What are you looking for?
What are you looking for?
What are you looking for?
20 Dec 2024
By Fe Skiniora
The Case for a Twelve-Ingredient Formula That Keeps Skincare Simple
Long ingredient lists look generous and usually are not. A shorter formula is harder to make, easier to trace, and far simpler to troubleshoot when something goes wrong on your face.
SHARE
There is a particular kind of label that reads like a harvest festival. Twenty-eight botanicals, six oils, a handful of vitamins, everything present and almost nothing present in a quantity that does anything. It is generous in appearance and thin in effect, and it makes one thing almost impossible: working out what your skin reacted to.
We hold formulas to twelve ingredients or fewer, and it is the hardest constraint we work under. Every addition has to displace something. There is nowhere to hide a weak choice behind a long list, and no room for anything included because it photographs well on a label.
What The Constraint Buys You
1. You can find the culprit
When a twelve-ingredient formula disagrees with your skin, there are twelve suspects. When a forty-ingredient one does, there are forty, and most people give up and blame the category instead.
2. Percentages have to be real
A short list leaves room for meaningful concentrations. It is the difference between a ceramide being in a formula and a ceramide doing something in it.
3. Traceability stops being a slogan
Twelve ingredients can each be traced to a supplier and a batch. Forty cannot, not honestly, and the ones that get vague are rarely the ones on the front of the bottle.
What It Costs Us
Texture is the first thing to suffer. Most of what makes a cream feel luxurious is a stack of thickeners, silicones and film-formers that do nothing for the barrier. Take them out and the formula has to earn its feel from the actives themselves, which takes far longer to get right.
It also means we launch rarely. There is no seasonal collection, because a barrier does not have seasons in the way marketing calendars do.
20 Dec 2024
By Fe Skiniora
The Case for a Twelve-Ingredient Formula That Keeps Skincare Simple
Long ingredient lists look generous and usually are not. A shorter formula is harder to make, easier to trace, and far simpler to troubleshoot when something goes wrong on your face.
SHARE
There is a particular kind of label that reads like a harvest festival. Twenty-eight botanicals, six oils, a handful of vitamins, everything present and almost nothing present in a quantity that does anything. It is generous in appearance and thin in effect, and it makes one thing almost impossible: working out what your skin reacted to.
We hold formulas to twelve ingredients or fewer, and it is the hardest constraint we work under. Every addition has to displace something. There is nowhere to hide a weak choice behind a long list, and no room for anything included because it photographs well on a label.
What The Constraint Buys You
1. You can find the culprit
When a twelve-ingredient formula disagrees with your skin, there are twelve suspects. When a forty-ingredient one does, there are forty, and most people give up and blame the category instead.
2. Percentages have to be real
A short list leaves room for meaningful concentrations. It is the difference between a ceramide being in a formula and a ceramide doing something in it.
3. Traceability stops being a slogan
Twelve ingredients can each be traced to a supplier and a batch. Forty cannot, not honestly, and the ones that get vague are rarely the ones on the front of the bottle.
What It Costs Us
Texture is the first thing to suffer. Most of what makes a cream feel luxurious is a stack of thickeners, silicones and film-formers that do nothing for the barrier. Take them out and the formula has to earn its feel from the actives themselves, which takes far longer to get right.
It also means we launch rarely. There is no seasonal collection, because a barrier does not have seasons in the way marketing calendars do.
20 Dec 2024
By Fe Skiniora
The Case for a Twelve-Ingredient Formula That Keeps Skincare Simple
Long ingredient lists look generous and usually are not. A shorter formula is harder to make, easier to trace, and far simpler to troubleshoot when something goes wrong on your face.
SHARE
There is a particular kind of label that reads like a harvest festival. Twenty-eight botanicals, six oils, a handful of vitamins, everything present and almost nothing present in a quantity that does anything. It is generous in appearance and thin in effect, and it makes one thing almost impossible: working out what your skin reacted to.
We hold formulas to twelve ingredients or fewer, and it is the hardest constraint we work under. Every addition has to displace something. There is nowhere to hide a weak choice behind a long list, and no room for anything included because it photographs well on a label.
What The Constraint Buys You
1. You can find the culprit
When a twelve-ingredient formula disagrees with your skin, there are twelve suspects. When a forty-ingredient one does, there are forty, and most people give up and blame the category instead.
2. Percentages have to be real
A short list leaves room for meaningful concentrations. It is the difference between a ceramide being in a formula and a ceramide doing something in it.
3. Traceability stops being a slogan
Twelve ingredients can each be traced to a supplier and a batch. Forty cannot, not honestly, and the ones that get vague are rarely the ones on the front of the bottle.
What It Costs Us
Texture is the first thing to suffer. Most of what makes a cream feel luxurious is a stack of thickeners, silicones and film-formers that do nothing for the barrier. Take them out and the formula has to earn its feel from the actives themselves, which takes far longer to get right.
It also means we launch rarely. There is no seasonal collection, because a barrier does not have seasons in the way marketing calendars do.
further
further
further
READS
READS
READS
