they do have stuff to hide and i don't think they realize that they have stuff to hide and
now they've just made it really obvious to everyone who knows what to look for
good molecules is a brand with a pretty unique marketing strategy
they show all their ingredients lists they say they have nothing to hide and it even shows the
percentages of every single ingredient good molecules claims that this is a whole new
level of transparency and they hope that others in the industry will do the same
but is that really transparent hi i'm michelle of lab muffin beauty science chemistry phd and
cosmetic chemist and today we're going to do a deep dive into good molecules claims
so on the face of it this definitely looks sciencey you have lots of numbers they go
from biggest to smallest some of these products even have two decimal places which gives you
at least four units of scienceness
but i think there are some really big issues with this that might not be
immediately obvious first off you can't tell everything from an ingredients list
a standard ingredients list gives you all of the ingredients in descending order from
the heaviest to the lightest and then once you go below one percent they can be in any order
one of the big issues with this is that you don't know the exact percentage you can only really
guess at the one percent line but even if you know the exact percentages there are other issues too
first off there's the quality of the ingredient
a lot of ingredients have a range of different qualities even if they have the same name
on an ingredients list natural ingredients like oils and plant extracts will be affected
by lots of different factors like where you get them from the exact farm the country the time
of year in a lot of products there are important impurities that will be different for example in
niacinamide you can get niacin as an impurity and this will actually make your skin flush
a lot of the time when people find that their skin flushes from niacinamide it is because
of the impurities and so better brands might look for something that has less of the niacin
there are also blended materials where there's multiple things under the one ingredient name
for example cetearyl alcohol is a mix of cetyl and stearyl alcohol and you don't
know how much there is of each one they can be in different ratios the list itself can also be
inaccurate even if everyone has tried really hard to make sure it's accurate the cosmetic
chemist has to calculate the ingredients list and sometimes an ingredient supplier will
give you a percentage range for example they might say this cetearyl alcohol has 45 to 55%
cetyl alcohol so the usual practice is to just take the midpoint pretend it's 50%
and calculate it from that so the list isn't as precise as you might believe
there's also the issue of stability even if you put in a particular ingredient at
a particular percentage at the very start of the process that might not be what you
have in the product by the end ingredients like retinol are pretty unstable and so by
the time it arrives on your door the one percent might be maybe a fifth of that
some names are also used for multiple ingredients for example dimethicone is
a polymer that comes in lots of different lengths and the length tells you what the properties are
so you can get really short polymers of dimethicone and they'll be really runny and light
you can get really long polymers and they'll be a lot thicker and stickier
and the word dimethicone is used for both of these and everything in between this also happens
for cardboard which describes a whole bunch of different polymers that are used for thickening
also plant extracts a lot of extracts can be extracted with different solvents and
that changes what is actually in the extract in terms of chemicals
it's also really difficult to tell if there's some sort of special delivery
system in the product for example you can encapsulate particular ingredients
and that changes how well they work for example you can have a lower percentage of encapsulated
retinol and that can work just as well as a higher percentage of unencapsulated retinol
so this ingredient list doesn't have any transparency with that because they are
just using the standard ingredient names you would find on any other ingredient list
the other issue is that this gives you a whole bunch of really useless
info that no one really needs i think this actually makes it less transparent
because now it's a lot more confusing you have a whole bunch of distractions
and you can't just zero into the stuff you actually want to know
you do get the percentages of every active ingredient which i think is useful
even though there are differences in potency and quality and that sort of thing
i still like to know roughly what i'm expecting but now we also have
all the percentages of the inactive ingredients which is like who cares
this tells me there's 83% water but if i had a different product that had 87% water that's
not going to help me make a decision i have propanediol at two percent i would probably
still buy it if it's at five percent carbomer is at 0.06% carbomer changes the texture of
the product but you could also work this out by just putting it on your hand or
reading a review it would be way more useful to read a review and find out how tacky it is
whether it feels drying or sticky or thick or if it's difficult to apply or even just
watching a video of someone applying it on their face or in the back of their hand
as a cosmetic chemist if i wanted to copy this formula it would give me an easier starting point
but it still isn't that useful because there are so many different ingredients
that are listed under the one ingredient name so carbomer for example this has 0.06%
carbomer i don't know which one it is out of the hundreds of different
carbomers which would give me hundreds of different textures i would still have to
make it based on my best guess and then check the texture and then adjust it until i got it
to match this product so even for this reverse engineering purpose this still isn't that useful
i do like the active ingredient percentages but lots of brands already tell us this so this isn't
really bringing that much radical transparency to the table i guess i would like it if more brands
