Evidence first. Beauty always.
I’m Becca, a board-certified dermatologist and the founder of Maei MD. I’ll tell you what I use and why. My hope is that you end up owning fewer things and loving all of them.
I spend my days on skin barriers and my evenings on perfume, tailoring and the hunt for the perfect croissant. This is where the two lives meet.
I came to dermatology the way most people come to skincare: curious, a little frustrated, and unwilling to accept “that’s just your skin” as an answer.
Fifteen years later I treat everything from stubborn acne to the pigment that shows up after one good summer. I studied and trained in New York and spent my formative years there, which is where I learned that something can be rigorous and beautiful at once.
Patients kept telling me a version of the same thing: a cabinet full of skincare, most of it unused, and no real sense of what mattered, what to use when, or what was doing anything at all. They were spending a great deal of money aiming blindly, getting frustrated, and giving up. That is the part I couldn’t let go of.
Then I started reading labels the way a formulator does. A product can name an ingredient on the front of the bottle and contain almost none of it, which is perfectly legal and happens constantly. It took me many tries to find a cosmetic chemist who saw it my way: actives at concentrations that actually do something, in a texture good enough that you want to use it. That became Maei MD. I wanted to make something people could trust.
- Columbia UniversityUndergraduate
- New York Medical CollegeDoctor of Medicine
- St. Vincent’s Hospital, ManhattanInternship, General Surgery
- Columbia University, DermatologyResidency
- Columbia University, DermatologyClinical research fellowship
Board certified by the American Board of Dermatology. Fellow of the American Academy of Dermatology. Published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
I looked for my signature scent for over a year, and even came home from a Paris trip empty-handed. Then, this summer in New York, a woman walked past me wearing exactly what I’d been imagining. I asked her what she was wearing, and she told me. A year of looking, settled on a sidewalk.
Valaya by Parfums de Marly, layered with Perseus, their men’s scent. I’ll always tell you what I’m wearing. That stranger did, and it’s the only reason I found it.
That is more or less the idea behind this site. I’ll keep looking for a year if that’s what it takes to find the best version of something, but no amount of looking replaces someone who already knows telling you plainly what’s good.