A customer sent me a photo of a product she'd been using for six months and asked whether it was any good. Not whether it was working (she already knew it wasn't). She wanted to know whether it had ever been likely to.
I could tell her in about ninety seconds. Not because I have special access to anything, but because the answer was printed on the back of the bottle, in an order that meant something, using rules nobody had told her existed.
So here they are.
Every product is a base plus something added
This is the thing to understand.
A skincare product has two parts. There's the "base" — the bulk of the bottle, the delivery method. And there's whatever has been added to the base, which is usually what's printed on the front and what sets the price.
In most skincare, the base is water, plus the emulsifiers that hold water and oil together, plus the thickeners that make it feel like a cream instead of a puddle, plus the preservatives. That's seventy to ninety percent of what you're holding. It's inexpensive, it's necessary (for the product), and on its own it does very little for your skin.
The added thing is the expensive part. And because it's expensive, there is usually not very much of it. You can see the whole arrangement on the back, because ingredients have to be listed in descending order by weight. Most to least. The first ingredient is the bulk of the product. By the time you're at number twelve, you're generally into fractions of a percent.
So the list is a map of where the money went. And the useful question isn't what's the active — almost every product contains what it advertises.
The useful question is: is this mostly a delivery system for a small amount
of something, or is it mostly the thing itself?
Both of those are legitimate products. Only one of them is what most people think they're buying.
The front is marketing, the back is law
Natural. Clean. Non-toxic. Gentle. Pure. Dermatologist-tested. None of those have a regulatory definition. Any product can carry any of them, at any time, with no evidence
required and nobody checking. Dermatologist-tested means a dermatologist tested it. It says nothing about what happened when they did, how many people were involved, or whether the results were any good.
But the more important thing is what those words leave out. None of them tell you anything about the base.
A product can be natural, clean, non-toxic, gentle and dermatologist-tested, and still be ninety percent water and emulsifier. Those claims are entirely compatible with there being almost nothing in the bottle. They're describing the added part, or sometimes just the intent, and they're silent on the majority of what you're paying for.
The words that do mean something are the boring ones on the back. Ingredients have to be declared by their INCI name — International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients, the shared standard — rather than by whatever the supplier calls it or whatever sounds nicest. Water is Water, or Aqua, or Water/Aqua. Not Purified Water, not Structured Water, not Glacial Spring Water. Anything present in nano-particle form has to be declared as nano.
These aren't stylistic choices. A brand writing marketing language into the ingredient list itself has a compliance problem, and in my experience it's rarely the only one.
Where the ordering stops meaning anything
The descending-order rule stops at one percent.
Anything present at one percent or less can be listed in any order the brand likes. So partway down every ingredient list there's a point where the ranking quietly stops being information and becomes arrangement — a design decision somebody made in an afternoon.
You can usually find the line. Preservatives are almost always used well under one percent, so once you hit the preservative, everything after it is unranked. Fragrance and colour additives sit down there too.
Now put that together with everything above, because this is where it gets useful.
Actives generally live below that line. And most brands using a given active are using it at a broadly similar concentration, because the useful range is published and everyone has read the same papers. Nobody is winning on active concentration — there's a ceiling, it's known, and going past it stops being better and starts being irritating.
So when you compare two products by their actives, you are usually comparing two numbers that are close to identical, positioned in a part of the label where order tells you nothing.
Which leaves exactly one variable that actually differs between products. The other ninety-something percent.
That's the part that varies enormously. It's also the part that never appears on the front of a bottle, because water and emulsifier are difficult to build a campaign around.
The ninety-ninety-second method
Four steps, in order, on anything.
- One. Read the first five ingredients. That's the base — that's most of what you own, regardless of what the front of the bottle says.
- Two. Find the ingredient you bought it for and note where it sits. Above the preservative or below it.
- Three. Find the preservative. Everything after it is unranked, so stop drawing conclusions from position past that point.
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Four. Check whether the names are INCI or marketing. Often brands list both, because customers don't (and shouldn't need to) know what a latin INCI name stands for. Some products, like tallow, don't have a complicated INCI name.
That's the whole thing. It works on drugstore products and on four-hundred-dollar serums, and the four-hundred-dollar ones are frequently more interesting. It also works on food!
Do it to mine
I mean that literally rather than as a rhetorical gesture. A brand that teaches people to read labels and then quietly hopes they don't is running the same play as everyone else, just with better lighting and a more convincing voice.
So: in my case the base is grassfinished suet. On the labels I've just written tallow, but online we get into the details, because you and I know the details matter.
The first ingredient is the thing that does the work. Not a carrier for something else. There's no gap between the base and the active, because they're the same substance.
I'm not claiming that makes it better than everything else. Water-based formulas exist for real reasons — they feel different, they layer differently, some ingredients need water to work at all, and plenty of people prefer them. That's a legitimate trade-off and it's not the one I'm arguing about.
What I'm saying is narrower. When you read my label, the first three ingredients are the product. When you read most labels, the first five are what's carrying the product. That's a real difference, it's visible on the back of the bottle, and now you know how to see it (and you won't be able to unsee it. #sorrynotsorry).
xo Caitlin