Daria's Story: The Personal Path Behind Gaia Uncovered

By Daria Diaz

On the page she titles "Daria's Story," Daria Diaz traces the personal history that led her to found Gaia Uncovered, a tallow-based skincare brand based in the Sydney area of New South Wales. The…

On the page she titles "Daria's Story," Daria Diaz traces the personal history that led her to found Gaia Uncovered, a tallow-based skincare brand based in the Sydney area of New South Wales. The account begins not with a product, but with her own skin.

Daria recounts struggling with cystic acne from the age of 14, an experience she describes as the motivation behind her decision to create tallow-based skincare. That long-running personal struggle gave her a direct reason to look closely at what she was putting on her skin, and eventually to formulate alternatives herself.

A second turning point came with pregnancy. Daria says she became pregnant with her daughter in 2020, an event she describes as reshaping her approach to animal fats and nourishment. From there she explains that she committed fully to tallow-based skincare by 2022 and began rendering her own tallow. She credits April Graham, Stephanie Peña and Arielle de Martinez with introducing her to whole-plant infusions, a method that became central to how she now works.

That hands-on approach runs through her wider practice. Daria describes a background spanning acupuncture, herbal medicine, human biology, physiology and chemistry, and describes herself as a TCM practitioner. She says she hand-formulates her products herself using in-house crafted herbal infusions, working with tallow, lard and ghee, with no outsourcing. The story she tells on the page connects that formal training in Traditional Chinese Medicine, which she studied through a Bachelor of Science at the University of Technology Sydney, with the kitchen-level craft of rendering her own ingredients.

What gives "Daria's Story" its coherence is how closely the brand follows the person. The acne she describes as a teenager, the pregnancy she marks as a shift in thinking, and the mentors she names in whole-plant infusions all feed directly into the skincare routine she now builds by hand. For Daria, the opportunity she describes is a straightforward one: to formulate the kind of products she once went looking for herself.