Hero Worship: Power Pair

Written by LAURA REGENSDORF
Illustrated by LYDIA McKEE

In the landscape of skin care, products for the face dominate the conversation. But the beauty brand Habelo took a different tack from the outset, focusing on a zone of the body that’s similarly always on display: the hands. It turned out to be a category ripe for reinvention. The Habelo founder Whitney Clarke, with a problem solver’s brain and a résumé stacked with C-suite roles in marketing and brand strategy, understood that see-it-to-believe-it results called for unconventional solutions. The protocol she launched in 2024 pairs a targeted treatment serum with a patent-pending occlusive glove, which works to maximize absorption and efficacy. Mere hours after the duo landed as a VIOLET GREY exclusive, the Power Pair system became an instant best seller, sparking testimonials as convincing as the independent clinicals. Here’s how the hand-care innovation got its round of applause.

THE GENESIS

For Clarke, the impetus to create Habelo was both logical and emotional. The pandemic had highlighted the practical side of hand products—the sinkside soap and omnipresent sanitizer that took a toll on the skin barrier. What did comprehensive care and maintenance look like in a world of evolved, results-oriented formulation? Clarke flashed back to her engagement in 2017—then in her 40s, it was her second marriage—when she excitedly snapped a photo of the ring for her friends. “I never sent the picture because I felt embarrassed all of a sudden,” she recalls. “I’ve always taken impeccable care of my skin, but my hands looked like my mother’s or my grandmother’s.” That differential between our faces and our tender extremities—exposed to windburn, sun, and papercuts—has a way of bubbling up in celebrity news cycles, when hands are uncharitably described as “betraying” someone’s age. “We shouldn’t be ashamed of aging—we all know it’s a gift,” Clarke says. “I just wanted to feel as great about my hands as I did when I looked in the mirror.” That meant designing a targeted protocol with all the integrity you’d expect in a forward-thinking skin regimen.

THE FORMULA

As rugged as we expect our hands to be, they are biologically susceptible to weathering. Fewer sebaceous glands than elsewhere on the body means the hands have trouble retaining moisture. The skin is about as thin as the eyelids, with little underlying fat, which leads to visible veins over time. UV exposure—an inevitability, given how periodic hand-washing complicates sunscreen use—speeds the breakdown of collagen and leads to mottled sun spots. With this in mind, Clarke tapped a veteran cosmetic chemist, Krupa Koestline, to fine-tune a treatment that could address these myriad concerns without oversensitizing the hands. The resulting Activating Hand Serum includes a proprietary peptide complex that encourages collagen production while inhibiting inflammation. Sea fennel extract, which acts like a retinol alternative, works to plump and brighten, while ceramides and niacinamide nourish and strengthen the skin barrier. But even a holy-grail topical product only works if it’s absorbed into the skin. Clarke “started to Frankenstein” her own glove prototypes, she says, using occlusive medical-grade silicone. The patent-pending Treatment-Boosting Gloves are fingerless and open-palmed for multitasking deskwork or driving. Lined in silicone to seal in the active ingredients, the gloves also feature UPF 50 fabric—”stretchy and breathable, like your most comfortable yoga pants,” she notes—to shield against the sun.

THE MOMENTUM

When determining the brand name, Clarke took a page from her son’s homework. In Latin, habeo is a conjugated form of the verb meaning “to have or possess”; bello is Portuguese for “beautiful.” “The idea was to hold on to beauty,” she says—less a denial of time and more a celebration of all that hands mean to us, whether as artists or mothers or gardeners. In the months before launch, she held events at upscale nail salons in Boston, gathering feedback from those already discerning about their hands; clinical trials and consumer-perception studies showed improvements in everything from elasticity to hyperpigmentation to radiance. When she sketched out the brand’s future milestones, a certain retailer was first on her list—and after earning the VIOLET GREY stamp of approval, Habelo’s Power Pair landed exclusively on THE SHELVES. The duo was an immediate hit, prompting an immediate reorder—proof that elevated hand care was the piece of the puzzle no one knew was missing. “Hands are vital to how we experience the world,” says Clarke, who is planning an upcoming series on artists and creatives with hands-on work. These tools of ours deserve the very best.