Who We Are: Two N=1 Researchers Who Decided to Make One Thing Well

Mycena Skin: Ingredient Science Series · Our Story

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We're Sophia and Paul, the two people behind Mycena. We don't come from the beauty industry. We're mushroom growers with a long habit of reading the research, trying things carefully on ourselves and writing down what happens. This article explains who we are, why we chose skin, where our ingredients come from, and what we won't do.

Part 1: A long-running experiment

We met in school, and one of the things that first connected us was a shared fascination with metabolism: how cells turn food and oxygen into energy, how the mitochondria make it run and why the whole system slows as we age.

That curiosity never switched off. Over the years it turned into a practice. We read the papers, then ran small, careful experiments on ourselves. Functional mushrooms like cordyceps and lion's mane. Peptides. Targeted supplements. Sleep, light and food. Each time, we tracked what changed and what didn't.

What N=1 means to us

"N=1" is the research term for a study with one participant. It's what every self-experimenter is really doing, and it's worth being clear about what it can and can't tell you.

• What it's good for: noticing what's worth a closer look, finding the doses and routines that are practical to live with, and ruling out things that don't deliver.
• What it isn't: proof. One person's result isn't a clinical trial, and we never treat it as one.

So we pair our own experience with the published evidence. That's why this account publishes long articles with references instead of testimonials. When our experience and the literature point the same way, we pay attention. When they don't, the literature wins.

Part 2: Why we chose skin

After years of experimenting across all of health, we decided to build a company around one narrow slice of it: skin.

• You can see it. Skin is one of the few parts of the body where you can judge a routine with your own eyes over a matter of weeks.
• It's where our experience and the evidence overlap most. Copper peptides, snow mushroom and cordyceps are the ingredients we kept coming back to in our own routines, and they have real research behind them.
• Focus beats breadth. We'd rather make a few serums carefully than thirty products loosely. A narrow line lets us make every batch ourselves and change a formula when we learn something better.

Mycena makes cosmetics. Our job is how skin looks and feels, and we keep our claims to that.

Part 3: Where our ingredients come from

Mushrooms are the heart of what we do, and we grow some of them ourselves.

Our farm

Mycena is made by the growers at a certified organic mushroom farm in Missouri.

That's where some of our cordyceps comes from. We grow Cordyceps militaris on the farm, harvest it, and send it to a specialist processor. There it's combined with other cordyceps that has been inspected and tested, then extracted into the concentrated form that goes into Vital Theory.

We think it's worth being exact about that. We grow some of the cordyceps in Vital Theory, not all of it, and we'd rather tell you how it really works than lean on a sourcing slogan.

Everything else

• Other mushrooms. These come from growers we know and from contract farms we've vetted.
• Purified ingredients. Some ingredients only make sense as a purified extract or a synthesized molecule, such as copper peptides and sodium hyaluronate. For those, we buy from established manufacturers and check the certificate of analysis for every lot.

Part 4: What we're not

The skincare and peptide world has some habits we deliberately stay away from.

• We're not peptide resellers. We don't sell vials of "research use only" powder. We formulate copper peptides into finished cosmetic serums at a fixed, stated concentration: 2% GHK-Cu in Copper Theory.
• We don't white-label. We don't put our label on someone else's formula. We develop our own formulas and make them ourselves, in small weekly batches in Missouri.
• We don't hide the formula. Every product lists its full ingredient deck (INCI), in order, on the label and on our site. You can check our work.
• We don't chase trends. An ingredient gets into a Mycena formula because we've used it ourselves and the evidence holds up, not because it's having a moment on social media.

Part 5: How we work

In practice, that comes down to a few habits:

1. Read first. Every formula starts with the published research on each ingredient: what it does, at what concentration, and what it's compatible with.
2. Use it ourselves. Nothing ships that we haven't used on our own skin for weeks.
3. Make it small and fresh. We make batches weekly and ship within two days.
4. Show our sources. Our Ingredient Science Series lays out the chemistry and the studies behind what we make, including where the evidence is thin.
5. Keep improving. When we learn something better, the formula changes, and we'll tell you why.

What we make

• Copper Theory: 2% GHK-Cu with tremella (snow mushroom) and sodium hyaluronate, for skin that looks firmer and more hydrated.
• Vital Theory: cordyceps extract (including cordyceps from our own farm) with tremella, niacinamide and adenosine, for skin that looks brighter and more rested.
• Scalp Theory: AHK-Cu with caffeine and succinic acid, for a clean, balanced scalp and hair that looks fuller.

That's the whole company: two mushroom growers who've spent years testing ideas on themselves, a few carefully chosen ingredients, and a narrow focus on doing skin well.

Thanks for reading. If you have questions about any ingredient we use, ask. It's our favorite subject.

— Sophia & Paul, Mycena Skin

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Mycena Skin products are cosmetics and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Ingredient research is provided for education and describes the ingredients, not claims about finished-product performance.