Dr. Mireille Vega: Founder & CEO of VGAM

Episode 859

On today’s episode, we welcome Dr. Mireille Vega, also known as Dr. Mimi V, Founder and CEO of VGAM — a PhD biochemist, former biotech executive, and the pioneer behind Skin Science 3.0.
Mireille’s story starts in a Montreal drugstore, where she was a teenager standing in the skincare aisle trying to decode ingredient labels that made no sense. Years later, after building a career in immunology and biotech, personal health crises in her own family changed the way she looked at ingredients, trust, and what we put on our bodies every day. That journey led her to create VGAM, a skincare company focused on the skin microbiome and the idea that skin is not just a surface — it is a living system shaped by hormones, stress, inflammation, aging, environment, and real life.
In this episode, Dr. Mimi V shares why she believes skincare needs less marketing noise and more real science. We talk about Skin Science 3.0, what most brands miss about hormones, midlife, menopause, and sensitive skin, and why the microbiome matters. She also breaks down what consumers should question when they hear words like “clean,” how to spot skincare claims that don’t hold up, and what it means to build trust as a scientist-founder in one of the noisiest categories in beauty.
This is a must listen.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control, control, control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. So join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go, let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Cura Goldin show. Today we have Dr. Mireille Vega, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible brand called VGAM. She actually goes by Mimi, and so we’ll continue to call her Mimi along the way, but very, very incredible brand products based out of Montreal. Her story starts in a Montreal drug store when she was a teenager, standing in the skincare aisle trying to decode ingredient labels that made no sense. Years later, after becoming a PhD biochemist and biotech executive, she continued to think about developing her own line of products. Then, personal health crisis in her own family changed the way she looked at ingredients. So, fast forward to creating this incredible line called VGAM, a skincare company focused on the skin microbiome and what she calls skin science 3.0 I can’t wait to hear more about the journey of building this incredible brand called VGAM. You can get it online, but very, very excited to meet you, Dr. Mimi V, as she goes by. Welcome to the Kara Goldin show.

Dr. Mireille Vega 2:09
Well, thank you, Kara. Thanks so much for the introduction. It’s exciting to be here,

Kara Goldin 2:15
very, very excited. So, talk to me about VGAM and what made you think that now is the time to go and develop this incredible company that you have?

Dr. Mireille Vega 2:28
Yes. Thank you. Well, why now is the time? Is because I think, honestly, I’ve been looking for a missing element all of my career. I knew early on, like you mentioned, that I wanted to develop a brand for the skin, but I wanted to be coherent and complete, and I wanted to be simple, and I felt even with all this training and research that something was missing, and honestly, younger, I thought, well, the big labs will do it, you know, because I can’t, you know, figure it out right, and I do think that we’re missing the information, and we have taken a tangent in skin care where we focus on symptoms, we have a dry patch, breakout, eczema, or whatever it is, right, some symptoms, you know, like lead us to a diagnosis that is, you know, critical, but others are just a symptom of, you know, other things that are going on in our life, right, and we’ve been focusing on those for, for at least 50 years, if not more, and focusing also on cleansing the skin, so, so much, like asypticizing it, sterilizing it, right? And even if I felt we were missing something, I couldn’t put it together before the technology allowed, allowed us to analyze the microbiota actually obviously my my journey started with the gut microbiota. I was in immunology, microbiology. I had moved from oncology because of, like, you mentioned life, personal life struggles, and we were talking so much about the gut microbiota and being so curious around the skin, I was okay. What’s going on with the skin? You know, what’s the connection there? There are so many connections with the gut, but there’s also a skin microbiota, and the more I started digging, and this was more than 10 years ago, right, where the computer capabilities not only was able to decode our genome, but it was also able to decode the genome of everything that lives on us, right, which is the skin, the human skin microbiome, and throughout this journey of research and connecting elements together I. Realized, OMG, this is what was missing. This is the element that we were never considering in formulation. And when I started focusing on it and thinking at ingredients, at what we give it, what we do, like the cleansing part was the, you know, like the first thing that I decided, okay, we have to shift this, and at the same time, my daughter was becoming a teenager, same reflexes we had. Look at the, you know, like the cabinet to figure out, okay, what am I going to do for my skin, right? And you want to cleanse, cleanse, cleanse, don’t cleanse too much, because you cleanse the good guys too. We think cleansing is great, but maybe you know too much is not a good thing, right? So, yeah, so this journey started really with the discovery of the skin microbiota as the missing element to consider.

