“I’m glad we did play the slow game, because we’ve gone above and beyond,” Ayesha Curry says of taking triple the time she initially planned to launch a beauty line. Today, after three and a half years of preparation, planning, and testing, her vitamin C-packed skincare brand Sweet July Skin officially launches with a suite of three products inspired by her Jamaican roots. It’s a natural next step for her lifestyle brand Sweet July, with the self-proclaimed “beauty junkie” having tried it all at this point—including every one of her grandmother’s beauty tips.

Photo: Peter Ash Lee for Sweet July Skin

“Growing up, I just remember them always having these little old wives tails about their skincare like, ‘Rub this tomato on your face, like it’ll be good for you,’ or ‘Take this aloe vera and put it on after the sun,’” Curry says. When she started noticing that her mother’s skin was “as smooth as butter” even as the years kept passing by, she started paying more attention to the advice she’d doled out. And while tomatoes may not have made it into the final lab samples, Caribbean ingredients like guava, papaya, and soursop did. Every product has “a little bit of vitamin C and niacinamide” in its formulation, she tells me. “Everybody needs these three products,” Curry says of designing recipes that work on all skin types (and while the industry’s take on “clean” beauty is shifting, they do meet the clean standards of retailers like Sephora and Credo).

The Pava Exfoliating Cleanser (the name is “a hybrid of papaya and guava”) polishes skin with super-fine lychee seed powder that Curry promises won’t scratch your skin like ’90s drugstore brands. “I was one of those girls, too, that was using those harsh ones,” she admits, promising her gentle alternative won’t strip your face. Then there’s the Pava Toner that brightens with natural fruit extracts, and the Irie Power Face Oil that smells of tea tree, neem seed, and rosemary oils and helps target hyperpigmentation and uneven texture, something she notes she’s dealt with her whole life. “I’m also a victim of adult acne,” Curry shares. “What I love about the oil is it’s not oily, if that makes any sense.” She uses it as a makeup base now, and mixes it with other products for extra hydration. “It really is multipurpose.”

For those familiar with her bestselling cookbook The Full Plate, Curry did come to think of the line as “recipes for your face” while bouncing ideas off of chemists in the lab. “I’m approaching it as a sensorial experience; it has to smell good; it has to feel good; it has to carry you somewhere,” she says. The cleanser, for example, has a “cooling, tingling” experience that lasts past the final splash. “I would look at that almost like the mouthfeel after a nice sip of wine,” she explains.

Photo: Peter Ash Lee for Sweet July Skin

It’s an approach that applies to the entire brand, in a way. July is “this month of tremendous joy in my family—my husband and I got married in July, and then all three of our kids just so happened to be born in July,” Curry says of her month of gratitude. “I just noticed that it would be such a heightened time of joy, and I was like, I wanna feel this amount of joy every single day and why can’t I? The small things in life should bring me joy: It doesn’t have to be a birthday or an anniversary. My morning cup of coffee should bring me this joy, or my skincare routine should bring me this joy, so we created this mantra to like find joy in life’s little pleasures.”

And now, in peak joy season, she and her husband Steph Curry are enjoying “a true summer vacation” with the kids being out of school. Plus, she can finally open up about the project she’s been keeping secret for almost four years. “We’ve been working on this for so long,” she says, adding that we’ll see even more from her Sweet July Skin line soon. “I can’t even believe we’re finally getting to talk about