About Us
It started during COVID
Before any of this was a skincare company, this actually stemmed from a different product. We live in Santa Barbara, California, where oil seeps naturally offshore and washes thick tar onto the sand. Everyone here deals with it. The usual fix was whatever harsh solvent was in the garage which is either turpentine, gasoline, mineral spirits, or some random kitchen remedy. That never sat right with me that someone would use harsh solvents like gasoline on their skin. So I built Oil Slick Beach Tar Remover, a natural, plant based alternative that lifted tar without the use of harsh solvents. My local community embraced it, told their friends, and it became a real little business for my wife and I. Then COVID came and threw a big wrench in our business.
The Pivot
The business we had built stopped working almost overnight. I had a product, a formula I believed in, and a market that had gone quiet. So I started asking what else the formula could do. We quickly discovered that it turned out to be very good at removing medical adhesive, such as medical tape, bandages, sensor patches, and more. That accidental discovery sent us down a completely different road.
The problem nobody was solving
Once I started looking seriously at medical adhesive removers, one thing stood out to us immediately. Almost every product on the market was built on isopropyl alcohol. Alcohol removes adhesive. But It also stings when it seems into a wound, and it dries out skin that is already compromised. Then I looked at who actually uses these products, and the picture got worse. It isn't an occasional user. It's a type 1 diabetic rotating a CGM or pump site every few days, for life. It's someone wrapped in surgical tape while an incision closes. It's ostomy patients changing a barrier on the same patch of skin week after week. It's caregivers doing wound care on someone they love, who has to watch that person go through it. These are people removing adhesive and bandages from raw, healing, or fragile skin on a schedule, and the industry's answer was to use isopropyl alcohol which burns them a little bit each time. Everyone had accepted that as the cost of getting the tape off. Nobody had made a product that didn't sting yet.
Two products, two problems
Oil Slick Beach Tar Remover is still its own brand doing its own job. We separated it out and left it there as its own thing. What works on tar on healthy skin kinda works for removing medical adhesive and it would have been easy to relabel the beach formula and call it medical. But we didn't do that and decided to go all in on what the customer needed. Instead we took what we had learned from the customer and built something new, designed from the start for people who use it every day on sensitive, reactive, and compromised skin. Every Amazon review we got went straight back into the formula design. Our customers were the ones who drove what our adhesive remover is today. When the product finally matched the problem, we decided to name the company after it. Sting-less. Which now represents a broader mission for us.
Building out the routine
The adhesive remover was the beginning and our customers weren't just taking tape off. They were cleaning, covering, protecting, and living with the routine required to heal wounds. At every one of those steps, they were reaching for products full of ingredients that didn't fully comfort them.
So since 2024, we've worked with an independent formulation lab to extend the same standard across the whole process. Four products, built to work together:
- Adhesive Remover, for lifting tape and residue without the alcohol burn
- Rapid Repair HOCI Mist, a hypochlorous acid mist for gentle daily cleansing of wounds and doesn't sting sensitive skin
- Barrier Repair Cream, for skin that needs a little repair without the synthetic ingredients and steroids
- Scar Support Complex, for the appearance of skin after it closes
The whole line runs on the same idea. Natural, marine and botanically driven ingredients, formulated to actually perform. We have never been interested in a gentle product that doesn't work, and we have never been interested in an effective one that makes you flinch. The entire point is refusing to choose between the two.
Who are we
Sting-less is my wife and me. We own it outright and built this brand from the ground up. Every ingredient decision is ours, and we're the ones who oversee the business. One rule has survived from the day we found the alcohol problem to now. If it stings, it doesn't go in our products.