did list their active ingredient percentages with maybe some disclaimers about potency so for
example if they have a particularly potent version of an ingredient it would be nice to know the
equivalent percentage it would be for a plainer product i realize that a lot of brands don't like
to do this because it is a bit more difficult to explain but it would be nice if that information
was maybe hidden away somewhere on their website and the nerdier people could still find it
interestingly the active ingredient percentages are kind of revealing here and i think it kind of
shows that good molecules doesn't really know what they're doing in terms of this transparency claim
so first off the niacinamide brightening toner this tells us we have 0.1% 3-o-ethyl ascorbic acid
if you want brightening you generally need more than one percent 3-o-ethyl ascorbic acid which is
10 times this amount the reason you would put 0.1% into a product is to make the ingredient list look
nicer or as an antioxidant to protect the product but it won't have these skin brightening benefits
so here's a cosmetic chemist secret if you put in a really tiny amount of an ingredient you
can still say contains vitamin c and then let consumers just make assumptions but
it's considered unethical to say it contains vitamin c for brightening
because you don't have enough in there it doesn't match the percentages used in studies
but a lot of companies don't have people who understand what claims they should be able to
make based on the evidence writing their actual claims in this case their claim is formulated
with niacinamide vitamin c arbutin and licorice root extract to brighten and improve appearance
of enlarged pores but vitamin c isn't actually doing any of this brightening and improving
appearance of pores in this particular product the licorice root extract which is also part of their
brightening claim that's also at 0.1% and again i don't think that percentage is going to do much
there is a lot of natural variation with plant extracts but i've never seen one this potent they
also say they increased it from their old formula i'm not sure why they increased it to 0.1 percent
maybe it is super potent but this doesn't tell me that and it would
be more transparent if they told me they had a super potent licorice root extract
this is the announcement they made on instagram when they first started
doing these nothing to hide ingredient lists
the world has enough skincare that doesn't work that's a result of adding fairy dust
to products instead of an effective level of actives or key ingredients
the fact they said this right as they were showing the world they had these
fairy dust amounts of vitamin c and probably licorice extract kind of says to me that they
don't really know what they're doing they're sort of telling on themselves
if they were actually trying to be transparent and they knew
what they were doing they wouldn't be making claims that they can't support
or they would tell you they have very dust amounts of 3-o-ethyl ascorbic acid and plant extracts
there are other examples of this so the cleansing gel has 0.1%
pineapple extract which probably isn't enough to be exfoliating the glycolic toner has 0.1%
aloe extract which is meant to be soothing the bha clarify serum has 0.1% grapeseed oil
and pomegranate oil and those are meant to be hydrating maybe they do have super potent super
fancy plant extracts and it would be really nice and transparent if they could tell us about them
there are also some calculation errors which i think is a little bit petty of me to point out
but if they were going to show everything then maybe they should have had it right
their overnight exfoliating treatment says it has 10% alpha and beta hydroxy
acids and it lists them but if you add them together you don't get 10%
there's also another 0.1% fairy dust issue here 0.1% percent salicylic acid is not enough to
make a claim for acne and sun damage plus acne is a drug claim and this is not a drug
this one is probably super petty and i'm not sure if anyone else has discovered it
because they probably weren't just nitpicking as hard as me but the percentages on the bha
clarify serum don't add up to 100 they add up to 100.4 and there are 16 ingredients
on here at 0.4 percent or under so this seems like a pretty big error
also some products don't have their percentages listed so saying that they have nothing to hide
by showing this sort of says they have something to hide with the other products
there are so many other things they could do to be more transparent they could show us the
clinical results or maybe they could say that they don't have them because they didn't want
to pay for them because it's a lot cheaper to just print out the ingredient list for marketing
in one of their instagram posts they also say it also makes it easy to see which
ingredients we left out this includes polysorbate 20 fragrance drying alcohol
and a long list of others it would be a lot more transparent to not have clean
beauty fear-mongering maybe they could tell people that parabens and sulfates are fine
also their niacinamide serum has polysorbate 60 which is not that different from polysorbate 20
other people have also mentioned that their sponsored posts especially those
from dermatologists have hidden disclosures so
maybe that might be something to fix if they're going to be more transparent
they also have a lot of drug claims on their products so for example they say
rosehip oil will regenerate and heal skin which is a very strong claim and it also
goes beyond the evidence we have for what rosehip oil does to skin
they also say we hope this new level of transparency invites feedback when we can improve
why not hire someone maybe a cosmetic chemist to check their claims instead of waiting for
free feedback which i do realize i have just given them maybe i should be writing
them an invoice if they pay me i will let you know in the interest of transparency
i rate this marketing strategy a hot mess they do have stuff to hide and i don't think they realize
that they have stuff to hide and now they've just made it really obvious
to everyone who knows what to look for i believe this is called showing your ass
so let me know what you think and let me know what other dodgy marketing claims i should look at next
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