A severe allergic reaction before her birthday sparked a three-year journey of research, thousands of formulations and a decision to invest her life’s savings in a skin-first personal-care venture
Munish Sood
MANDI: What began with a painful allergic reaction just a day before her birthday has taken Dr Manya Sharma, a doctor from Mandi, on an unexpected three-year entrepreneurial journey — from experimenting in her kitchen to building Secreto Care, a personal-care brand centred on what she describes as a “skin-first, planet-first” approach.
In March 2023, Sharma opted for waxing ahead of her birthday. Instead of celebrations, she developed severe redness and painful blisters across her body and required medication. The experience left her asking a fundamental question: why had women come to accept pain, irritation, ingrown hair and skin reactions as an inevitable part of hair removal?
Laser hair removal was suggested to her, but as a doctor, Sharma was aware of its practical limitations, including cost, sun exposure and the role of hormones and individual biology in hair growth.
Then she remembered something from her years in Kyrgyzstan, where she had encountered sugar waxing — a simple formulation traditionally based on sugar, lemon and water.
The idea was simple. Finding the product in India was not.
After returning to India, Sharma spent months searching for sugar wax while preparing for her medical licensing examination in Delhi. When efforts to source samples from Kyrgyzstan failed, she made a decision that would change her career trajectory: if she could not find the product, she would make it herself.
Around May 2023, she began developing her own formulation while working as an Emergency Medical Officer at Government Medical College and Hospital, Chandigarh, one of the busiest tertiary-care centres in the region. Her days involved handling a large emergency workload, while evenings and weekends were devoted to formulation experiments and postgraduate examination preparation.
Her kitchen became her first laboratory.
The biggest challenge was consistency. A formulation that behaved one way in one climate could perform differently elsewhere because of variations in temperature and humidity. Sharma therefore set herself a more ambitious task — developing sugar wax capable of delivering consistent performance across India’s diverse climatic conditions.
For nearly a year, she documented every experiment. Initially producing about six formulations a day, she eventually increased that to nearly 12. She personally tested samples repeatedly, including on the hair of her own forearm.
There were thousands of attempts, failures and modifications before she arrived at a formulation she believed worked.
The next stage involved testing across different regions of India, from Jammu and Kashmir to Chennai. The process ultimately resulted in two formulations — Everlyn, a softer consistency intended for sensitive areas such as the face, underarms and bikini area, and No Rules, a medium-consistency formulation designed for larger areas such as arms and legs, with a reusable application approach.
But turning a formulation into a business proved equally difficult.
Sharma initially pursued institutional financing to establish manufacturing facilities. After approximately eight months of applications and revisions, the loan application was rejected on December 30, 2024.
The setback came while she was at the hospital.
With institutional funding no longer available, her parents became her backbone financially encouraging Sharma to bootstrap the venture in January 2025. She combined her savings with a personal loan and committed a substantial portion of her earnings as a doctor to the business. Her parents also stepped in financially, while a small group of friends supported her through the difficult phase.
Her father, she says, had another reason for believing in the product: he had used Secreto himself for hair around his eyebrows and cheeks.
Manufacturing brought another hurdle. Sharma says several manufacturers in India told her that the formulation could not be produced as intended. She was unwilling to compromise on the ingredients or formulation merely to reduce costs.
She eventually found manufacturing support outside India and continued building the company while protecting the formulation through confidentiality agreements.
For the Mandi-born doctor, Secreto is consequently not simply a beauty venture. It represents a journey that began with a personal setback and evolved through medical experience, experimentation, financial risk and persistence.
From a birthday she could not enjoy to a product she spent thousands of attempts creating, Dr Manya Sharma’s story is ultimately about turning a problem she personally experienced into a business built around a question she believes deserves greater attention: can personal care begin with caring for the skin itself?
