Our Story.
Or: why a peptide skincare house, and why now.
A bone fragment in my hand. And a two-year wait.
For over a year I thought it was a wart. I tried to freeze it off, aggressively and repeatedly, and made it worse. When I finally saw my doctor he sent me for an X-ray. There was a floating bone fragment in my hand, killing the skin above it from underneath. The fix was a surgical consult. The wait was two years.
That was three years ago. The call hasn't come.
In the meantime I tried copper peptide, which I'd been reading about for years. The visible wound closed in under three weeks. The bone fragment is likely still there. I no longer notice it. That was the first time I saw, on my own skin, what this molecule could actually do.
I'm not a doctor and this is not medical advice. It is the reason I spent the next three years thinking about what copper peptide could actually do — for skin that's aging, stressed, or struggling to repair itself.
Twenty years of reading the research. Most serums sprinkle.
I've spent close to two decades reading peptide research — the published work on skin signaling, repair, and the visible markers of resilience. Copper peptide in particular has been studied since the 1970s. The research is not new. What's new is how rarely it shows up in skincare at concentrations that match the research.
Most peptide serums on the market today carry copper peptide at trace levels, well below the concentrations used in the published work. The peptide is on the label. The dose is on the marketing team's terms, not the formula's.
When I went looking for a face serum that respected this molecule the way I'd learned to, I couldn't find one. So we built one.
Eric. The reason it's a brand, not a forum post.
My co-founder Eric has spent his career building e-commerce companies, software, payments infrastructure, and consumer brands. He's seen the DTC skincare playbook up close — the manufactured scarcity, the influencer seeding, the formulations engineered for margin instead of efficacy.
We agreed early that Selfore would not be built that way. The product would have to earn its place on the shelf. The price would have to be justified by what's in the bottle, line by line. The marketing would have to be quieter than the formula.
If I'm the reason copper peptide is in this bottle at one percent, Eric is the reason the bottle is something you'd actually want on your vanity.
Why a skincare brand, built by two men. A fair question.
A fair question.
Eric and I have both used skincare ourselves for over a decade. Long enough to have stood in front of our own mirrors with most of what's on the shelf, and long enough to know what doesn't work. Our wives, Grace and Kasey, have been doing this longer than we have. Between the four of us we've tested, returned, finished, and given up on more serums than we'd like to count. None of them met the standard we wanted for ourselves, and none of them met the standard we wanted for the women we live with.
Grace and I are expecting our first. Eric and Kasey are expecting their second. The first bottle of every batch goes to the two women we love most — the standard for Whisper has always been whether we'd want it on their skin.
Whisper is fragrance-free because fragrance is the most common cosmetic allergen in the dermatology literature. The peptide concentrations are printed where you can read them because we think you should know what you're paying for. The price is what it costs to make this formula honestly.
The face is allowed to move. That's not marketing. That's the brief.
The Selfore standard. Earned, or it's not in the bottle.
Every active in a Selfore formula has to clear one bar: meaningful concentration, supported by published research, formulated for stability and wearability. If an ingredient is in the bottle, it's there to do work. If it's not doing work, it's not in the bottle.
Whisper is the first expression of this standard. It will not be the last.
Selfore · Edition N°01
Whisper. For skin that still moves.
A copper-blue peptide serum for expression lines, bounce, hydration, and calm. 30 ml. One draw from the dropper. High-active care with a quiet finish.