Lejla Cas tells me that when people see the word Knesko, she wants them to feel something like a gentle sigh.
It is an unexpectedly intimate ambition for the founder of a luxury skincare company now found in more than 1,000 spas and hotels around the world. But intimacy is where Lejla’s story begins: in the treatment room, in the energy exchanged between an esthetician and her client, and much earlier, in the small rituals she watched transform her mother.
“If she was having a bad day she’d put on her red lipstick and just light up,” Lejla remembers.
She understood, even then, that beauty could be about much more than appearance. It could change how a woman felt. It could be a way of returning to herself.
This is the idea at the heart of Knesko. The brand is known for jewel-toned hydrogel masks infused with gemstones and Reiki energy, and for an approach Lejla describes as “science and spirit.” But before the formulations, the clinical studies, the luxury resorts, and the awards, there was a sensitive young woman who wanted to take care of people.
“From Day One, I knew this wasn’t about superficial,” she says. “It was about how I made people feel and how I made people feel cared for.”
An Immigrant Child with a Clear Instinct
Lejla and husband Sean today with their two daughters
Lejla was born in Bosnia. When she was nine—the age of her older daughter today—war uprooted her family. Her parents moved with their children to Australia, arriving with $500 and no English, determined to build a safer life.
“I’m a true immigrant child that moved across the world,” she says.
Lejla loved Australia and knew how fortunate her family was to be there. She also watched her parents work extraordinarily hard. Some days there was money; some days there wasn’t. She saw the strain of that instability and, at 14, took a job as a checkout clerk.
“I was a worker from Day One,” she says. “I knew that I wanted a better life for myself where I could have more stability. At the same time, I was never driven by money. It was about being passionate about what I was doing.”
At first, she thought she might become a psychologist. She was highly sensitive and wanted to help people. Around the same time, she was initiated into energy healing and began exploring Reiki, gemstones, minerals, and the idea of balancing the body’s energy centers. Then she chose beauty school.
Her father was not pleased when she told him she wanted to become a beautician and makeup artist instead of a psychologist. Today, she says, he is very proud.
“I wanted to help people, make people feel good from the inside out,” she says. “To me that was way bigger than being a psychologist. I can connect at such a deep level.”
At 18, Lejla began working in the treatment room. She trained as both an esthetician and massage therapist and was soon hired by a leading medical day spa in Australia. She loved the work immediately and completely. There was never a Plan B.
“I just love this industry. It gives me goosebumps,” she says.
The Road Through Every Room
The early esthetician days
At 23, an Australian cosmetics company sponsored Lejla to come to the United States for what was supposed to be a three-month contract. She arrived alone, lived in Hollywood, and stayed. By 25, she had traveled to nearly all 50 states for the brand.
Her rise was swift, but it was not effortless. She lived out of suitcases and hotel rooms, working constantly. For years, she was reluctant even to buy furniture because she never knew where she would be next.
The experience gave her something no business school could have: an understanding of the beauty and spa world from almost every vantage point. It also kept her close to the people whose work would eventually make Knesko possible.
“I’ve held every position,” she says. “There’s nothing like it. It humbles you. It teaches you how to relate to everyone as you’re building the business.”
“Why spa? Because it’s what I have passion for. Relating to spa professionals, I’m one of them.”
That humility remains visible in the way she works today. She will pack boxes and get down on the floor beside her team because she does not see herself as above the work. “I see myself as an extension of my team,” she says. “The greater mission that I’m trying to accomplish is to inspire women to take care of themselves from the inside out.”
But before she could build a company around self-care, Lejla had to confront how thoroughly she had neglected her own.
Near 30, after years of relentless travel and work, she reached burnout. She describes a period of deep anxiety and depression. Energy work and meditation helped, but they could not erase what her body and spirit had absorbed.
“I was a worker and I knew I was more than that,” she says. “Here I am doing everything that I knew to do that was right, but along the path, as hard as I tried, I forgot to take care of myself.”
The woman who had made a career of caring for others needed to pause. In that pause, the idea for Knesko took shape.
Built from the Treatment Room Outward
Lejla and husband Sean at ISPA earlier this year
Lejla’s husband, Sean Nezhad, became her co-founder. He came from a medical family, had attended business school, and wanted to build something with his wife. He recognized her passion and asked what she truly wanted to do.
Her answer was clear: create a skincare brand that promoted self-care and brought warmth and soul into a beauty culture that often felt cold to her.
The first product was born partly from those years on the road. Alone in hotel rooms, Lejla would visit beauty stores, buy inexpensive masks, and create small rituals for herself. She loved the ritual, but not the products.
She and Sean registered their business in April 2012. They married in a five-person ceremony on Santa Monica Beach, then put the money they had saved for their wedding into developing Knesko’s first product, the Gold Face Mask.
“I built Knesko from the treatment room outward,” Lejla says. “That became my personal vision, which has now become a global luxury skincare and spa brand born from my experience, my lifelong journey in this industry. Why spa? Because that’s all I know. It’s what I have passion for. Relating to spa professionals, I’m one of them.”
The beginning was decidedly unglamorous. Lejla cold-called spas and walked into the Beverly Wilshire with a single Gold Face Mask and no packaging because the young company could not yet afford the box. She left the mask with an esthetician. Three days later, the spa called.
The Beverly Wilshire became Knesko’s first client, and other Four Seasons properties followed. Most recently, Four Seasons Hotel George V, Paris, as well as the Four Seasons Yachts.
