The idea for Protocol came from Los Angeles-based Tyler Gaul, who is not your typical beauty founder. A self-professed "closet science nerd" working in marketing, Gaul was baffled by the realization that beauty brands, sometimes knowingly, put out products that don't really work. At the time, he was working for a skin-care brand and was wondering what made it different from all the other skin-care brands.
"[I thought,] it's gotta be their ingredients. It's gotta be the chemistry behind it," he explains. "I went down this huge rabbit hole because reading academic research is fun for me." His conclusion: "This is crazy, not only is this company using deactivated derivatives — they're chemically inert forms of good ingredients — but everyone's using these."
