Good geekery / bad geekery...
...featuring Time's most influential beauty brands, some dupe behaviour that I'm not impressed by, and the brands that got a slap on the wrist for "stretching" the science in their ads...
Greetings to the new subscribers, many of whom I know Emma Gunavardhana has sent this way. I hope you won’t be disappointed. Do spin through the archives to get a flavour of the sort of thing I cover — it’s a mix of rants, deep-dives and general musings on the topic of beauty (largely).
If you’re hoping for coverage of Met Gala lewks, you’re in the wrong place I’m afraid (for that you need Cheryl Wischhover’s genius bird/outfit matchups that I saw on her Instagram stories but I am very much hoping make it into her newsletter or at least her notes over here), but what I can offer you this week is a rant about dupes, a deep-dive into some recent Advertising Standards Authority rulings, and a bit of musing on the beauty brands that Time mag has included in their list of the most influential brands of 2026. So let’s kick off with that one…
BTW: some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links which means if you buy a product through them, I can earn a small amount of commission. This will never influence my opinion on something: I only rave about products I really rate. 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 (and, for more on my thoughts on affiliate links, click here.)
Beauty’s real influencers?
I’m always interested in how media / individuals outside of the beauty space are viewing things because it can be an indication of how much traction a brand is getting outside of the beauty bubble that I live in. And, although the success, or otherwise, of products is obviously linked to a brand’s financial clout and credibility, and how it’s playing out on social media, the sort of metrics that Time Magazine use to make a call on the year’s most influential beauty companies are likely to be different from the ones I’d use. So, who do they rate…?
First up, Byoma. To me this is a total gimme. Full disclosure, I consulted with the brand pre-launch and on some projects since and, that aside, I really like them. In fact one of my chats with the founder, Marc Elrick, was the subject of an early Beauty Geekery newsletter. But yes, from a numbers perspective — over $500million in sales, selling two million units of an single SKU in one year — it makes sense for Byoma to be included. But I’m also heartened to see that Time focus in on the clinical trials that the brand does because I’m really hoping that they’ll be influential in this way. Beauty brands need to provide more proof their products can do what they say and this is one of the ways they can do that
.Next SharkNinja Beauty - I’ll be honest, this surprised me. I knew SharkNinja for being yet another vacuum brand that diversified into beauty, presumably because, like Dyson, they saw gold in them there hills. And, to date, most of their beauty tech (by which I mean their hair devices, because those are the ones I’ve tried) has not really wowed me at all. To be fair, I haven’t tried their newest, the wet to dry straighteners, and I also haven’t tried their Facial Pro Glow device which did interest me because, unlike most of what they’ve produced, it seemed to be innovative rather than just another LED mask / hair tool. There is definitely an element of me that mistrusts a brand that sells blenders and vacuums and air fryers as well as beauty gadgets, even though, arguably, Philips has done exactly that for years. Maybe the difference is that Philips make a real effort to show their proof points (I still use both the now-discontinued Visapure facial brush, and their Lumea IPL device.) If you’re a SharkNinja beauty fan, do let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Picking L’Oréal Groupe as an influential beauty brand seems a bit obvious but in this instance, Time has focused on their strategic acquisitions — basically buying into fragrance just as fragrance became the fastest-growing category in luxury, and also looking at the fact that they’ve scooped up Medik8 and Color Wow. At this level, you’re not looking at individual brands and products but about how a multinational maintains a position of supremacy as a business in a changing market, and what they buy and sell in order to do that. I have some serious thoughts about what happens to brands when they have been acquired by major conglomerates like L’Oréal Groupe and Estée Lauder Companies and whether it’s ever possible for them to retain their individuality and personality once they effectively cede their independence — but that’s for another newsletter…
Rhode again is a bit of a gimme. Hayley Bieber feels like she’s delivered a masterclass in how to do a celebrity beauty brand. The seamless and credible integration of social media, merch — that lip gloss phone case was EVERYWHERE — and product that not only found favour with its obvious target audience but also beyond, is obviously what led to its staggering $1 billion pricetag when e.l.f. beauty acquired it last year. Again, it will be really interesting to see what happens to the brand now it’s part of something a LOT bigger — and has to pay its way BIG time.
