Philip Pells

A MacMasters Beach resident who loves looking at ideas and the world as interesting problems to solve and opportunities to explore.

It’s little wonder that, in his career as a rock engineer, Philip Pells took on innovative projects such as the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and the Perisher Ski Tube. He was also part of the design-andbuild team for the double-helix-shaped Sydney Opera House underground carpark. Its geometry explains why traffic going down the helix never meets traffic coming the other way.

It also has benefits, such as the last car to find a car spot would not be on the lowest floor but instead almost back to the top (almost without noticing). It meant the car park’s ventilation was so much better, and the smaller footprint lessened the risk of disrupting any of the Botanical Garden tree roots directly above the carpark (just one rare white fig above the car park was insured for a mere $.5 million).

Normally, the focus of Philip’s attention runs to issues such as the geophysics of tunnelling, groundwater, fracking, and catastrophic ground subsidences caused by old, early 1900s’ mines. But ‘lock him up’ during Covid, wearing a mask and using hand sanitiser, and his mind went to things closer at hand (literally and figuratively speaking).

While so many of us didn’t have to spare a thought about the prolonged use of hand sanitisers – Philip and his business associate, MacMasters’ nutritionist Madeline Stevens of Nu-Trition, heard from frequent users – the frontline nurses, doctors, care workers and people with a tendency to dry skin – that their hands were suffering from so much contact with the alcohol in the sanitisers. Coincidentally, a group of friends at MacMasters had been working on DIY natural moisturisers, so Philip looked at ways to build on this knowledge to invent a new and better hand sanitiser. It didn’t matter that this was not an engineering problem; it was still based on technical issues.

The process to add a moisturiser to an anti-viral sanitiser meant using two double boilers, keeping the temperatures constant in each, and mixing moisturising oils with ethanol alcohol – two traditionally un-mixable ingredients. After some initial attempts, he succeeded by using two kitchen Thermomixes in place of the boilers, and combining macadamia and coconut oils with ethanol alcohol. The next challenge was to get his innovation approved as an anti-viral hand sanitiser. But there were no official testing facilities in Australia for such a product, and the World Health Organisation regulations only listed ingredients for a non- moisturised version.

Philip is not one to be daunted and was eventually able to tunnel through the obstacles and gain the necessary approvals for his product. His business partner, Madeleine Stevens, provided the marketing and distribution knowhow, and VIRAbalm Anti-Viral Hand Moisturiser was launched.

Spurred on by the success of the moisturising hand sanitiser, and inspired by a little group of beekeepers at MacMasters, Philip is now on the way to marketing Honey Hydrogel, a treatment for burns.

As Philip says, “For a place famous for nothing happening, the geriatrics at Macs are ‘Breaking Bad’!”

Philip (pictured with his wife, Helen) constructed a rotating double helix hanging garden in his lakeside home, a structure whose life expectancy hangs on the branch of a 100-year-old Melaleuca.