Demonised ingredients geekery...
...or why we shouldn't allow non-scientists to tell scientists how to make beauty products. Plus the return of an icon, and the results of the affiliates "debate" (such as it was) poll ...
A few weeks ago, I saw James Welsh flagging what I consider to be a massive issue with Bioderma…
Like James, I was previously a big fan of Bioderma. It’s a French brand that I’ve recommended in the past — it was one of the first micellar waters I used, they had some great sun protection and I even washed my kids in their oil wash. But no more. Because in this video, James points out that Bioderma have started quoting their Yuka score on their website.
For those of you whose lives are — as yet — unbesmirched by Yuka, let me explain. Launched in France in 2017, Yuka claims to be a “100% independent app that scans food and cosmetic products in order to know their impact on your health.” The idea is that you scan a product and based on the ingredients — each of which “is assigned a risk level according to its potential effects on health or the environment” — you get the Yuka score out of 100 for it, and a traffic-light coded assessment: Bad (red) less than 20; 20-50, Poor (orange), 50-75 Good (green) and 75+ Excellent (dark green).
Their cosmetics ingredient database contains almost 13,000 ingredients and this page explains the scoring system in detail.
Rani Ghosh is a toxicologist. It’s literally her job to assess whether a beauty product is safe and the way that that is done is far more complicated than looking at a single ingredient in isolation. I really liked her Instagram post on the topic that really spelled it out…
But Yuka — and other apps like the Think Dirty app have serious sway. Yuka say they refuse to partner with brands and so make most of their money — more than $7million in 2024 — from paid subscriptions, which means a significant proportion of their estimated 70 million users (who include Robert F Kennedy Jr, President Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, and the brains behind the “Make America Healthy Again” movement) are not only using the app, but paying to use it.
And the app is changing the way that shoppers behave. According to this Washington Post piece, Yuka says survey data suggests 94 percent of its users put products back on the shelf after the app shows them low scores. As a result, it’s changing the way that products are formulated. In France, where apparently 1 in 3 people have downloaded the app since launch, Intermarché, one of the big supermarket chains, has reformulated more than 2,300 private-label products to improve their scores in food.
And now this seems to be happening in the world of beauty too. I don’t know enough about the food side of the app to make a judgement call on whether helping people buy products that are less processed and lower in sugar is as good as it seems (although instinctively it seems too simplistic), but I know for sure that when it comes to beauty, judging a product based on a single ingredient is a recipe for disaster.
Iris Smit, founder of Australian brands Quick Flick and Quick Faced commented on James’ post saying “As a brand founder, we’ve been going back and forth with Yuka for years. We even offered to disclose our ingredient percentages to demonstrate that everything is used within safe, toxicologist-recommended levels. They refused, and openly acknowledged that their rating system doesn’t take ingredient percentages into account at all. The lack of willingness to engage with the science or have a genuine discussion is honestly pretty unbelievable.”
So far, so crappy pseudoscience. But for me what’s really problematic, for a number of reasons, is beauty brands rolling over and effectively endorsing crappy pseudoscience. As anyone who knows me knows, science is my religion. And whether “clean” (such a problematic word) brands like to admit it or not, beauty products are science. Products are formulated by cosmetic scientists, they are tested using scientific methodology to ensure that they won’t harm users, or deteriorate, if they work, it’s because scientists have evaluated the concentration of the ingredient that has a biological impact on the skin. I don’t know how many more ways I can demonstrate that science is fundamental to the beauty industry and the products that we use.
That’s why I get so infuriated when companies and individuals either undermine the science of beauty products, or betray it. The reason I liked and trusted Bioderma is because of the science behind it. But when a brand who has historically used science to sell its products shows that it’s bending to bullshit pseudoscience, I’m out. I kind of feel like you live by the science and you die by the science. You can’t just pick up “science” and use it as a marketing tool when it suits you and then drop it when it doesn’t.
It’s one of the reasons that I stopped talking about The Inkey List. Back in 2020, they suddenly started suggesting that we should be wary about parabens (more on parabens below) and as I wrote in an email to the PR at the time, “I feel really let down that a brand that says it’s about science and education would continue to perpetrate the idea that one needs to be cautious about parabens. As far as I’m concerned they’ve totally shot themselves in the foot with this one. What were they thinking?” They back-pedalled, but for me the damage was done. This was a brand that I’d championed, in part because they were science-backed and then suddenly they weren’t.
In 2021, after another social media-based kerfuffle (kerfuffle seems the right word, it wasn’t anywhere as significant as a scandal) involving the same company, I talked a bit about this in what was then called an IGTV. It’s a long video but I’ve linked it below because I think the comments on it are really interesting. In the video I talk about the fact that we as consumers (and also as journalists) have emotional relationships with brands and why we feel so betrayed when what we thought were shared values turn out not to be.
Or, perhaps more accurately, appear to be values that can be dropped if it’s going to sell more product. I have no idea if The Inkey List’s apparent change of tack back in 2020 was in any way related to the fact that Sephora went big on the whole clean beauty thing and being in Sephora, one of the world’s biggest beauty retailers, is something any young beauty brand would aspire to.
Look, I’m not naive. I know that the beauty industry is essentially a capitalist endeavour. Brands, whatever their back story (and I have a lot to say on origin stories but that’s for another time) exist to sell product and make money. I can only assume that Bioderma felt they’d sell more product by embracing Yuka than by sticking to the science, because pseudoscience and fearmongering sells.
And me saying I won’t cover a brand because I feel they’ve sold out probably makes very little difference to their bottom line but I think it’s important to call out this bullshit, and to talk about what’s really driving it. Because, as I commented on James’ post, “when the tail wags the dog, we’re fucked.”