It would have been criminal not to include a Korean brand in this list. As per last week’s newsletter, Korean beauty is dominating the industry right now and APR is not only Korea’s biggest beauty brand, but one of the world’s. Not familiar with the name? Neither was I, but then I realised they’re the ones behind Medicube, one of the Korean beauty brands that has gone mainstream over here in recent years, in part thanks to their dominance on TikTok. The numbers behind it are impressive — $1 billion in annual revenue and the top-selling beauty brand on Amazon Prime Day last year. Everyone is talking about the Pore Pads and the AGE-R Booster Pro device — but not always in glowing terms. Have you tried them or any other Medicube products? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
And finally, N8iv. This was a totally new one on me. But according to Time, it’s “the first Indigenous American-owned skincare brand to bring products to the mainstream market nationally; in 2025, the company won an Allure Best of Beauty Award for its exfoliator and became the first Indigenous beauty brand featured at Coachella. This year, N8iv is launching at Nordstrom, entering over 100 Ritz-Carlton spas.” I’m really glad to see Time hero-ing a brand like this and I’m really glad it’s being showcased as it is. But it’s not an inexpensive proposition (that exfoliator is $80) so I will be interested to see how it holds up against other prestige brands at a time when wallets are being squeezed. (US readers do please let me know if you’ve tried it / have thoughts.)
Would these have been the brands I’d have picked as being beauty’s most influential for this year? From a UK perspective, Byoma and Rhode would definitely have been in there. Medicube would have been fighting it out with Beauty of Joseon for the influential Korean brand, possibly Skin Rocks for their consumer products plus diversification into pro, and I’d have been tempted to throw in a wild card, like Exist, the new brand from the people behind The Unseen Beauty (more on their founder, Lauren Bowker here) which I’m hoping to cover in a future newsletter. Who would be on your list?
“Clinically-proven”… but not
I’ve whinged repeatedly before about how the ASA are essentially a toothless organisation — they’re the UK Advertising Standards Authority and they’re the ones that investigate adverts and marketing that seems to go OTT. But the sanctions they can impose are relatively limited and largely confined to banning adverts and reputational damage. While in theory repeat offenders can be investigated by Trading Standards or the Competition and Markets Authority, who can impose fines and prosecute, in reality this rarely happens and so brands largely get away with making outrageous claims and just getting a slap on the wrist when they get called out.
However, in recent weeks two big brands have had rulings against them for “clinically proven” claims and I think it’s worth having a look at them because these aren’t two-bit companies, they’re L’Oréal and Beiersdorf, huge multinationals that have big legal and regulatory departments so to me it’s FASCINATING that these adverts got through in the first place, especially when you read the full ASA judgements.
At the end of April, the ASA upheld a complaint against an on-demand video for Garnier’s Vitamin Cg Serum that claimed that it was “clinically proven to reduce hyperpigmentation in 2 weeks”, a claim based on a clinical study of 44 subjects over 10 weeks.
Annoyingly the full details of the clinical trial they reference have been kept confidential because Garnier say it’s “commercially sensitive” but ultimately the ASA didn’t believe that the trial justified the claim. You can read the full ruling yourself (if you’re so minded) but the main reasons relating to the trial that the ASA gave for ruling against Garnier were…
small sample size and no evidence about whether the sample size was big enough to be clinically robust;
no information about how participants had been randomly assigned to treatment or control group;
the trial was carried out in a country with a hotter, sunnier climate than the UK;
although the trial included Fitzpatrick skin types I to VI, the distribution of these skin types in participants in the trial was different from the distribution of skin types you might expect to see in the UK;
trial participants were told to avoid sun or artificial UV exposure and use SPF, while the model in the ad was seen outside in bright conditions;
although the results showed some statistically significant differences in the treatment group after two weeks, the reported percentage changes were small, and were only seen amongst a minority of subjects.
