The Ayurveda Experience

The Ayurveda Experience is an Indian-founded global Ayurveda business and house of brands, built around taking Ayurvedic knowledge, formulations and daily rituals to an international audience. It is a wellness platform founded by Rishabh Chopra in 2010, originally with a strong focus on Ayurvedic education before expanding deeply into beauty, personal care and wellness products.

Rather than positioning itself as a quick-fix wellness brand, it leans into ancient frameworks that view health as a balance between body, mind and environment. The platform brings together products, learning resources and practitioners rooted in Ayurvedic principles.

Ayurveda isn’t a collection of fashionable ingredients such as turmeric and ashwagandha that can be sprinkled into otherwise conventional products. It is an Indian system of health with thousands of years of accumulated knowledge around plants, food, massage, oils, daily routines, individual constitution and the relationship between physical and emotional wellbeing. I have incorporated a couple of basic routines such as Takra Kalpa and Kaya Kalpa in my personal life for a long time now and the benefits are immeasurable. Being healthy is not just luck, it’s an accumulation of many good practices and herbal supplements which Ayurveda teachings have taught for thousands of years.

The Ayurveda Experience actually started with education. Its earlier platform offered courses, articles, videos and access to Ayurvedic practitioners, describing itself as a digital publishing business focused on Ayurveda and other ancient knowledge systems. The products grew alongside that educational side rather than Ayurveda simply being adopted later as a branding exercise.

Today it operates as a house of Ayurvedic brands, rather than every product being branded The Ayurveda Experience. Its portfolio has included iYURA, Ajara, A.Modernica and Ayuttva, with different approaches ranging from traditional Ayurvedic oils to formulations combining Ayurveda with contemporary skincare. The UK site currently describes iYURA as its authentic Ayurvedic oil range, Ajara as Ayurveda-inspired natural products and A.Modernica as combining Ayurvedic recipes with modern science.

The company has become considerably bigger than its beginnings suggest. It now sells internationally to more than a million customers and in 2024 raised $27 million in Series C investment, led by Jungle Ventures with participation from SIDBI Ventures, Anicut Capital and Sharrp Ventures. That took its total external funding to more than $41 million. So this is no longer a little founder-funded Ayurvedic business, even though Ayurveda remains its central identity.

The part of The Ayurveda Experience that interests me most is its extensive collection of facial and body oils.

iYURA makes products including Kesaradi Daily Glow Face Oil, Manjish Glow Night Time Elixir, Balaayah Black Gram Body Booster, Sandalwood Rose Eye Butter and Golden Years Face Serum. Many are based on traditional Ayurvedic preparations or ingredients and use sesame oil as a carrier for complex combinations of herbs.

The ingredient lists are fascinating if you’re accustomed to Western skincare. Kesaradi, for example, contains sesame oil infused with a long list of plants including manjistha, vetiver, liquorice, turmeric, lotus, Indian barberry and saffron, with rose and geranium oils. Manjish Glow uses sesame oil with ingredients including manjistha, liquorice, mahua and lemon.

Balaayah Black Gram Body Booster takes another traditional direction, combining sesame oil with black gram, country mallow, rasna, velvet bean, nutsedge, castor root and dill, with frankincense and vanilla providing its aroma.

The wider business goes beyond oils into creams, serums, eye treatments, cleansers, masks and other beauty and personal-care products. There is also educational material explaining Ayurvedic concepts and practices rather than simply presenting the finished products without context.

Ayurveda is exactly the kind of life and health philosophy I’ve increasingly moved towards myself: oils, concentrated plant preparations and serums rather than endless layers of conventional moisturisers. Ayurveda takes plant oils seriously. Oil isn’t simply a cheap carrier into which a fashionable active ingredient has been dropped. Ayurvedic oil preparations can involve infusing numerous herbs into an oil base through specific traditional preparation methods. The resulting oil becomes the treatment medium itself.

Take Manjish Glow. The current formula is fundamentally sesame oil, milk and botanical materials including manjistha and liquorice. There are no silicones creating artificial slip and no enormous collection of texture modifiers required to make the product resemble a conventional cream.

I also like that The Ayurveda Experience doesn’t strip Ayurveda of its language to make it more palatable to Western consumers. Products still discuss Vata, Pitta and Kapha, Ayurvedic massage techniques and the traditional properties associated with particular plants.

I don’t need Ayurveda translated into Western pharmaceutical terminology before I’m prepared to take it seriously. This is a sophisticated medical and wellbeing tradition that existed for thousands of years before modern cosmetic chemistry appeared. Modern research into its plants and practices is interesting and useful, but Ayurveda doesn’t suddenly acquire its history because a laboratory confirms the presence of a particular active compound.

The formulations also introduce plants rarely encountered in mainstream Western skincare. Manjistha, black gram, country mallow, rasna, velvet bean, nutsedge, Indian barberry and mahua aren’t the usual rosehip-and-aloe botanical decoration repeated across hundreds of supposedly natural beauty brands.

