, and we found that that yellow was really the perfect strategy to mix in seamlessly and invisibly on all skin tones. It’s plant-based, provides extra protection against environment stressors but in addition helped the product to mix in seamlessly. So, we went about making a mineral formula in a way that no person else has.”