It was this last point that REALLY staggered me. What were they thinking? (Apparently 82% of participants in the clinical study agreed that their dark spots looked less visible after 2 weeks but nobody at Garnier is dumb enough to think that this sort of consumer perception study justifies a “clinically proven” claim.)
Then just last week, the ASA upheld a complaint against this Eucerin ad for their Hyaluron Filler serum that appeared at Balham tube station.
It claimed “Look up to 5 years younger.” and referenced a study that involved 160 participants who used the product for four weeks. But also included the words “Clinically proven” next to the product. The ASA said, not unreasonably I think, that viewers would think that the product was clinically proven to make you look up to five years younger.
You can read it all here, but the reality was that the “up to 5 years younger” claim was based on 160 people using the product and being asked after four weeks if they thought they looked younger and if so, by how many years. I mean COME ON. That’s not a clinical study, that’s a consumer perception study
Beiersdorf also gave the ASA a number of other unpublished studies in support, one which the ASA dismissed as not being relevant because it didn’t look at quantifying the anti-ageing effect, another that was basically a consumer perception study that asked people whether they agreed that they looked up to five years younger, and one which did objectively assess skin age, but only showed a reduction of one year in biological skin age after 4 weeks (even though the participants in that same study reported an average reduction of five years.) They also submitted a peer-reviewed published study of the active ingredient which the ASA dismissed because it wasn’t based on the serum itself and didn’t look at daily use and the impact it had on improving the youthfulness of the skin.
My suspicion — and I can’t know this for certain — is that Beiersdorf knew that they didn’t really have data that proved that this serum was clinically proven to make you look up to five years younger. However they knew that they had a published clinical trial to show that Epicelline — one of the active ingredients in the serum — had anti-ageing properties (I’m fairly sure that this is the active ingredient study the ASA is referencing) and they gambled on putting the words “Clinically proven” far enough away from the “Up to five years younger” claim that they had some sort of plausible deniability. Interestingly, the original complaint about the product didn’t reference the “Clinically proven” claim, just the “Up to five years younger one” and the ASA adjudication suggests that even without that “Clinically proven” tag, the complaint would have been upheld.
There is SO much to talk about here, not least about the fact that the number of complaints about each ad was, er, one. Yep, a solitary, single complaint. And — again, I have no way of proving this, but I KNOW that this happens — I suspect that the complainant in each case may well have been a brand competitor. In fact last year an ASA complaint against another L’Oréal brand, La Roche-Posay, which was in-part upheld, was openly made by Beiersdorf.
I’m not saying we should disregard complaints if there’s only one, or if they’re made by competitors, I think it’s important that these things are flagged and held to account, so we don’t get that Overton window effect, where eventually it’s fine for a brand to claim with no evidence at all that a cream will make a 50 year old look 15. But I do think where complaints come from and the number of them is very indicative of how much the general public entirely disbelieves / ignores / doesn’t care about how they are marketed to.
However I am pretty pleased to see that these adjudications seem to show that the ASA doesn’t consider consumer perception studies good grounds for claims, and send the message that if you want to make a claim, you need to make sure that you’ve designed a clinical trial that can substantiate it. (I spend a LOT of my time as a consultant trying to get companies to work out what they ideally want to claim and how to design a trial that will substantiate that claim rather than doing a trial and realising they don’t have the data to support what they want to claim *eye roll*)
Let’s be clear, I don’t think any of this means these aren’t good serums. But I do think that it’s yet another example of the marketing department either extrapolating the science, or not understanding what the science shows. What baffles me is how the legal and regulatory departments didn’t intervene before it got to this point. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Duping as a dud marketing strategy
Can we talk about dupes? Of course I’ve talked about dupes before, in the context of MCo Beauty, for The Sun — and on my LinkedIn — and I’ve got a Lidl round the corner from my house so I often stop to look at their homages / rip-offs of Lush / Jo Malone London / L’Occitane and more. But this one landed in my inbox from a brand I’ve not really paid much attention to before.