Kara Goldin 5:56
So, what do you think when you define the microbiome? Obviously, you are educated in this, you have a PhD, and as a biochemist, and biotech, and immunology, but most people don’t really understand what the microbiome is, maybe they think it’s their stomach, and you know it has something to do with that, but How does that relate to what people have on their skin.

Dr. Mireille Vega 6:24
Okay, well, that’s a very good question. Absolutely. Well, it’s very similar to what we have on our gut. So, in our gut, we now know that we have these microorganisms that are essential for our health. They are the gateway to our immunology. A good healthy gut microbiome, or microbiota, it’s more or less the same thing. The microbiome is like the genes and the science of the microbiota, and the microbiota is actually the bacterias, right, that live in our gut and that help us in our digestion, and you know, send signals, and you know, communicate, so these, you know, really support the systemic immunity, our with our health, our global health. There is a connection to the signals it sends to the skin, but on the skin you have also a community of microorganisms, their bacterias, their viruses, their, you know, like it’s not everything bad, it’s, you know, like a community, and those that have been living on us for generations, because it’s passed down, right, are actually very good bugs, and they protect the skin. They’re like physically on your skin, they’re not relating to the gut, like in their composition. They’re very different, because on the skin it’s exposed to the air, it’s a different environment, and you know, like on the on your skin, you know, think of it as, you know, a symbiotic relationship. These microorganisms, you know, like they will feed on what is on your skin. That’s how you know, like they thrive too. But it’s built that way. This, the skin is built that way. It, it’s protected by these guys too. Actually, we know that even UV rays are, you know, like offer the bacteria offer certain protection against them, right? So a healthy skin microbiota is good for, yes, premature aging because it filters – it’s not like a sunscreen, but it does filter what’s going on in the air, and it acts also as a protector against acne, rosacea, dermatitis, a lot too, because we now know that when we wash these microorganisms too much, we actually paved the way for the not so great ones to take over. The more bacteria you have on your skin, the more they balance each other out, and it’s this balance that keeps the skin healthy. And when there’s not enough microorganisms, because we washed too much, you know, like, there’s these double cleansing, there’s these explosion, these twice a day, and everything. You know, like, if your skin isn’t dirty, meaning if it’s not contaminated by makeup or sunscreen, or whatever you put on it, you don’t need to cleanse it, right? You don’t need to, because you’re also cleansing the good guys that are protecting against all of these affections, so how did you come up with the name VGAM? Oh, well, I’ve been on this journey for more than 30 years, honestly, as a kid, even, you know, like, so when I was in university, I did my. PhD in biotech, because I wanted to develop a line that was coherent, right, and at that time my name, I studied at Miguel University, and my code name was Vega Mirai, but they only used the first three letters, so it was vegan, V E G M, began, you know, so it stayed like, like that, because a gam, a line in French, gam is like a line, it’s like old gam, or you know, so anyway, that’s the name that was there, and when we actually launched the company, not the, not the brand itself, but the company will brainstorm as to names, and I was like, you know, we don’t have to use this name, right? And it’s, it kind of stayed. We, we took out the e, and yeah, we made it more like the gam v, for yeah. So it’s come, it comes from my name, but the gam means like it’s really a gam authentic and microbiome,

