For Anita Lal, ITI by Good Earth began with a personal skincare reckoning

Good Earth founder Anita Lal’s skincare journey began as many do, with a disaster–a woman at a counter, a badly timed comment and a cream she probably should not have bought. She was in her mid-30s at Selfridges when a beauty advisor told her she was “already getting some wrinkles”. The cream cost £200, an alarming amount for that time, but Lal bought it immediately. “This is what happens to us, the panic,” she says. A few days later, her skin reacted so badly that she spent nearly a year unable to use anything on her face.

What followed was a shift in how Lal approached her own skin. At her home in the mountains, she came across Absolute Beauty by Pratima Raichur, a book that pushed her to think beyond what beauty counters were offering. She began making her own preparations using pure oils, rosewater and simple ubtans. It started as a way to recover, then became something she kept returning to, first for herself, and then for friends and family who wanted the same.

ITI by Good Earth is the public shape of the private practice Lal has carried for years. It extends the sensory vocabulary that has long defined Good Earth: scent, colour, texture and an insistence on material quality. “I live for the senses,” she says. “I live for beauty, I live for scent.” Only this time, that sensibility is applied to skin.

The launch also arrives in a category crowded to the point of exhaustion, where skincare has become a rotating cycle of actives, claims and algorithm-driven advice. “The place is full,” Lal says plainly. “Everyone’s talking about retinoids, peptides, this, that.” For Lal, the excess is about products, but about information. The sheer volume of guidance, routines and supposed fixes has made skincare feel increasingly complicated, even burdensome.

Her response is not to reject but to step back from the urgency that often accompanies it. Don’t think about magic bullets, she says. Instead, do it for the long term. That long view shapes how ITI has been built. The line launches as a full system rather than a tightly edited set of hero products, a choice Lal justifies with characteristic practicality. Skin, she points out, is not uniform. It shifts with age, environment and sensitivity, and any attempt to reduce it to a handful of products feels incomplete. “If there are so many skin types, I can’t just have four products,” she says.