Sandra Hale Schulman
ICT
A visit to a popular beauty emporium prompted a question from Ruth-Ann Thorn’s daughter, who noticed the special sections for Korean- and Black-owned skincare brands.
“Where’s the Native American section?” she asked.
The answer: There is none.
That innocent comment led Thorn, a registered tribal member of the Rincon Band of Luiseño/Payómkawichum Indians in Southern California, to create N8iV Beauty, the first and only Native American beauty line in the world, and the first to bring Indigenous ingredients and ancestral plant medicine to the mainstream skincare market.
Now, just four years later, the company has been named to the list of TIME100 Companies as one of the 10 Most Influential Industry Leaders in fashion and beauty, alongside heavyweight billion-dollar brands such as Rhode, L’Oreal and Uniqlo.
“N8iV Beauty is the first Indigenous American-owned skincare brand to bring products to the mainstream market nationally,” according to the article in TIME. ”Rooted in traditional plant medicine, N8iV Beauty brings Indigenous knowledge into a global skincare industry long forged in a lab.”
Ruth-Ann Thorn, founder of N8iV Beauty, stands with the display of her company’s products at the Oscars Gifting lounge at the Cameo Hotel ahead of the 2026 Academy Awards in March 2026 in California. Credit: Sandra Hale Schulman/Special to ICT
The company was founded in 2022, and features acorn oil sourced from tribal lands. It won an Allure Best of Beauty Award in 2025 for its exfoliator and became “the first Indigenous beauty brand featured at Coachella.”
This year, it will launch at Nordstrom and enter more than 100 Ritz-Carlton spas, with 5 percent of its sales going to support the missing and murdered Indigenous women movement, according to Time.
“In an industry saturated with mass-produced products, we stand out as a brand dedicated to sharing our rich cultural legacy with the world,” Thorn told the magazine.
To assemble the lists, TIME solicited nominations across various sectors, and polled a global network of contributors and correspondents. Then the TIME editors evaluated each on key factors, including impact, innovation, ambition, and success. The result is a diverse group of companies shaping global business, one industry at a time.
Thorn is not sure how she got on TIME’s radar, but last October she received a questionnaire from them with extensive queries about the brand and its story. About two weeks ago she got a call from the CEO that they had been selected.
Auntie approved
The beauty emporium visit with her daughter “led us on a little journey to discover that there weren’t any Native American beauty products and that there never had been,” Thorn told ICT.
“That struck a chord because I remembered being a young person and never having identity in beauty spaces or in fashion, never seeing ourselves portrayed anywhere. I felt we need to change that and we need to change it for that next generation to be proud and hold their head up high.”
It’s one thing to come up with an idea, it’s another one to execute. To bring something to market, she asked the people from her tribe what that should be.
“I spoke to our elders, our Aunties, and our medicine people from our neighboring tribes like Pechanga,” she said. “One of my real mentors has been a woman in Pechanga named Myra, who is an archaeologist, anthropologist, and truly one of the top medicine women. She helped me figure out the plant medicine and she said, ‘You absolutely need to lead with acorn oil — the tree that grows on our land.’ So that’s where it all started.”
She continued, “Necessity is the mother of invention here. I think as Native people, we probably coined that phrase because the reality is we’ve always been able to see things that needed to change or be adaptable to our environments. That’s why we’re so resilient.”
The line started out with three products, a daybreak cream, a night cream, and then a serum, all power-packed with acorn oil and cactus extracts with natural UV protection.
“The beauty of acorn is — because people always ask me, what makes acorns so special? — the delivery system, because traditionally with acorn, you can’t eat it unless you process it,” she said. “So traditionally, we put it in vats of water and leach it, soak it for eight to 10 days then dry it. Traditionally that water was used to tan hides because it’s very high in tannic acid, so it breaks down the protein in the hide and makes it soft and supple.”
It has a similar effect on skin.
“The oil has a trace amount of that tannic acid,” she said. “It’s breaking down the top layer of the skin because we’re basically a hide on the outside and it’s penetrating two to three layers deep to the skin that hasn’t emerged yet. That’s what you want to fortify, because when we’re thinking about beauty and healthy skin, we’re thinking about plant medicine that is actually fortifying the skin.”
“When new skin comes up to the surface, it’s doing its actual work, which is protection; it’s strong and healthy. That’s what makes beautiful skin.”
What’s in a name
As for naming the brand, she explains that it’s spelled “N” for Native, the number “8” because as Luiseno people they follow an eight-season calendar, “i” for Indian, and ”V” for victory. The star on the “i” is because in their creation story, they come from the Milky Way.
To follow the mountain to the sea, she added two products called Mumat, which means mother ocean in her language. One is a cleanser and one is a serum, packed with seaweed, kelp, algae – plants that are high in natural iodine, which is important for healing.
The N8iV Beauty exfoliant Moyla, which means moon, won an Allure Best in Beauty Award in 2025. Credit: Courtesy photo
Next came the exfoliant, Moyla, meaning moon.
“That got the Allure Best in Beauty Award, which was super great as the first Native Americans to ever win an Allure Beauty Award,” she said. “We utilize the outside of the acorn, the shell. We grind it into a fine powder.”
Then came the Avellaka eye cream, which means butterfly. Finally is the Timet sunscreen with algae, cactus and sweetgrass. ”It’s green,” she said, “which is color-correcting redness on the skin.”
A new product is arriving from the Four Corners, a Three Sisters mask made with Hopi blue corn, red beans, and pumpkin enzyme.
N8iV Beauty is made in two laboratories. Thorn had to go to several to find ones that didn’t use synthetic products or preservatives.
“We press all the acorns at Rincon at our local facility,” Thorn said. “We gather it up in the mountain at Palomar where our ancestors gathered. We bring it back, we press the oil once a year. We work with a lab out of Los Angeles to make small batches.”
“Our goal is to break ground this year on our own land, on the land that I have that was passed down from my great-grandfather, and create our own lab so we can bring everything in-house.”
Looking ahead
Because Thorn also has other businesses, including Native Star Boutique in San Diego, she wasn’t in a race to the finish line to pay for development.
She took the products to Native people first, then to Santa Fe Indian Market and to RES, the Reservation Economic Summit ,and listened to the feedback of what people thought.
“I really wanted to hear mostly from our elders, the Aunties, let me know your thoughts about it,” she said. “We did modify things, but I wanted to make sure that even as a Native woman, I wasn’t culturally appropriating our own culture, that people understood that I was doing this in a right way and it wasn’t just about making a buck. I feel like that was a really good way of doing it.”
Thorn concluded, “This is bigger than me. This is about bringing recognition to our people collectively all across Turtle Island and the fact that we are the remnant of one of the greatest genocides that has ever happened.
“We’re still here and now we have an opportunity to show people that not only are we still here, but we hold these amazing, traditional secrets that are all backed by science. It’s time that we step off the reservation and show up in modern day life and say, ‘Now’s our time to rise and show how talented we are as human beings.’ That’s what really makes me excited.”
More info
To celebrate the recognition by Time magazine, N8iV Beauty is offering a 20 percent discount on products by using the code NBTIME20 until the end of May. The brand can be found online and at Nordstrom, Ritz-Carlton spas, multiple spas throughout Southern California and in San Diego at Native Star Boutique in the Gaslamp District.
The post N8iV Beauty named to TIME Magazine’s Most Influential Beauty Companies appeared first on ICT.
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