Two Years in the Making
On believing in something long enough to see it through.
Last week, we got the news that our tubes were in line to be filled.
If you’ve ever built something from nothing and really pulled it out of the ground with your bare hands you might understand why I’ve been sitting with that sentence for days. After over two years of work, Bastét is about to exist in the world in a way it never has before. A physical thing. Something you can hold.
I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting this week. On everything that came before. On how long the road actually was. And on something I think about often but haven’t written about directly yet: what it actually takes to believe in something deeply, stubbornly, sometimes irrationally for long enough to see it through.
The Inheritance of Anxiety
My relationship with oral health didn’t begin with me. It began, in many ways, with my parents.
My mother lost both of her front teeth at fourteen during a game of Red Rover. This was the early ‘70s dental implants were not what they are today. She was fitted with what was available, and she would go on to replace those implants again and again over the decades. In her forties, she moved to veneers for a more natural look a decision that, years later, would conceal a serious infection she’d need to address separately. A lifetime of amalgam fillings, intensive dental work, and ongoing struggle followed.
My father’s story is its own kind of vivid. Emergency fillings. Harrowing ordeals. And one memory that has never left me: a bone graft performed with no anesthesia.
These were the stories I grew up with. And they shaped me. I responded to them the only way I knew how by becoming diligent. I developed an exhaustive oral care routine early, because the alternative felt unthinkable.
And yet. My results didn’t match my efforts. Every follow-up brought new areas of concern. I was doing everything right and still falling short of where I wanted to bet.
Have you join the waitlist yet?
My Internal Audit
Around the same time, my health was unravelling in other ways. What started as a small patch of eczema became something far more serious: my eyes swelling closed, my face barely recognizable to me. My battle with my skin, and my body as a whole, forced me to become an avid researcher, a health advocate, an outside-the-box thinker, and a relentless self-advocate. I learned to question the health of my environment and to see everything I put on and in my body through a binary lens: inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. It changed the way I moved through the world entirely.
When I brought that same scrutiny to my oral care routine, I realized how much was missing. I had audited my pantry, my laundry, and my home but I was still scrubbing my mouth with the some of the very inflammation I was trying to outrun. The “natural” options either didn’t perform or weren’t readily available. I wanted something that would protect my teeth and support my oral microbiome without the ingredients I’d learned to avoid.
I started researching. I found hydroxyapatite used widely in Japan, barely known in North America. I rebuilt my routine from the ground up.
Some of you have read about what happened next to the hygienist who stopped mid-cleaning to ask what I was doing, because she had never seen a mouth as clean as mine. That moment was a confirmation. There was a better way. I was on it. And the product that could deliver it, for people who didn’t have time to research the way I had, didn’t yet exist.
What I haven’t talked about as much is what came after that realisation.
I turned down a lot of labs. More than I expected to. Some told me what I was trying to create couldn’t exist. Others told me it simply wasn’t “how things were done.” I was adamant about the ingredients I wanted to include and completely ironclad about what would never make the cut and that combination made me an inconvenient client.
I didn’t waver. Not because I was certain it would work out, but because I couldn’t imagine creating something I didn’t fully believe in.
“Believing in something is easy when there’s evidence it’s working. The harder thing—the thing that actually determines whether something gets made—is the believing that happens before the evidence arrives. The quiet, stubborn insistence that it’s possible. The willingness to look unreasonable.”
Bastét exists because of that. And through my own journey of discovery, I’ve had the great pleasure of helping the people I love most. This product represents that dedication, and the extreme care that went into every decision along the way.
Our tubes are being filled. After everything I can’t quite believe it, and I absolutely can.
Happy for you Stranger.
Very exciting