Tapur Gupta

Founder and Director, Root Labs

At 24, Tapur Gupta is one of the youngest founders shaping India’s skincare landscape, building Root Labs against an industry driven by more actives, more steps, and more promises. Root Labs is a hormone-considerate, barrier-first skincare brand rooted in a simple belief: we don’t fix skin, we support it.

The Turning Point

Tapur’s own skin taught her the brand’s philosophy before she ever articulated it. While living in Singapore, she built the kind of elaborate, ingredient-led routine most skincare obsessives dream of: retinol, vitamin C, niacinamide, layered and rotated with precision. It worked, until she moved back to India, where pollution, humidity, dust, and shifting seasons wore down her skin barrier and made the same routine backfire.

The fix wasn’t another product, It was fewer of them. She stripped her routine to a gentle cleanser, a simple moisturiser, and sunscreen, and watched her skin recover. That experience reframed everything she thought she knew: healthy skin isn’t built through aggressive actives, but by protecting the skin barrier and letting it do its job. From that conviction came Root Labs.

From Psychology Student to Industry Insider

Tapur read consumer behaviour and psychology at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and that background shows up in how Root Labs talks to people: warm, direct, and free of the jargon that usually makes skincare feel like a test you can fail.

She earned her place in the industry from the inside out. Internships with Coco Veda and global beauty brand Coco & Eve gave her a first look at formulation and influencer marketing. Back in India, a role at Nykaa Fashion as a Digital Marketing Executive expanded fast: working alongside the founder of Kica Active, she picked up sales planning, brand partnerships, events, and product development, effectively serving an apprenticeship for the brand she’d eventually build.

Building Root Labs

Tapur started building Root Labs at 23. Nine months of formulation, sampling, and testing later, the brand launched on 9 January 2026, not as another entrant into a saturated market, but as a response to something she kept hearing in customer feedback: skincare rarely accounts for how skin’s needs shift across hormonal life stages: puberty, pregnancy, menopause.

That insight became the brand’s spine. Every Root Labs formulation is built around hormone-safe ingredients and engineered specifically for Indian skin and climate, accounting for higher melanin levels, humidity, pollution, and near-constant sun exposure, rather than importing formulas designed for other skin types and climates.

Today, Tapur runs product development, formulation strategy, and brand direction end-to-end, working closely with in-house manufacturing and testing teams to keep every launch tied to real consumer feedback rather than trend cycles.

Off Duty

Ask Tapur what she does outside Root Labs and the answer is unglamorous by design: chasing down good coffee and better dessert, and spending time with the people she loves. She used to be a serious makeup person, but building a skincare brand nudged her toward the same minimalism she now sells – less product, more skin.

In Her Words

“I believe our skin already knows how to heal itself. It doesn’t need to be constantly corrected or overwhelmed with stronger actives and complicated routines. At Root Labs, we’re simply here to support that natural process, strengthening the skin barrier, creating the right environment for healthy skin, and helping it get there a little faster. Healthy skin isn’t something we create; it’s something we help your skin return to.”