Skincare geekery...

... a quick spin around Drunk Elephant's new serious, grown-up, definitely not for kids rebranding, plus a deep, deep dive into the controversial new No7 range that's been setting my DMs on fire...

This week’s is a long one, grab a cuppa…

Drunk Elephant goes to rehab

Last week I said I wanted to have a bit of a dig into whether Drunk Elephant could rehab its reputation and lord knows they’re trying. First up if you don’t know what’s been going on with Drunk Elephant, let’s start at the very beginning. Drunk Elephant is the brainchild of Tiffany Masterson, a Texas housewife, it launched in the US in 2013, in the UK in 2018, and was acquired by Shiseido in 2019. Her founder story was a classic “I couldn’t find anything blah blah blah so I made it myself.” To which my response these days is frequently “look a bit harder.”

(Honestly, there is an entire newsletter to be written about founder stories. In exactly the same way that literary theory has it that there are only a limited number of story archetypes, I’d argue that there is a similarly limited number of founder story archetypes, but that’s for another day.)

When Drunk Elephant launched, it was very much positioned as a “clean” brand. Now I’m not sure if I’ve ranted about “clean” on this platform before but if I had to briefly sum up my beef with it as a concept:

1) it means nothing — literally. There’s no legal definition of “clean beauty” although it often involves demonising a load of ingredients that have been shown to be safe to use in skincare. And there is also no consensus among the brands about what those demonised ingredients should be.

2) it suggests that anything that’s not branded as clean must, by default, be dirty or toxic, which is just BS because as established previously, there are actual laws based on actual science, created with toxicologists who have done the work (not just decided that if you can’t pronounce something, or might find it in another form in a non-skincare product, it must be dangerous) to ensure that beauty products aren’t toxic.

3) oh do I really have to explain further? It’s just pseudoscience and scaremongering and all the bollocks that seems to get traction because screaming “THIS FACE CREAM IS GOING TO GIVE YOU CANCER AND YOU’RE GOING TO DIE” gets way more attention than calmly saying “You’re going to die at some point, we all do. But the likelihood that your face cream is going to cause your death (via cancer or any other route) is, on the balance of things, based on biology, chemistry and probability, vanishingly small.”

Anyway, yeah, when Drunk Elephant launched, they weren’t screaming about death and cancer, at least not overtly, but what they were doing was talking about “The suspicious six—silicones, essential oils, chemical screens, SLS, drying alcohols, and fragrances or dyes.” I can’t actually be bothered to go into why, individually each of these is not really that suspicious at all for most people (although if you want me to I will, just let me know in the comments). Interestingly, a few years later, when the clean backlash had started in earnest, Tiffany Masterson had toned down the language she was using around these ingredients. In this 2022 interview with Get The Gloss, she says “I knew there were six ingredients that I wasn’t going to include. That’s not that because they’re dangerous – I’m not scaremongering by not including them…” I mean calling ingredients the “suspicious six”≠ scaremongering? Whatever.

She also had what she called a “Skin is skin philosophy”, rejecting the idea of skin types (oily, sensitive, dry) and instead calling them “skin ‘behaviours’ because they are something we can fix very easily by eliminating bad ingredients from our routines.” There are quite a lot of dermatologists and a fair amount of scientific evidence that would suggest otherwise on that but let’s just let that one go for now…

So that was the start. And then there was the Sephora Kids issue. If you’re not familiar with it, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph about it last year. Ugh. I mean it wasn’t exactly Drunk Elephant’s fault that they’d made brightly-coloured, supremely Instagramable packaging that appeared in a gazillion social media posts that were watched by teens, who then went out to buy products that were entirely unsuitable for their skin and in all likelihood would actually damage it. But it’s not like they really tried to stop it.

In a now-deleted Instagram post (they’ve deleted a LOT of Instagram posts, but more on that later) in December 2023, Masterson assured customers that most of the products were “designed for all skin, including kids and tweens”, responding to the question, “Can kids & tweens use Drunk Elephant?” She said “Yes!” adding that they should “stay away from our more potent products that include acids and retinols—their skin does not need these ingredients quite yet.” In emails to Glamour for a piece published in January 2024, she clarified her position and said that although the brand had gained its “highest number of followers ever this year across all social platforms,” leading to a “growth in awareness and our sales” she was adamant that they weren’t purposefully marketing products to children.

For what it’s worth, I believe they weren’t purposefully marketing products to children, but their attempts to actually put a stop to kids using their products were seriously half-hearted. I’d like to believe that a massive company sees thousands (millions?) of dollars of sales and decides that they don’t want the cash, but it kind of felt they were doing a v-e-r-y slow-motion run to slam the tills shut before those pesky kids and their parents could throw any more money into them.