Kara Goldin 11:01
I love it. So, VGAM is built for women. I’ve heard you talk about, especially in midlife. I’ve also heard you talk a lot about hormones and stress and inflammation, aging environment, and how VGAM really works to really help people deal with all of life that that they’re dealing with. When you thought about the first products that you’re developing, what was the first product, and I guess where have you gone from there? How many SKUs total do you have, and can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Mireille Vega 11:41
Absolutely, okay, this is a completely complete shift, because I have, like, I have a few SKUs, and I’ll explain, but I have two SKUs that are my duo, and I didn’t set out to be a woman’s brand, I set out to be a human brain brand, and I based my whole philosophy of on the one human skin. What does the one human skin mean? It relates to science 3.0 but the one human skin is an organ. It’s the human organ, and it works the same for everybody. It works exactly the same, and I focused on what was common to everybody, meaning the three barriers that we have. Skin Science 3.0 is the three barriers: is the water hydration barrier, is the lipid protection barrier, it’s the microbiota ecosystem barrier. It’s these three barriers working together, but I wanted really, what I wanted was one skew, one product that could do it all. That was my goal when I started, but I had to reprogram myself, because we’ve been conditioned to, oh, your skin breaks out, you put, you know, like this ingredient on it, put some acids, it’s going to help do this, do that, or you know, we’re so conditioned that even when I was developing, I knew everything about the microbiota, I had mapped all the good ingredients, the bad ingredients, which are easy to find, but the wasteful, I call in between, like the ones that we think are good, we don’t, we’re not sure, but we’re not going to risk it, we’re going to use it, you know. So I mapped all of those, so I had all of that, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to put them all together, and you know, like we’re going to do it, and then if my daughter, because I was working to develop a product for my daughter, but I wanted something that I had never found for myself at the same time. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this for me too, right? And it wasn’t working, it wasn’t working for her or for me, and certainly not all the time, and it took a few iterations, because at first I thought, okay, I’ll have to add a corrector for her and a corrector for me, and you know, and I was like, no, no, no, you know, like it took like quite a bit of time and thinking, and when I realized, oh my god, you got this wrong, you know, like you got to go back to the root function of the skin, forget about the noise, forget about the, you know, like the different corrections, or you know, focus on what this skin needs at the core, and that’s it. And then, you know, clarity came, and I made a product that’s actually not just for women, it also works for men, and we do have quite a few men that use it, because it’s super simple, it’s complete, and it’s adaptable. What does that mean? Is that I map the 35 ingredients that are core for the skin, for the skin hydration barrier, for the skin lipid barrier, it’s a complex mix of. Salts and lipids, but there’s also complex sugars that feed the microbiota. There’s, you know, like these environment ferment extracts that will provide the environment to the microbiota to tribes. So all of these are in now separated into two, the lipid phase is in the cream and the water elements, the salts are mostly in the serum with the minerals, and then you adapt, because a woman, and this is what I realized, and I was going through perimenopause, and you know, like, and it stabilized the whole thing, because we diagnose ourselves, or you know, like we say we have skin type. For me, it’s probably the biggest myth, the myth of skin types, because in a month I had four skin types. I had the time where I was breaking out very oily, another time I was dehydrated, another time I was glowy. Oh, I love my skin. It’s great now. Yeah, of course, your estrogens are there, and you know, like, so it’s moving all the time.

Dr. Mireille Vega 16:08
For a woman, it’s, you know, minimum four four times a month, but then you know, like, there’s stress levels, there’s how much you slept, there’s what you ate, there’s all of these variables that affect how much oils and salts your skin produces, and then we try to make it, you know, give it one product or a few products that are always the same that layer on the skin, but that don’t respond to what it needs on that particular date, so by separating, and you know, for those on, you know, like audio, it’s not getting, you know, by separating into two products that you mix together. I developed the approach I call, like, this two steps that are feel and mix, which is you feel your skin, you, you know, mix in your hand the proportions that your skin will need that day, and then you adapt, that’s it, feel and mix, so yeah, this is the journey, and how we develop this, it’s the 35 ingredients that you don’t need to rethink, and that was one thing that I really wanted for myself and for my, my friends, and my daughter, is not to have to always wonder, okay, do I need to be adding this or that, or, you know, is what am I missing? No, you’re not missing anything, you’re doing it all right, you just do it like one minute, that’s it, and then you go on to do your other things, and you stop focusing on the symptoms, that’s it. And so, how many skews do you have total in the line now? So we have five, if you don’t consider the format, because if I separate the oils from the salts, some people use at the basis, at the core, more oils than salts, and a woman, particularly with time, will be producing less oils, so we’ll want to supplement a bit more oil, right, so we have the serum in different proportion, we have this queue of cream that’s, you know, like the full size, and then some people will add a bit of serum, even if they adjust daily, they adjust with a little serum, and some others, like my teens, they use a lot of serum, you know, they balance more because they produce more oils, and that’s how it does, even if they do adapt still, you know, like their baseline is much, much higher, but it becomes very, very intuitive, that being that said, these are the two products of the core care, then with time people were using a lot, some women were using a lot more oil,

