The Skin Pharmacy
#01-22 City Square Mall
180 Kitchener Road
6509-8469 / www.the-skin-pharmacy.com

YOU could call Lau Min-Tsek and Mah Mei Hui modern-day Macbeth witches, though they're not exactly of the "eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog" school.

Like the witches, the couple make a living brewing up charms for powerful trouble – only the troubles that they attend to are of the more earthy sort; things like eczema, acne and pigmentation, for example.

This they do at The Skin Pharmacy, an apothecary at City Square Mall that specialises in customised skincare solutions done the old-school way, with serums, creams, cleansers and lotions concocted and compounded on-site from mostly natural ingredients. (A simple "leaf system" indicates how natural each product is, with a three-leaf item being 100 per cent natural and a one-leaf one, not natural. About 75 per cent of the products here are rated three leaves.)

The Australia-trained Mr Lau and Ms Mah opened The Skin Pharmacy four months ago because of their interest in skincare; they also missed working in pharmacies where actual compounding work was done, as in Australia.

Explains Ms Mah: "My husband and I are both pharmacists who started our careers in Melbourne. There, we did a lot of compounding but when we came back here there wasn't anything like it, so we started this."

It helped that they had the right background: Mr Lau's main business is a contract manufacturing pharmaceutical company that supplies aesthetic products to doctors and beauty chains, which is why The Skin Pharmacy is able to produce anything from anti-ageing serums to lip balms.

The reason the store focuses on custom-blend skincare is that "we feel there's no such thing as the perfect skincare product", says Mr Lau.

"Everyone is different, so people should be able to choose and tweak their own products. And this is something that we can provide. I don't agree with how the big skincare brands tell you this or that product is the best in the world. That's not true; it won't work for everyone."

To that end, customers of The Skin Pharmacy can pick and combine several treatment ingredients in one remedy to target their various conditions.

You can, say, take an anti-acne face cream and add in an anti-pigmentation component if you need it, or order yourself a shampoo that has both calming and anti-dandruff properties if you so wish.

In addition, the store produces a standard range of items that's available off the shelf, plus it sells pure essential oils that have healing properties.

Prices range from $49.90 for a lip serum to $264 for a custom-blend face serum. You can get a skin analysis on-site too, and a "no-nonsense" facial service – which will clean the face and treat skin conditions – will be launched next month.

Some may curl their lip at the idea of buying skincare from a local pharmacy, but doing that actually offers some pretty substantial benefits.

For one thing, there are no pushy promoters here. "We can help you diagnose the condition but we won't push any products because we don't want to pressurise people; we will only help you to do something about it if you want to do something about it," says Mr Lau.

And then there's the fact that, unlike many other international-brand products, The Skin Pharmacy's products were made precisely for this climate and according to local regulations.

Says Mr Lau: "A lot of products found in Singapore have European, US or Korean sources. And the trouble with those brands is that they have a temperate climate in mind, whereas Singapore is more humid so the products come up as too oily or heavy."

Also, imported products usually have to cater to many sets of regulations so they can sell across many countries. So effectively what you get then are the lowest denominators, and they can be milder and slower acting."

Of course, being a local company, the owners know their audience best too. "We know Singaporeans are not very patient and can't wait for results," says Ms Mah with a grin. "So what we're striving for is to be educational – we want people to know what to expect from each treatment, what benefits they can get and how long the results will take."