FOUNDER
Founder of Khold
Kian Majlessi
Growing Up in the Lab
Kian Majlessi grew up in his family's skincare lab, but that's not where his story with skin actually starts.
He had a head start most people in his position don't get, and he knew it. His parents, Manuela Marcheggiani and Darius Majlessi, founded Isomers Laboratories in Toronto in 1988. The company's own history tells it plainly: two university students, a borrowed blender, and a bachelor apartment turned into a real formulation lab. By the time Kian was old enough to be useful, that lab wasn't a story he'd heard — it was where he spent his time. He was compounding, packaging, and learning the mechanics of a formula before he understood the chemistry behind it. He watched his mother build trust with an audience in real time, appearing on ShopNBC and later HSN, explaining ingredients and defending formulas to viewers who had every reason to be skeptical of another skincare brand promising results.
Living With Acne
It starts earlier — with acne that showed up young and didn't leave quietly. Kian dealt with breakouts through his teenage years and into adulthood, along with the scarring that acne leaves behind long after the breakouts themselves have cleared. He tried the over-the-counter route first, the way most people do, cycling through products that did nothing or made things worse. Eventually it got serious enough that he went on prescription medication to bring it under control — a step that helped, but came with its own tradeoffs, and never fully answered the question of what to do for the skin and scarring left behind once the acne itself was managed.
Anyone who has dealt with acne, acne scarring, or years of trial and error with their skin knows the particular kind of frustration that comes with it: it's not just about appearance, it's about spending years feeling like your own skin is working against you, and not knowing who or what to trust to fix it. Kian lived that frustration for most of his life. It became the thing he cared about more than anything else — not just solving it for himself, but making sure other people didn't have to spend as many years searching, or go through as much trial and error, as he did.
Why the Industry Wasn't Enough
But knowing how skincare was made didn't fix his own skin. That gap — between growing up inside the industry and still not having an answer for himself — is what eventually pushed Kian to stop assuming the industry had already solved the problem, and start asking why it hadn't.
He studied Entrepreneurship at Toronto Metropolitan University, graduating with distinction, and spent two years running SEO inside Isomers — learning, from the other side of the business, how skincare actually gets found, evaluated, and trusted by people searching for answers online. It gave him a rare vantage point: enough formulation background to understand what was happening inside a formula, and enough of a digital, consumer-facing perspective to understand why so many products failed to deliver on what they promised.
That question led him to something specific: heat.
The Discovery: What Heat Does to Skincare
Most skincare relies on heat to process its formulas — it's simply the industry standard for blending oil and water into a stable emulsion. It's efficient, it's cheap, and it's what nearly every lab defaults to. But heat comes at a cost that rarely gets mentioned on the label: it degrades the very actives brands spend their marketing budgets talking about. An ingredient that tests well in a vial can lose a meaningful amount of its potency by the time it's been heated, blended, and bottled.
Kian set out to test whether a cold process could do better. It did.
Building Khold
The difference lives in the emulsion. An emulsion is what allows oil-based and water-based ingredients to combine into a single, stable formula — normally achieved with heat. Processed cold instead, the emulsion protects actives that heat would otherwise diminish, so the potency that goes into the formula is closer to the potency that actually reaches skin. And a cold-processed emulsion behaves differently once it's on skin, too: built correctly, it's designed to help actives absorb more effectively, instead of sitting on the surface where they do the least good. That's the difference between a formula that reads well on a label and one that actually performs — the kind of performance Kian spent years looking for on his own skin and rarely found.
That's where the name comes from. Khold is built cold, deliberately, from the first step of formulation to the last — not as a gimmick, but as the direct answer to a specific problem Kian identified after years of watching heat-processed formulas underdeliver.
Khold isn't a home shopping brand, and it isn't a diluted version of what came before it. It's a streamlined, multi-system approach to skincare, engineered to be as potent, premium, and precise as the cold process allows — built by someone who needed it to exist before he ever thought about selling it.
Still Made in Toronto
Forty years of formulating sit behind every Khold formula. It's still made in the same building, on Tycos Drive, in Toronto — the same city, the same industry, a different process.