Kara Goldin 19:10
the

Dr. Mireille Vega 19:10
cream, so we added what we call plus, it’s just a bomb, it’s a boost, it’s just butters oils, it’s really concentrated. It’s not for people that are producing a lot of oils, not for people that are acne prone, because it contains butters that are occlusives, but it gives a good boost to the skin, you know. Sometimes it’s in the winter, sometimes it’s in, you know this summer we go and it’s windy, we need more support, a thicker layer of protection, then we boost it, and if, if not, we can carry it around, and I really, really love multifunctional products that can do everything, and then you have, we don’t have clutter, so this boost. You can use on your the skin of your body, on your hands, on in your hair, and you don’t like, so you carry it. It’s a very multifunctional item to have around, and we do have the body cream, but you know, like we use for our feet or hands, but at home, and that we developed well after, you know, like cleansing so much after the pandemic, we realized, you know, like it was a good habit to maybe supplement the hands, but it’s not the part of the core foundation, and finally the fifth one is the cleanser, the cleanser is neutral pH cleanser that’s very gentle, that we recommend once a day, maximum, even for teens, and I know it’s really difficult, but you know, like people that tend to produce a lot of oils will tend to cleanse a lot and will tend to actually stimulate their glands to produce more oils, so instead you know, like, you balance your skin, and then you, you rinse with water when you feel that you, you have the urge to cleanse again.

Kara Goldin 21:17
Well, they’re all so beautiful. So, I love the two-step process too, and you’re right. I mean, your skin ends up changing depending on so many different factors in a pretty short amount of time, too. And it could be the season, but it could also be just based on what you’ve been eating, or lots of different factors, for sure. Maybe you’re spending more time inside because it’s so hot, and, and your skin is just getting so dried out. So, I love the fact that you can add more or less of the serum on top of it, and I found even using the serum, even with nothing else, it also works too. So, it’s really

Dr. Mireille Vega 22:00
okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. Because I don’t recommend, like, the only reaction, like people, you know, like at the beginning, they don’t know, because even if we write it down, even if you, we have instructions, people tend to rely on what they’ve experienced in the past. They get a serum, oh, you put it on top, and then you layer, you know, like, and the serum is really astringent, so it’s really active, and some people that are not used to, at the beginning, you know, like, they’ve used it alone, and they were like, “Oh, no, no, I’m reactive, where actually it’s just because it was missing the counterbalance of oils, to you know, so your skin is thick.

Kara Goldin 22:47
Yeah, I ended up putting on something right afterwards, but I ended up using it just to, and it felt really good. I think I was very warm that day, in particular, so it felt really, really nice having it, having it on, so I loved it. What’s been the most difficult part of launching a consumer brand? Because you switched industries, right? You’re, you’ve been working in a medical environment, now into a business to consumer, building a brand. You’re online, you’ve been for four years, I guess. You launched it in 2022 so, but it’s um, it’s challenging, right? Getting the word out to people, and it’s one thing to have friends and your local community, knowing that you’re doing this, but to actually build a brand like you want to, to help so many other people understand what you do. It can be really hard. What do you think has been the toughest part of it?

Dr. Mireille Vega 23:48
Yeah, well, you know, you evolve in your career. That’s a very good question. You evolve in your career, and you gain these tools, yes, or these ways of working that you develop, you know, like with your time management, with your project management, how you interact with people, and you know, I’m in an.. I was in an industry highly regulated, and interactions, big projects, bigger budget, honestly, you know, like, so I brought with me some of that, of course, right, and I made a lot of mistakes because it’s a completely different approach we have to take. I was project management driven, where I understood intellectually the need to validate as we had validated in biotech biopharma, but the need to validate is very different when it’s a disease whereas when it’s a prevent. And I really see, you know, like that we are in prevention. I mean, it’s a cosmetic, really, it’s a support, it’s like supplements for the skin in a way, right. So, so that transition was difficult. Now it’s keeping up with the trends, right. It’s e-commerce, it’s social media. I cannot say that I’m consistent enough, because I’m not able to manage it all. But you have to get out of your comfort zone. This is where the magic happens. This is how you connect with people, you, you know, put your ego aside, and then you record videos, and that’s what that’s what you do. This is certainly something that was very different than biotech, where you had a team that would come in that would tell you, okay, this is what you have to say, and you know, like, which is, you know, like, now you do it all.

Kara Goldin 26:02
I love it. Well, you’re creating, you have created, and you’re continuing to get the word out about VGAM. It’s such an amazing, amazing line. So, thank you for doing all that you’re doing. Really, really appreciate it. And thank you, Mimi, for sharing your story, because it’s inspiring so many people. Everyone needs to try VGAM for sure, and for everyone listening, you can check out VGAM online and follow along on social as well. And we’ll have all the info on how you can get to VGAM, and also Mimi in the show notes. But thank you again. Really appreciate you coming on, and thanks everyone for listening. Until next time on The Kara Goldin Show. Thank you, thank you for having me. Pleasure. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to The Kara Goldin Show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe, so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.

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