Flash forward two years and the brand are really trying to distance themselves from kids. And with good reason, Cosmetics Business reported DE had experienced “multiple consecutive quarters of declining sales” which is kind of not surprising. The kids wanted it, the kids got it, the kids got told it wasn’t for them, but the grown-ups decided that if the kids wanted it then they didn’t… Maybe… Anyway, in January this year, they wiped clean (LOL) their Instagram, and relaunched with their “Please Enjoy Responsibly” campaign, claiming “The next era of Drunk Elephant is here: refined, elevated, and strictly intentional. We believe skincare works best when every ingredient has a purpose and every step has a plan. No fillers, no distractions.”

I mean, you kind of had me up until the “no fillers” bit. Fillers has become one of those words that “clean” brands like to use. As far as I’m concerned it’s another way to scaremonger or throw shade. Brands that talk about “no fillers” are suggesting that other brands use “filler” ingredients — ingredients that don’t have an active role to play in a product formulation — to bulk it out. But, this is bollocks. Products are more than just active ingredients. An active ingredient on its own is like a chocolate cake made only from chocolate. It’s not a cake. An ingredient needs a delivery system to get it to where it needs to be, a preservative system that keeps it safe to use, ingredients that make it feel nice to use and make the consumer want to keep using it. So calling any ingredients “filler ingredients” is just the same “we’re better than they are” BS repackaged.

And I’m kind of fine with that, it’s what I expect from a clean brand. But the rebrand doesn’t stop there. A few weeks ago, my Instagram feed was packed with journalists, influencers, dermatologists, aesthetic doctors talking about the Drunk Elephant event that they’d gone to, it was all about “the new era” and “reminding everyone of its serious skincare roots.” Er, sorry what? A brand that starts out by demonising ingredients by definition doesn’t have serious skincare roots.

If you read my newsletter from a few weeks ago about demonised ingredients, you’ll know how strongly I feel about this sort of thing. In that newsletter I said:

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.

And to a certain extent I feel that the opposite should be true too. If you’re going down the clean, anti-science, woo-woo line, go down the clean, anti-science, woo-woo line. But don’t pretend you can be clean and scientific and serious about skincare. Because you can’t. It’s like being wet and dry at the same time. They’re two polar ends of the same spectrum. I’m fascinated to see how this works out for Drunk Elephant and who they’re really targeting as a consumer — not just from an age point of view, from a psychological point of view. Because while I think clean and serious skincare are a total contradiction, maybe they’re actually bang on. Maybe there are clean fans out there who do think clean is about science and serious skincare. Maybe this is what they want. Watch this space.

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The new No7 — what’s the deal?

I wasn’t going to write about the new launch from No7 for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s for women in their 30s and as so much beauty journalism these days is based on “I tried this and I thought it was…”, there was no way I was going to be asked to try out a product range designed for a woman 10 years younger than me. But more importantly, I did some consultancy work with the brand on this project.

I’ve worked as a consultant for brands for years and I always try to make sure I’m really clear with them about the line that I draw between consulting and journalism. I think it’s really important that there is a line. When I started out as a consultant, before the social media explosion that changed everything, the idea that a journalist would be paid to write about a brand was absolutely anathema. It was the sort of thing that would get you blacklisted by a publication or an editor. Of course now all that has changed. But I personally still hold the line. If I’m writing or talking about a brand on my own platforms, I’ll say that I’ve worked with them. And I don’t pitch stories on projects that I’ve consulted on. It just doesn’t feel ethical. Even if it’s not the case, it could look like I’d been paid to place a story. I care about the truth, but I also care about the optics.

Early samples of Prime Forever - you can tell they’re early as the packaging wasn’t finished and the labelling kept coming off.

So yeah, Prime Forever was not something I planned to cover. But when the range launched last Wednesday my DMs, my WhatsApps, my inbox were on fire with people asking me what I thought about it. So here’s my take on it…

Prime Forever is an interesting proposition. From a marketing point of view it’s targeting a demographic that’s beyond spots and starting to think about lines, but not quite reached anti-ageing. But it also makes sense for No7 to capitalise on the brand new ingredients they spent years — and a load of cash — developing. I’m talking about the peptides that form the basis of Future Renew, the range that the brand launched in April 2023. I wrote about it at the time and it was the first time in a long time that I’d been really excited about the science behind a range.

As you’ll know if you read my Honest Geekery newsletter,

I care less about whether something worked for me than about whether objectively you can show that it’s worked for 50 people who aren’t me. What I think becomes irrelevant if you’ve tried something on 50, 100, 200, 300 different women and have good clinical data showing that it’s effective

But not only did No7 have good clinical data, the Future Renew serum was also one of those products that people messaged me about saying. “I bought it because you rated it, but then I bought it again because it really worked.”

The same peptides that are in Future Renew are also in Prime Forever and in the same concentration that they showed worked in Future Renew. Those peptides are great at prompting the skin to produce more elastin and collagen. In Future Renew the patent-pending peptide combo was dubbed Pepticology. My eyes rolled so far back in my head when I heard that. It felt like the marketing department was trying to “science up” what was actually already really good science.

