91. SKIN: the app to find the best beauty deals and hack your bathroom cabinet

Founder: Flinty Bane
Year founded: 2022
Website: theskin.app

The beauty market is a booming industry fuelled by innovation and the appetite of consumers to try new products and services to help them feel (and look) their best. So what’s the problem?

Well, with so much choice comes overwhelm for customers, who are working with a finite budget and a limited amount of time to score their ultimate beauty fixes. As evidence, just look in anyone’s bathroom cabinet for the mountain of half-empty cream jars and mascara brushes.

We knew in order to win users we'd need partnerships with all of the biggest and best known beauty brands,

Striving to address this customer need is SKIN founder Flinty Bane. Bane describes SKIN as the ultimate money-saving app for savvy beauty lovers. The app works as a price comparison tool of a user’s favourite products so they can see the best prices for an item on their virtual beauty shelf — helping them to keep track of their inventory and stock up for less.

The simplicity of this idea belies years of hard graft. “We knew in order to win users we’d need partnerships with all of the biggest and best known beauty brands,” says Bane. “Building those partnerships took a huge amount of work. Now, we have more products from more brands than any other platform.”

SKIN has partnerships with SpaceNK, Boots, Sephora, LookFantastic and Cult Beauty, plus a huge UK pharmacy chain on its waitlist, showing that the biggest beauty players believe in SKIN too.

Unsurprisingly, it is first targeting women aged 25-34, who are the biggest spenders on everyday beauty products. Bane notes that anyone can use SKIN but she has a highly focussed customer acquisition strategy and wants to conquer this audience initially.

Some big names are already on board. Bane starred on Dragon’s Den and says securing funding from Sara Davies has been a standout highlight. By 2030, Bane hopes SKIN will be a household name among beauty consumers in the UK and moving into international markets so that consumers in the US and Europe can save money too.

SKIN helps beauty lovers keep track of their favourite items and get the best deals on them – making looking and feeling good easier for less. This simple fix to an everyday blemish makes it a natural fit in the 2025 Startups 100 Index.