Every clinical nurse develops a trained eye. After 27 years in skin health, Yvonne Fokianos can look at a complexion and read its history: the sun damage, the hormonal shifts, the slow work of a good skin care routine finally paying off. But it was a smaller, more domestic observation that changed the direction of her career. It happened not in her Brunswick West medispa, but at home, going through her teenage daughters’ makeup bags.
“After nearly three decades in the skin industry, I knew consumers deserved better,” says Fokianos. “We spend so much time and money investing in our skin, yet many makeup products are working against those efforts.”
It’s a tension she’d been watching play out for years from the other side of the treatment chair, long before it showed up in her own bathroom cabinet.
The Gap Between the Chair and the Cabinet
At The Medispa on Melville, Fokianos spends her days helping clients repair and strengthen their skin: barrier function, pigmentation, the slow accumulation of sun damage undone one treatment at a time. What frustrated her was that the moment a client left the clinic and reached for their everyday foundation, that foundation quietly cancelled out her careful clinical work.
Skin care, she’d noticed, had spent the last decade getting smarter. Brands had shortened their ingredient lists, made formulations more considered, and grounded ingredients in stronger evidence. Makeup, largely, hadn’t kept pace. The two categories had drifted apart, one treating skin as something to protect, the other still treating it as a surface to sit on top of.
Then her daughters’ makeup kits gave the problem a face. Reading the ingredient lists in the mainstream cosmetics her own teenagers were using, Fokianos found herself doing the same risk assessment she’d run for clients with reactive, acne-prone or post-procedure skin. It was one thing to see this gap professionally. It was another to see it sitting on her daughter’s dressing table.
Building Ore
That collision of clinic and home is where Ore Mineral Makeup began. The name, stripped of its accent by design, points to something elemental: raw material, drawn from the earth, refined into something wearable.
Fokianos built the range the way she approaches everything in clinic: tested extensively, formulated with premium Australian minerals, and designed to hold up on the skin she sees most often in practice; sensitive, acne-prone, and post-procedure. The debut collection covers the full routine a client might actually use day to day: a Mineral BB Cream, Liquid Mineral Foundation, Powder Foundation, Mineral Blush, Contour Palette, Eyeshadow Palette and Mineral Setting Spray.
What sets the range apart isn’t a single hero ingredient or a clever marketing hook. It’s the age range it’s built to serve. Fokianos calls it “generational makeup” – a collection that moves with the wearer rather than pinning itself to one life stage. The same foundation that sits comfortably on a teenager’s acne-prone skin also delivers the breathable, low-irritation coverage that ageing skin needs decades later.
“I wanted to create a range that people from my daughters to my mother could feel confident wearing every day,” she says, “one that delivers beautiful results while respecting the skin beneath.”
“It Either Performs, or It Doesn’t Leave the Formulation Room”
Fokianos is unsentimental about what that standard actually means in practice. On the Ore website, she puts it more bluntly than any press release would: “I spent 27 years treating skin. I watched foundation fail on every type of it – oxidising, settling, aggravating. Ore was built to the standard I held in my clinic. Which means it either performs, or it doesn’t leave the formulation room.”
It’s a line that doubles as the brand’s whole philosophy. Ore doesn’t formulate to trends or seasonal colour stories. It formulates to the same clinical bar Fokianos holds her in-clinic treatments to, and if a formula doesn’t meet it, it simply doesn’t launch.
That standard shows up in the detail. The Liquid Mineral Foundation ($119) and Mineral Powder Foundation ($109) both run across nine shades, from Alabaster through to Obsidian; the Mineral BB Cream ($99) spans eight, from Porcelain to Espresso, each named with the same understated, earthy language as the minerals themselves. Rounding out the range are the Mineral Setting Spray ($129) and Mineral Oil Primer ($99), alongside the original Contour Palette, Eyeshadow Palette and Mineral Blush. Every shade comes with what Ore calls its Shade Match Promise: an exchange within 30 days, worn or unused, on the basis that skin-first makeup should never be a guessing game bought sight unseen.
Built on Real Skin
It’s the phrase Ore has chosen as its own tagline, and it captures something the press release only gestures at: Ore built this brand backwards from the treatment chair, not forwards from a trend report. “Ore was not created in a boardroom,” the brand states plainly on its site. “It was developed in clinical practice – shaped by decades of observing how skin behaves, responds, and evolves over time.”
The brand’s real innovation isn’t technical, it’s philosophical: refusing to accept that healthy skin and high-performing colour cosmetics are mutually exclusive.
As more Australians start asking what’s actually in their makeup, not just their skin care, brands like Ore point to where the category is heading: cosmetics judged by the same standards we’ve come to expect from serums and moisturisers. For Fokianos, it was never really about launching a beauty brand. It was about closing a gap she’d been watching from both sides of the treatment chair for 27 years, and finally deciding it didn’t have to exist.