The independent customer feedback is particularly interesting because people repeatedly talk about visible results rather than simply saying that the products smell nice.

The UK business currently has a Trustpilot score of around 4.4 from more than 1,000 reviews, with 80% awarding five stars. Recent reviewers describe improvements in skin texture, hydration and appearance and there are numerous reports from women in their 60s and 70s who have incorporated the oils and serums into their routines.

Skincare ultimately has to be effective. After my experience with brands whose philosophy I admire but whose products leave me wondering why I spent the money; I pay considerable attention when large numbers of people say they can actually see a difference.

I also like the pricing more than I expected. Many of the current hero products sit around £33–£37. Kesaradi is £33, Balaayah £35 and Manjish Glow £37. These aren’t cheap, but they’re considerably less absurd than parts of the premium skincare market where a 30ml serum can easily pass £100. Good, clean ingredients are never cheap. Synthetic versions make cheap products but that’s not what we’re looking for here.

My main reservation is that The Ayurveda Experience is becoming a very large, investment-backed direct to consumer business, and I don’t want commercial growth to gradually turn Ayurveda into just another global beauty category.

The company raised $27 million in 2024 alone and more than $41 million in total funding. Jungle Ventures, SIDBI Ventures, Anicut Capital and Sharrp Ventures are among its investors. Growth capital isn’t inherently a problem, but once outside investors put that amount of money into a consumer business, growth and financial returns inevitably become part of the equation.

For this particular company, I’ll be watching whether traditional formulations remain central or whether the catalogue gradually fills with increasingly conventional beauty products wrapped in Ayurvedic language.

The website itself can also be far too sales-heavy for my taste. There are discounts, bundles, dramatic product claims, countdown-style promotions, testimonials and long sales pages designed around conversion. Some product pages feel much more like aggressive direct-response marketing than the calm, considered philosophy I associate with Ayurveda.

This is an odd contradiction to me. Ayurveda encourages patience, ritual and long-term attention to the body. Modern D2C marketing encourages me to BUY TWO NOW BEFORE THE OFFER DISAPPEARS. I’m rarely impressed by this.

There are also formulations that aren’t quite as simple as the initial natural imagery suggests. Balaayah, for example, includes parfum as well as fragrance constituents including coumarin, limonene and benzaldehyde in one published formulation. That’s not enough for me to reject an otherwise beautiful herbal oil, but I would rather see the traditional oils remain as close as possible to their botanical foundations.

The products aren’t universally vegan. Manjish Glow, for example, contains cow’s milk and lac resin, and the company explicitly warns customers about this. Anyone assuming Ayurvedic botanical skincare automatically means vegan needs to read the formula.

Independent reviews reveal some less attractive experiences too. The UK Trustpilot profile is overwhelmingly positive, but 11% of reviews are one-star. Complaints include delayed or missing deliveries, difficulty getting responses from customer service and products causing irritation or simply doing nothing for the person using them. One recent reviewer described both a body and neck product as ineffective and irritating. Of course Ayurvedic doesn’t mean universally effective and plant-based doesn’t mean nobody will have a reaction to it. Our 21st century western fed bodies are far from balanced and metabolically healthy so reactions to natural products have been quite normalised.

What I don’t consider a negative is that some of these formulas or their underlying Ayurvedic uses haven’t been subjected to the same volume of modern clinical trials as pharmaceutical or multinational cosmetic ingredients. I’m not going to dismiss thousands of years of Ayurvedic practice because twenty-first-century commercial research hasn’t investigated every traditional formulation.

The Ayurveda Experience is not one uniformly certified-organic skincare brand. It operates multiple brands and sells many individual formulations, so organic, vegan and other certification or ingredient claims need to be checked at product level.

iYURA describes its products as natural and says they use wild-crafted herbs prepared using traditional Ayurvedic methods. Individual formulas differ substantially.

Some products are vegan while others aren’t. Manjish Glow, for example, contains milk and lac resin, while the current Balaayah formulation is identified as vegan.

I would therefore rather judge each formulation on its complete ingredient list and any certification it actually carries than give the entire platform a blanket “organic” or “vegan” label that isn’t accurate.

I like to experiment and use a different range of their products. I’m not drawn to any of their marketing messages. I do like some of their formulations. Sesame oil cooked with black gram, country mallow, rasna, velvet bean and nutsedge. Manjistha and liquorice infused into a night oil. Saffron, turmeric, lotus, vetiver and Indian barberry appearing together in a facial preparation.

These aren’t ingredient combinations created by somebody looking at Google Trends and discovering that turmeric is having a good year. They come from an entirely different tradition of understanding plants and the body. I particularly like the fact that the products fit the direction my own skincare has been taking: away from complicated moisturisers and towards concentrated oils and serums where the plant oils and extracts actually constitute the product.

Kesaradi, Manjish Glow and Balaayah are now firmly on my list of products I want to try. Perhaps this is the best verdict I can give a brand I haven’t personally tested yet.