Harry’s is a men’s shaving brand and as I rarely cover men’s grooming, I generally tend to glance through and delete, but this release, with the subject “LAUNCHING TODAY - Harry’s REDACTED. No Name. No Number. No Markup.” was about a body wash, specifically “Harry’s drops a body wash that smells like THAT scent - for a fraction of the price.” Now I don’t need to smell the “seriously familiar woody santal scent” to know that that Harry’s Redacted Body Wash (£8 for 458ml) is a rip off of Le Labo’s Santal 33 Shower gel (£48 for 237ml) — I mean just look at the packaging for a start…
Now what I don’t get is WHY? Arguably you could say job done, they’ve got my attention (and subsequently yours) by doing this. But is any attention good attention? Apparently the rationale behind this product is that it “leans into something consumers already say about Harry’s online: ‘the scents smell like they should cost ten times as much.’” In which case publicise that, but don’t do it by really obviously duping another brand.
Am I being too holier-than-thou about this? Is this brilliant, savvy marketing that will bring in customers who didn’t know the brand before? (Interestingly as I was writing this newsletter, the Business of Beauty published a feature on beauty brands faking scandals for attention and the associated risks of this strategy, which feels along the same lines.) Personally I think there are FAR cleverer ways to do this sort of thing. This is where good PR comes into its own. They could have made the same product in its usual packaging and the PR could have met up with a load of their contacts and said something along the lines of “OBVIOUSLY we can’t say this, but if you smell this next to Santal 33, I genuinely think you can’t tell the difference.”
Because they’re not the first brand to — deliberately or otherwise — create a smell-a-like of Santal 33. M&S’s Apothecary Warmth (£12) scent is not a million miles off although it doesn’t have anything like the complexity and doesn’t linger — but also, M&S kept it classy and didn’t go all out boasting about how they’d ripped off Le Labo. There are other products out there that have similar notes. I’m so obsessed with the Beauty Pie Le Smash Santal body cream (£35) that I actually can’t stop sniffing myself when I slather it on, while other people I rate rave about Saltaire’s Santal Bloom range (from £15).
My view on dupes broadly is quite simple. Fundamentally I’ve always believed that consumers, whatever their budget, should have access to good, effective products. And if, as a brand, you stand by the quality of your products, you shouldn’t have to rely on another brand’s reputation, formulation, or packaging to sell them. Pia Long, a perfumer and author of Demo Accords, a book on fragrance (and so much more) has expressed a similar view. The debut issue of On The Scent magazine, a new fragrance-focused quarterly publication, features an abridged extract of her chapter on dupes and is well worth a read. I’m not going to reproduce it all here but her argument is, like mine, not that fragrance shouldn’t be democratised but that the way to democratise it isn’t through dupes.
“Dupe companies aren’t owned by poor, working-class people who are heroically Robin Hood-ing their way through perfumery’s elitism problems. They don’t take from the rich corporate brands and donate these formulas to struggling independent perfumer-wannabes; they don’t give consumers free perfume or operate as a non-profit. They’re stealing from everyone (not just from the rich and elitist), and making money from stolen labour.”
Instead she says that there are a LOAD of really good perfumes that AREN’T dupes and aren’t expensive — she mentions one of her favourites in the On The Scent feature and, rather brilliantly, she’s agreed to let me quiz her about other brilliant and not expensive fragrances so expect to see that in a forthcoming newsletter.
In short: dupes — not big, not clever, even in a pseudo-ironic fashion. There are better ways of drawing attention to yourself and selling your products.
That’s all for this week. I would love to hear your thoughts on any of the above — as well as ideas for anything you might like to see in future newsletters. Until next time…
I found you via Emma G and I’m so pleased I did. I’m 50+ and have become more interested in skin care as I age and as I now have more time and disposable income.
Of course it’s easy to be influenced by new product launches on Insta but I’m genuinely interested in the science and therefore the effectiveness of what I’m buying.
Your Substack seems to be exactly the right place to get knowledgeable, current information so thank you!
Ahahah thank you for mentioning my bird photos: sadly those have disappeared into the Instagram story ether where they probably belong! LOVED this dive into standards and marketing claims