About — The Founder's Story

At 49, I weighed 280 pounds. It changed everything — including what I put on my skin.

The story of how PrimalBasics came to exist. By Mike Green, Founder.

Chapter 1 — Before

I was not a skincare person. I was a guy who ate too much, sat too much, and ignored labels. At 49, I weighed 280 pounds, and the version of myself that I saw in photographs was not the person I thought I was.

What happened next was not a diet. I lost a lot of weight, got healthy, and became picky about what I put in and on my body. It was a recalibration — a slow, stubborn rethinking of what went into my body, what I moved it through during the day, how I slept, what I touched. I read a lot. I changed what I ate. The weight came off. But more usefully, a habit I did not know I was building — the habit of reading labels — travelled from the kitchen to the bathroom.

Chapter 2 — The kitchen laboratory

The first thing I formulated was a tooth powder. The reason was narrow: I could not find a toothpaste I trusted. Most mainstream toothpastes had sodium lauryl sulfate, which causes mouth ulcers in a meaningful slice of the population. Most clean alternatives had glycerin films that interfered with the mouth's own remineralisation chemistry. I wanted something that was mineral-rich, lightly abrasive, and free of everything the mainstream was reaching for by default.

So I mixed bentonite clay, sodium bicarbonate, and a little Ceylon cinnamon on my kitchen counter. Too abrasive at first. Too heavy on the cinnamon on the second try. By the fourth or fifth iteration, I had something I used every morning and did not want to stop using. My wife tried it. Our friends tried it. Four ingredients. No fluoride, no SLS, no glycerin, no sweeteners. Every one of them I could pronounce.

Then came the shave oils, because I was doing that every morning anyway, and the drugstore shelf was not a place I wanted to rely on. A pre-shave oil in 2019, a post-shave elixir in 2020. After that, the magnesium deodorant — fifty-plus iterations until the performance was there. Aluminium antiperspirants, I had decided, were not something I wanted to continue putting on my body every morning. Magnesium chloride, sourced from the Zechstein Sea deep in the north of the Netherlands, turned out to work as well or better — and the skin did not learn to need it the way it had learned to need aluminium.

Chapter 3 — The Face Elixir

Years later, in 2024, the first product I formulated that was not for me was for my wife. She asked whether I could make a face serum to the same standard as the tooth powder — only natural, only stable, only ingredients she could read on the label. I said yes, and spent three months on it. The Face Elixir was the result. It shipped that year and stayed in the line until earlier this year.

The skin, I learned, is a lipid organ. The stratum corneum — the outermost layer — is built from corneocytes held together by a mortar of ceramides, cholesterol, and free fatty acids. Most of what luxury skincare does is occlude evaporation from above: mineral oil and petrolatum sit on top of the skin, slow water loss, and go home. Most of what clean beauty does is well-intentioned but built on the wrong oils — oils heavy in polyunsaturated fatty acids that oxidise on the skin, generating inflammatory compounds in the process.

What I wanted to do was different: use only lipids that were either bio-identical to what the skin already makes (squalane, jojoba wax esters) or structurally similar enough that the skin recognised them rather than occluding against them. Every lipid saturated or monounsaturated, so it would not oxidise. No water — which meant no preservatives were needed. The Face Elixir was the first version of that idea. My wife has used it every day since.

Chapter 4 — Why the company exists

PrimalBasics Co., Ltd. was incorporated before COVID, on a different premise entirely — it was going to import beef-organ supplements. COVID and various regulations put that plan on hold. The company sat idle while I kept formulating for our own household: the tooth powder, the shave oils, the magnesium deodorant, and in 2024 the Face Elixir for my wife.

By 2025, the daily routine in our bathroom was almost entirely made by me. Enough friends had asked where to buy the products that we decided to turn the household routine into something customers could buy. PrimalBasics pivoted — from an on-hold supplement importer to a skincare brand, built around the formulations we had been using ourselves for years.

In 2025, we also partnered with MSRI — a research institute inside Prince of Songkla University, one of Thailand's top research universities, in Hat Yai. PrimalDent was the first product through the transition. The magnesium deodorant is scheduled for its first MSRI batch in mid-May 2026. The Bio-Active range — including our flagship Bio Gold serum — rolls through MSRI production between May and August 2026. All under research-grade quality protocols.

After several years of personal use and early customer feedback, we also stopped describing PrimalBasics as a "natural alternative" to the mainstream. The word alternative suggests the brand is secondary to the thing it is alternative to. We no longer believe that. We believe what we make is best-in-class for ingredient transparency, oxidative stability, and short-list bio-mimetic formulation — and materially cleaner than the clean-luxury incumbents whose price tier we are entering. That the formulations happen to be fully natural is a consequence of the decisions we made, not a constraint we accepted.

Chapter 5 — An invitation

If you have read this far, you are our customer. We mean that precisely — the people who read ingredient lists before they buy anything, who understand why the short list is harder to formulate than the long one, and who are quietly tired of paying luxury prices for products they suspect are mostly story.

We built this for ourselves. It is also, we hope, what you have been looking for. If it is, we would love you to start with whichever product speaks most directly to the thing you already notice about yourself. Our tooth powder is a good first product for most people — it's THB 390, it lasts six weeks, and the first morning you use it you will understand what we mean by "different." If you are already ingredient-literate and ready to go straight to the serious stuff, Bio Gold — our flagship serum — is available now, and we would be honoured to send you a bottle.

Thank you for reading. — Mike Green