The first five years, Lejla did all of the trade shows herself. She resisted the pressure to launch broadly, concentrating instead on her first products: the Gold face mask, Gold eye mask, Diamond face mask, and Diamond eye mask.
“I know that more doesn’t mean better,” she says.
Knesko has grown slowly and deliberately, without outside investors. That independence matters to Lejla. It allows her to work intuitively, to spend as long as two years developing a product, and to reject the industry’s demand for constant novelty.
“Every product I bring to market is intentional. It’s not a trend,” she says. “Knesko is my canvas. I see this vision in the real world. This is my art.”
Science and Spirit
Lejla’s dream: Knesko Gold Repair Skincare
Lejla has never seen efficacy and energy as opposing ideas. Knesko’s gemstone story is highly visible: six collections—Gold, Diamond, Rose Quartz, Green Jade, Amethyst, and Pearl—address particular skincare benefits and correspond to different intentions and energy centers. Every product is Reiki charged.
Yet she is equally intentional about ensuring Knesko’s spiritual identity does not eclipse the rigor behind the formulas. Lejla works hands-on with her chemist, scrutinizing ingredients and leading product development. The company has also invested significantly in clinical testing, going beyond consumer-perception studies to substantiate product performance.
“Our energy story is powerful, and sometimes that can become the first thing people associate with Knesko,” she says. “But the science is equally important. It has always been there.”
That union—measurable performance with a deeper sense of meaning—is what “science and spirit” means to her. It is also why the products feel so personal. Lejla meditates on what she creates. She considers how a product will be touched, how it will make someone feel, and what intention it will carry into the world.
Four years ago, after a decade largely defined by masks, Knesko began expanding into facial skincare. Body care followed in 2024 and received an ISPA Innovate Award. Now the eight-product Gold Repair Skincare collection represents a particularly emotional milestone.
“This is my young girl, that young Lejla dreaming,” she says. “It’s everything I always wanted. I didn’t rush it.”
Finding Her Voice
The most moving extension of Knesko may be one that asks Lejla to offer not only her formulas and energy, but her voice.
As a child in Bosnia and later in middle school, she had a stutter. She has overcome it, but the memory of struggling to speak stayed with her. When she was invited to record a meditation for a LEMI vibroacoustic treatment table, the experience in the studio became unexpectedly profound.
“It was a spiritual experience, very personal, to go from a girl who used to stutter to use my voice to heal others,” she says.
She returned to the studio and recorded six 15-minute meditations, one for each Knesko collection. Each guided track works with the intention and energy associated with its gemstone. Before recording, Lejla Reiki charged her vocal cords.
The meditations have now entered spa treatments and guest experiences. The Ritz-Carlton Bacara, Santa Barbara, introduced a Knesko Mask Meditation Suite, and the program has appeared at properties including The Maybourne Beverly Hills, 1 Hotel Austin, and Encore at Wynn Las Vegas. A professional treatment can begin with intention setting and incorporate meditation; retail customers receive a shorter track and mantra through a QR code.
For Lejla, this is not an add-on. It completes a circle. The young woman who once tried to create self-care and comfort in anonymous hotel rooms can now help a guest find that sanctuary almost anywhere—in the spa, in a guest room, beside a pool, or in a quiet group ritual.
“That’s what I wish I had going back to my hotel days,” she says. “I want to meet the guest wherever they are.”
A State of Being
The Mask Meditation Suite at Spalato Spa in Split, Croatia.
Lejla will turn 44 in October. She is a founder and formulator, an energy healer, a wife, and the mother of two young daughters, ages six and nine. When she talks about success, she speaks less about scale than about what the company permits her to give to her family, her team, her spa partners, and women she may never meet.
Not coming from money helped shape her, she believes. What the business provides is now a gift: the result of hard work and, she hopes, an example to other women.
Her definition of luxury reveals the person behind the brand.
“True luxury is a state of being,” she tells me. “To me, it’s how you feel. Do you feel cared for? Do you give yourself permission to receive?”
That question reaches far beyond skincare. It reaches back to the treatment room, to her mother’s red lipstick, to a childhood interrupted by war, to a young immigrant watching her parents begin again, to the hotel rooms and exhaustion, and to the act of building a company slowly enough that it could remain true to her.
Lejla says, “When I touch my skin, I’m doing it not because I’m growing old, but because I love touching.”
It may be the purest expression of Knesko: care not as correction, but as affection. Beauty not as fear, but as a relationship with oneself.
“To Knesko is a verb. It’s a way of life,” she says. “It’s my dream. It’s my legacy I want to leave.”
And perhaps that gentle sigh Lejla hopes to create is the sound of a woman giving herself permission to receive.
Mary Bemis
Mary Bemis is Founder & Editorial Director of InsidersGuidetoSpas.com. An advocate for all things spa, Mary forged a vocabulary for spa reportage that is widely used by those who cover the issues today. Recently honored as a Top 30 Influential Voice Transforming Wellness by Medika Life, Mary is an inaugural honoree of Folio’s Top Women in Media Award. Her spa media roots run deep—in 1997, she launched American Spa magazine, in 2007, she co-founded Organic Spa magazine, and in between serving on the ISPA and NYSPA Board of Directors, she was on the launch teams of Luxury SpaFinder and New Beauty magazines. Named a "Wonder Woman of Wellness" by American Spa magazine, Mary was honored by the International Spa Association with the distinguished ISPA Dedicated Contributor Award. She is a special advisor to the non-profit Global Wellness Day.
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