About this site, and what this address used to be

Published 6 August 2026Stratum editors

Who writes this, and what they are not

Stratum is written and edited in house, and every page is published under the name of the publication. There is no invented byline, no rotating cast of stock authors and no author box with a stock portrait in it.

Nobody here is a dermatologist, a cosmetic chemist or a clinician, and this site never pretends otherwise. What it does is narrower and, done honestly, useful: it reads the primary sources — regulations, standards, randomised trials, systematic reviews — and reports what they actually say, with the citation attached so that a reader can check the work rather than take it on trust. Where a question needs clinical judgement, the page says so and says to ask a doctor.

Corrections, sources and disputes go through the contact form, which is linked from the footer of every page. This domain carries no mailbox of its own, so a printed address here would bounce in silence; the form is the route that actually arrives. It goes to the editors, not to a support desk, and the contact page sets out what is answered and what is not.

What this domain used to be

Te Mana Skincare was a skincare brand based in Auckland, New Zealand, operated by BioCosmeceuticals Ltd and founded by the cosmetic chemist Andrea Taimana. Press coverage at the time described it as New Zealand's first Māori-owned cosmeceutical skincare range. Its formulations drew on New Zealand native red and green seaweeds, on keratin derived from merino wool in work with the Crown research institute AgResearch, and on other native botanicals. It was covered by the New Zealand Herald, by the trade publications Beauty Independent and American Spa, and reviewed by independent beauty writers. It traded at temanaskincare.com from around 2018 until roughly 2023.

The storefront closed. The domain registration lapsed, and — as frequently happens to a lapsed domain with a history — it passed through other hands. During 2024 it was serving a cloned news template and unrelated foreign-language data files, which is what an abandoned address with residual reputation tends to get used for. It came to this publication in 2026.

None of that history is ours, and none of it is hidden. We state it here, in the footer of every page, because a reader who arrives from a 2019 magazine article or an old bookmark deserves to work out in one glance that the address is right and the publisher is not.

What we will not do with the name

These are commitments, not aspirations, and the site should be judged against them.

• We never brand as Te Mana Skincare. Not the wordmark, not the colours, not the template, not the product names. The domain is our postal address; it is not our identity, which is why the masthead says something else.
• We never reproduce the previous owner's writing. The archived site was used to establish facts — who ran it, what it sold, when it operated — and nothing else. No sentence of theirs appears on this site.
• We do not claim, imply or hint that the brand is still trading, that we are its successor, or that anything can be bought here. Every old shop, cart, checkout and product URL from the former site now redirects to this page, so that the first thing a stray link finds is the sentence explaining the shop is gone.
• We do not borrow te reo Māori as branding. The former brand was Māori-owned and spoke in Māori. Doing the same from here would be dress-up, and would muddy exactly the distinction this page exists to draw. Māori words appear on this site only where they are the correct name of a plant — kawakawa, kānuka, mānuka, harakeke — in the same register as a Latin binomial, and nowhere else.
• We sell nothing. No shop, no affiliate links, no sponsored posts, no advertising, no product rankings, no discount codes. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed at the top of every affected page before it changes, and this paragraph will be rewritten rather than quietly deleted.

Why this subject

Skincare is an unusually bad information environment. The claims that sell are made by the people selling, the ingredient lists that contain the real information are written in a nomenclature nobody explains, and the loudest corrective voices frequently overcorrect into a different kind of certainty. Meanwhile a great deal of genuine research exists, including some good New Zealand research, and it is mostly read by nobody.

The gap this site tries to fill is narrow and specific: take a claim, find the primary source, report what it measured and how many people were in it, and say plainly when the honest answer is that nobody knows. That last part is the whole point. A page that cannot say "the evidence does not support this" is not a reference, it is an advertisement with citations.

How that works in practice — what counts as a source here, what the certainty labels mean, how corrections are handled — is set out in the method.

Contact

Corrections, sources, complaints and rights queries all go through the contact form. If you represent the former brand or its founder and would like the description of it on this page amended or removed, send it that way; it will be actioned. Further detail is on the contact page.