Let me explain a bit what I meant by that. Consumers are largely not experts. Consumers are largely not cosmetic chemists or toxicologists. I’m not saying consumers should sit down, shut up and blindly believe in “Big Beauty”. I think consumers should have the right to make informed decisions. But what worries me is that — thanks to pseudoscience, misinformation, social media, and a whole load of other things — consumers aren’t making informed decisions, they’re making scared decisions that are forcing brands to make poor decisions.
Take parabens.
First a quick explainer from brand founder, Sam Farmer:
“Paraben esters are found in plants and fruits such as blueberries, they are part of our natural world. We have been using them in cosmetics for nearly one hundred years without an issue and they are an incredibly effective and safe preservative, preventing the spoiling of products. We have been giving liquid paracetamol products to our infant children for decades, most of which are preserved with paraben esters. If it's scientifically proven that paraben esters are safe for infant ingestion then where is the evidence it is not safe for topical application?”
And yet parabens became demonised after a much-criticised 2004 study suggested a relationship between them and breast cancer. Despite the fact that the vast weight of evidence suggested that the parabens used to preserve beauty products are entirely safe when used in the quantities found in beauty products, this insidious lie took hold and, aided and abetted by high profile proponents — hi there, Gwyneth Paltrow — social media, chemophobia, the fact that fear sells, and a growing mistrust of authority, and brands suddenly began dropping parabens like an embarrassing uncle that’s brought shame on the family.
And yet products still needed a preservative system. So what happened? What happened was either that inferior preservative systems were adopted, that protect products for a shorter period of time, and against fewer microbes, and/or preservative systems, such as methylisothiazolinone (MI) that cause contact allergies were introduced.
Basically in the rush to get away from using perfectly harmless parabens, brands started using an ingredient that had the potential to cause dermatitis. The result? Dermatologists saw a huge increase in incidents of MI-related dermatitis — in the UK and beyond — which led to changes in EU regulations, banning its use as a preservative in leave-on products and restricting the concentration that could be used in rinse off products. (If you’re interested in a deeper dive into this, Janna Mandell’s Washington Post feature from 2022 is a great read on the topic.)
And THAT’S why I say if brands allow fear and pseudoscience to dictate formulation we’re fucked. As I say, I get it. In 2017, I was at the launch of a huge brand’s new “botanicals” haircare range. Needless to say it was “paraben-free” and when I asked the chief scientist why they weren’t using parabens when they knew they were safe, they told me “that battle is lost.” But it was lost because the very companies that make money from science refused to stand up for it.
I could — and will — bang this drum for a really long time, but I’ll stop there for now. Please let me know in the comments if you have any comments or questions and I’ll do my best to answer them (or find someone who can.)
Should you put this hand cream on your face?
I didn’t expect to be writing about body products again quite so soon but this week Deciem announced that they were bringing back one of the very first brands that the company launched, way back in 2013: The Chemistry Brand (which was shut down in 2022), and specifically the hand cream, Hand Chemistry.
Back then the late founder Brandon Truaxe had left Indeed Labs and was bound by a non-compete that prevented him from making any facial skincare products for three years. As a result, the first brands that Deciem launched were Inhibitif, a hair reduction serum; Fountain, an ahead-of-its-time supplements brand; Grow Gorgeous haircare — and The Chemistry Brand, which was all about hand and body products.
Hand Chemistry, the brand’s hand cream, launched into Boots in November 2013 and within two weeks was outselling every hand and body product in the store. And it wasn’t surprising. Boasting a “19.5% active complex” that included a bunch of ingredients that back then were rarely found in face creams, let alone hand creams — think copper peptides (known to boost collagen and elastin), pseudoalteromonas ferment extract (a fermented bacteria that is meant to have collagen-boosting properties as well as an ability to help protect the skin from dryness and redness), and plantago lanceolata (a plant extract that has antioxidant, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties). The brand promised the cream could target firmness, elasticity, density, evenness, brightness, texture, smoothness and hydration, giving visible results in just ten days.
Those who knew about the non-compete, such as Kirsty Lewis (then heading up PR in the UK at Deciem, now head of PR at Huda Beauty) and BritishBeautyBlogger started using it on their faces with — unsurprisingly, given the punchy ingredients — impressive results (Jane wrote about it here.)
The reason I have a fondness for it is because it was a very good hand cream, yes, but also because it formed part of another of my favourite stories — where I compared a number of face creams to the hand creams in the same ranges…
This might be the only one of my features that’s ever been discussed on the Today programme (for non-UK readers that’s the serious news and politics show that’s on Radio 4, a very serious radio station). It also apparently led to a 182% spike in day-on-day sales of Hand Chemistry.
According to Business of Fashion who broke the story, the relaunch of Hand Chemistry is just the start…“Further additions to the line are planned for the year, both relaunched formulas from its original 10 year-run as well as net new products.”
In many ways, it’s a total no-brainer for them to be bringing back this range. I wrote last week about how body care with actives is proving to be a really strong category within beauty and even though (assuming the formula has stayed the same) Hand Chemistry is more than ten years old and you might have expected formulations to have moved on since then, it was so forward-thinking at the time, that I still think it can compete against many of the body products out there today.
Will I be putting it on my face? Probably not now that I use prescription tretinoin and azelaic acid, but I wouldn’t blame you if you did. (And if you do, please let me know.) (No link — affiliate or otherwise — as it doesn’t go on sale for another week or so.)
The results are in…
In last week’s newsletter I talked A LOT about affiliate links — thanks to those of you that voted in my poll and left such thoughtful comments / DMed me on the topic. The results are below, so the affiliate links stay for now. But as I always say in my little post at the bottom, nothing is set in stone and I am very much open to alternative views.
That’s all for this week, until next time…
Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.
This is brilliant. So glad I found you Claire 😊
Brandon was really ahead of his time 🙏