When the Doctor’s Office Is Also a Day Spa
Nothing in Howard Murad’s appearance or manner suggests a rebel. At 59, he is a soft-spoken, natty dresser with stylishly slender eyeglasses and short silver hair. Yet throughout his career, and especially in the 10 years in which he’s built his El Segundo-based skin care company into a $60-million-or-more-a-year business, he has been a maverick. In his characteristically calm, self-assured way, he says, “I’m open-minded, and I look at things differently than a lot of people do.”
That has meant he’s been willing to blur the lines between medicine and the beauty industry, to ignore the medical profession’s taboos against aggressive marketing and to experiment with new treatment approaches.
The skin is the body’s largest organ, as well as the most visible. Murad, a dermatologist in Los Angeles since 1972, knows just how concerned women are about their skin. As a physician-entrepreneur, he offers a product line bearing his name that promises to do everything from fade a freckle to fatten a thinning epidermis.
While giant multinational cosmetic companies market a profusion of potions to women eager to have the smooth, radiant skin of youth, many of Murad’s products have the advantage of being “cosmeceuticals,” a hybrid of a cosmetic and a pharmaceutical. As such, they parallel the current revolution in the prescription drug industry sparked by baby boomers who consider the quality of life as essential an element of good health as the absence of disease.
The new attitude toward medicine considers one of its legitimate uses to be improving a less-than-ideal situation. Feeling blue? Try Prozac. Sex drive stuck in park? Pop a Viagra. Going bald? There’s Propecia. These medications, among the drug industry’s bestsellers, address conditions that are not life threatening. Oh, no. They’re lifestyle threatening.
So is dull, blotchy or wrinkled skin. In the ‘80s, when cosmetic problems, not rashes or suspect moles, brought more and more patients to Murad’s Westchester office, instead of dismissing his patients as healthy but vain, he looked for solutions beyond the boundaries of medicine.
“I always ask the question, if you had no disease, would you really be healthy? The answer is often no,” Murad says. “What you need to be healthy is a sense of well-being, a sense of the ability to function at your highest level. If having fewer wrinkles or a little more hair or having your nails manicured is going to make you feel better, that can add to your health.”
Acupuncturists, massage therapists, facialists and nutritionists are all health care providers, Murad believes. His inclusive approach sounds rational enough, but at the time it defied the unspoken code that held that doctors, and the treatments they offer, are good, and anyone else might as well be a carnival huckster dispensing snake oil.
Uninterested in, and undaunted by, medicine’s conservative traditions, he set out to learn what people who tended to women’s skin--without medical degrees--had to offer.
“I wanted to address the patient’s concerns, and if that meant using a facialist instead of laser surgery, then that’s what I’d do,” he says.
Promoting Products to Beauty World
The aesthetic community, a loosely bonded group of treatment salons, beauty supply stores and spas, uses trade shows to introduce products and equipment, and teach techniques. Arguably, a fair amount of snake oil flows at gatherings like the recent International Cosmetology Expo at the L.A. Convention Center, but pity the poor facialist who passes up a really effective electric pore vacuum. Murad began spending his weekends at such conventions, and in 1985 opened a skin care salon in Brentwood called A Sense of Self. His wife managed the business, which stated its goal as “creating a medically sound environment for absolute skin perfection.”
As much as he’d learned from aestheticians, Murad was also interested in bringing information to them. He was in the vanguard in experimenting with a family of relatively gentle, food-derived acids that improve the appearance of the skin by causing the top layer of dead skin cells to shed, thereby exposing fresh skin better at retaining moisture. Glycolic, lactic and other alpha and beta hydroxy acids had been in use since Cleopatra bathed in sour milk. Murad believed they were due for a revival, and in 1989, he worked with a lab in Connecticut to develop Murad Age Spot and Pigment Lightening Gel, Murad Acne Prone Skin Formula and Murad Skin Smoothing Cream, all containing mild concentrations of glycolic acid.
Sales, he knew, were directly dependent on education, so he gave free seminars to consumers and salon owners (a practice the company rigorously continues). Before fashion and beauty magazines heralded alpha hydroxy acids as the secret ingredient of a new elixir, most women would welcome a pie in the face before they’d willingly put acid on their skin. Murad repeatedly invited beauty editors to lectures, explaining so clearly how AHAs worked that the skin care mavens of Vogue and Mirabella couldn’t wait to inform their readers.
By 1992, Murad’s inaugural alpha hydroxy trio were sold in 2,500 salons. Seeking to reach a still wider audience, Murad made an infomercial. He had been teaching at UCLA Medical School as an assistant clinical professor since 1973, and using a pseudo-sitcom story about two women--one who took care of her skin, the other who didn’t--he reconstituted his tutorial on alpha hydroxy acids, antioxidants and liposomes for remote control-toting audience of insomniacs. The infomercial, which Murad now considers “ahead of its time,” was a total flop.
“Maybe three people in the whole country bought products,” he says. “I wasn’t devastated. I was building the business through the aestheticians.”
