When Christina Peng's son was born, she thought she was prepared. She had spent her entire career in the beauty industry, understood ingredients, and knew how to read a label. What she wasn't prepared for was watching her baby react to almost everything around him, including the food he ate, the air he breathed, the surfaces he touched, and the products she put on her own skin.
"Before the age of two, he had been in the ER eight times," she recalls. "I didn't know if we'd make it through another day."
Her son had been born with severe eczema and multiple life-threatening allergies. The family spent months stripping their home of potential triggers. They switched to clean products, then organic products. Still, he reacted. It wasn't until they eliminated fragrance entirely that his skin finally began to clear.
After this harrowing personal experience, Peng knew she had to take action into her own hands, and it was a realization she was uniquely positioned to act on. In fact, Peng had built a career as a beauty industry executive, most recently at COOLA, the Carlsbad-based organic suncare brand. There, she overhauled the company's ingredient standards and product development process to make the line better suited for sensitive skin. This intensive project deepened her already sharp understanding of how misleading the "natural equals safe" narrative can be.
"It's a really difficult education story to help people understand that natural isn't always better for you, depending on what you're dealing with," she says.
Havyn allergen-free skincare, fragrance + candles
This background, together with her own personal mission to heal her family, led to the formation of Hayvn, an allergen-free fragrance and skincare brand based in San Diego. Hayvn began humbly, with small-batch candles made at home and tested at local farmers markets. This allowed Peng and her husband to experiment with allergen-free fragrance development at a manageable scale while getting direct feedback from real customers.
"People would be smelling and be like, 'This isn't giving me a headache,'" she remembers. "And then they'd ask: could you make this into a perfume?"
However, creating truly allergen-free fragrance is, as Peng puts it, "not easy." Most fragrant ingredients contain allergenic compounds, including beloved "natural" options like lavender essential oil.
"What people don't realize is that natural products actually contain a lot of allergens," Peng explains. "Everything you're allergic to is natural. The purest organic peanut is still going to be a peanut."
To develop a fragrance that removes those compounds requires partnering with specialized fragrance houses capable of performing molecular separation, which isolates the non-allergenic portions of an ingredient and discards the rest.
Hayvn Founder Christina Peng
"You can extract certain parts out of a natural ingredient that don't have the allergens," she explains. "It is going to change how it smells. You're never going to get a true lavender fragrance in something that's allergen free. But you work from the parts that don't have the allergens and try to be creative with that."
The trade-off shrinks a perfumer's available palette from thousands of ingredients to fewer than two hundred. Peng compares it to asking an artist to work only in charcoal when they're used to an entire studio of materials. It's one reason the industry has largely avoided this challenge as the effort is enormous.
Plus, conventional wisdom held that people who can't tolerate fragrance simply opt out of the category altogether. Peng didn't believe that. "The more people I talked to dealing with the same issues we were, it wasn't that they didn't want fragrance in their lives," she says. "It was just that there wasn't anything available."
That grassroots validation eventually gave way to something bigger. Through the persistent work of showing up at trade shows, markets and community events, one meaningful connection led to the next, including a contract with Anthropologie for full in-store distribution.
The brand now carries three fragrances as part of its beauty line. The top seller is 002 Grace, a fresh rain, pear, and white lily scent. Hope, a peony, rose, and pomelo blend, was originally conceived as the hero fragrance. Wake, an ocean moss, sage, and cedarberg scent, won a 2026 Global Beauty + Wellness Award from Glamour.
A Haven in Every Sense
Havyn's boutique store + candle-making workshop space in Rancho Santa Fe, CA
The name Hayvn is not accidental. For Peng, it carries a double meaning — one rooted in her family's experience searching for products they could trust, and one rooted in a commitment that predates the brand itself.
Before she had children, Peng mentored a young woman who was a survivor of human trafficking trying to rebuild from scratch. The experience stayed with her. "I wished I could just be with her during the day, almost holding her hand through that process," she says. "But I was at work."
That memory planted a seed. When Hayvn began to take shape, Peng connected with Generate Hope, a San Diego nonprofit running a recovery and housing program for trafficking survivors. The partnership felt, she says, like it was meant to happen as the nonprofit's biggest need at the time was job partners willing to work through the complexity of trauma-informed employment.
Today, Hayvn runs a structured three-to-six month transitional employment program for Generate Hope residents, offering real jobs inside a production studio environment designed with coaching, mentorship, and patience built in.
"We want to be a safe and trusted space for people who have not been able to find the types of products they need," Peng says. "But also a physical space with the right culture — a haven for people to heal and grow and learn."
Hayvn now operates a permanent boutique space in Rancho Santa Fe, offering candle making workshops to the community. Fragrance mixing and custom perfume-making classes are in development for later this year, where participants will work from a curated portfolio of allergen-free base and accent blends to create their own signature scents.
New products are on the horizon with additional skincare formats and new fragrance additions to the existing beauty line, with launches planned through the end of the year and into spring.
Hayvn’s allergen-free fragrance and skincare products are available at Anthropologie and at hayvnco.com.
Hayvn, 6024 Paseo Delicias, Suite G, Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067
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