Two years later, he tried again. By then, the infomercial had progressed from neologism to marketing phenomenon. Murad’s followed the accepted format: A recognizable talk show host type (Sarah Purcell) presided over a group of enthusiastic Murad users in an ersatz living room. Murad participated in the chatfest, dispensing skin care advice that didn’t always point straight to an available product. From June 1994 through December 1996 the company spent half a million dollars a week buying television air time; every day, the Murad infomercial was running at some time, on some channel, somewhere in America. In contrast to the “what if you gave a party and nobody came” response to the first television push, the second effort motivated 700,000 people to order $119 starter kits containing four products. In keeping with Murad’s belief that women should get professional help for their skin, the kits included a coupon that could be redeemed for a discount on a service at a local salon or spa.
Although medical advertising has been legal since 1977, most doctors don’t do it, much less star in their own 30-minute TV sellathons. “A lot of the medical community is very conservative and frowns upon doctors who do infomercials because they think it’s too promotional,” says Arnold Klein, a Beverly Hills dermatologist and associate clinical professor of dermatology at UCLA School of Medicine.
If Murad knew his colleagues were frowning at his talking on the tube about cream that absorbs oil in the T-zone, he ignored their reaction. He thought it was important to broadcast news of a breakthrough.
“I never really pay attention to what other people think,” he says. “I don’t know what other doctors think. I thought doing the infomercial was a different way to go, but I didn’t think it was anything bad.”
A Medical Degree, Then Service in Vietnam
Anyone searching for an explanation for Murad’s willingness to buck convention might look to his childhood. As a Jew who spent the first seven years of his life in Iraq, he was born an outsider.
“When my family left Iraq for the United States in 1946,” he says, “there were 250,000 Jews there, including families who had been there for generations. Today, there are less than 5,000 left. It was never good to be a Jew in Iraq. There was a kind of coexistence, but we weren’t first-class citizens there. In America, I feel like an American. In Iraq, I felt like a foreigner.”
He graduated from the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, then worked his way through the then-California College of Medicine, now the UC Irvine College of Medicine, as a night-shift pharmacist. After completing an internship in surgery, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Attached to an airborne division, he tended to soldiers brought into a base camp before they were shipped to a MASH medical unit. The experience left him with the feeling that he wanted more contact with patients, and less with their body parts. He did a residency in dermatology after his discharge in 1962.
His medical office claims, at most, a day per week of his time. Four months of the year, he teaches at UCLA for a few hours a week, and he volunteers one day a month at Vista Del Mar, a resident center for troubled children. Murad’s 180 employees are also encouraged to take off one paid day a month to devote time to a charity. The company supports the Los Angeles Free Clinic and funds a scholarship program administered by Big Sisters of Los Angeles for young women interested in medicine or aesthetics.
Divorced in 1995, after 27 years of marriage, Murad lives at the Marina City Club in Marina del Rey, a short drive from the Murad corporate offices and Murad 365, the luxurious full-service day spa that opened in 1996. One daughter, the eldest of his three children, now 28, 27 and 22, works with him. When he spends a weekend in Los Angeles, Murad hikes in the Santa Monica mountains with friends, but three or four times a month, he’s on an airplane, usually traveling to deliver a lecture about his products, which are sold internationally.
Working on Health of Skin From the Inside Out
By continuing to meet with the public and salon owners, Murad is bolstering the twin pillars of education and innovation that have been the foundation of his business. Anyway, his enthusiasm for his latest regimen is evangelical. It’s called internal skin care and is based on the notion that good health and beautiful skin should work from the inside out.
“Things that you put on your skin are never going to be able to penetrate and do anything in the dermis, the layer of the skin where wrinkles are,” he says. “So I asked myself, what is it in the dermis that your body needs? I thought that if you took the amino acids necessary to build protein, plus vitamins and minerals and other things that the dermis is composed of, then, theoretically, you’d have the ingredients to build more dermis. The concept was there, I tried it and it seemed to work. We did a double-blind study and there was a reduction in the number of lines and wrinkles and an increase in the elasticity of the skin.”
Joshua Wieder, a dermatologist and assistant clinical professor at UCLA, says, “The idea that you can take vitamins, herbs and antioxidant supplements that will improve your skin makes great sense. However, there isn’t a lot of published data yet to show that taking antioxidants internally helps to reverse sun damage or rejuvenate the skin. It’s early to make a call on that.”
Murad doesn’t mind being ahead of the pack, even if it means recommending that women swallow supplements and apply layers of serums and lotions and creams to their skin morning and night. He answers the most common criticism--that his regime involves too many steps and a confusing array of products--by saying that he’s offering what he considers optimal skin care.
“My position is I’m going to provide everything, and women can choose what they want,” he says.
But the woman who skips the Murad Environmental Shield Daily Renewal Complex (after she applies toner and before she slathers on moisturizer) won’t be “building a natural defense against harmful external elements while encouraging healthy collagen formation,” according to the label. So she could be missing a chance to have skin like Murad’s. His complexion is clear and unlined. It practically glows. The credit might go to his products, or perhaps it has something to do with success and a sense of accomplishment.
“I’ve been able to see that as an individual you can make much more of a difference than you think you can,” he says. “What’s important to me is being able to do something that makes a difference. If someone asks me how to have beautiful skin, my first answer is, you have to be happy within yourself.”