It reminded of that Maureen Lipman BT ad…

(Yeah, I know I’m showing my age 1988 FFS, but it’s a good ‘un.)

They’ve not dropped the ‘ologies for this new range either. Glaciology is the name they’ve given to the trademarked combination of antioxidants (vitamin C, vitamin E, plus extracts of camellia and myrtle leaf, and another one called Lipochroman) and peptides (the original ones from Future Renew plus another rice peptide) in the new range and honestly, I hate it. And I’m not the only one. While I was writing this newsletter, BritishBeautyBlogger posted this note…

So yes, let’s get into it…

Let’s be clear, you can’t stop the ageing process. But, when it comes to skin, there are two different aspects to the ageing process. There’s extrinsic ageing — the stuff that is down to outside forces, such as the weather (not just UV, but cold, wind etc, but yeah, mostly UV), pollution and stress. Then there’s intrinsic ageing, the fact that whatever is going on on the outside, the cells in your body get older, and the processes get slower and less efficient. While there’s quite a lot you can do about extrinsic ageing, there’s not a lot you can do about intrinsic ageing. But, given that an estimated 80% of what we think of as skin ageing has been put down to UV, if you can affect that, you can affect quite a lot. I mean take a look at the difference between the skin on your face and the skin on your bum (assuming you don’t regularly sunbathe in a thong).

Now, the biggest problem with all this is that in order to show that a product is reducing the speed at which you age from your 30s, you kind of have to have people use it for a decent chunk of time and then show that the people who have used it have aged slower than the ones that didn’t. But brands can’t really afford to hang around for five years — or the 20 years they’re quoting in their promotional blurb — to prove that their science works and so for this range, they’ve leaned really heavily on extrapolating what seems to me to be good science. (It doesn’t automatically follow that their extrapolations are correct, but I broadly believe the science that they’re basing them on seems to be.)

When it comes to “actives” in the range, there are four main elements: the original Future Renew peptides, the new rice peptide, the antioxidants and the 5* SPF and it’s true that, there is decent evidence to show that all of them can help stave off the ageing process in various different ways.

The Future Renew peptides have been shown to boost levels of collagen and elastin which do diminish with age. Then there’s this new rice peptide that apparently helps inhibit the activity of an enzyme in the body, collagenase, that breaks down collagen. So yes, in theory both sets of peptides could be said to be theoretically slowing the rate of ageing, if you accept that ageing=less collagen and less elastin, so keeping levels of these proteins high=slower ageing.

Next up are the antioxidants. A quick recap on oxidative stress — those free radicals that you hear a lot about that antioxidants neutralise. Free radicals are basically unstable compounds that are generated by pollution, UV and also internally by the body through processes such as exercise. Unstable compounds have an innate desire to stabilise themselves and the way they normally do this is by nicking bits of other cells in the body (this is not the way a chemist or biologist would describe it but that’s the gist of it) and we think that this accelerates the ageing process. However if you introduce them to antioxidants, they nick bits of antioxidant instead.

And so the theory is that increasing the levels of antioxidants can reduce the level of oxidative stress and if you reduce the level of oxidative stress, you age slower. No7 have done the experiments to see if the antioxidant blend in their new serum does what it’s meant to do and their in vivo tests (which mean done on real people not just in a lab in a Petri dish or test tube) show that within 30 minutes of applying the serum, and longer-term, after 28 days, the skin has more antioxidant capacity than it did before. They’ve also been able to show that those antioxidants are doing what you’d want them to and measured levels of oxidative stress that are seven times lower than on skin that hadn’t applied the serum. So this is another of the ways in which they’re claiming that they can slow down skin ageing activity.

Finally there’s the 5* SPF 50 primer that forms part of the range. 5* means you’re getting a 1:1 ratio of UVA:SPF protection and is about as good as it gets in terms of UV protection and this is at the heart of what they’re claiming with that AI pic that seems to be bothering everyone (and I can totally understand why.)

As Jane (BBB) pointed out, “she looks fine in all of those pictures and if you asked me about the middle one, I would not be able to say that she has 70% less ageing signs than the last picture” which is what they are claiming.

To get that stat, No7 worked with a photobiologist (I know who and they’re really well respected but I don’t think that info is in the public domain and so I don’t think I can share it) who looked at the product and made a calculation based on applying 1mg/cm² (interestingly not the prescribed 2mg/cm² but something more realistic which I think is very interesting) on someone who works inside, and taking into account how it will wear during the day, and assuming no reapplication. According to Mike Bell, their head of science research, “This gets to about a reduction of 88% in UV radiation.” They then used that stat I quoted above that at least 80% of facial ageing is caused by sun exposure. “This means for 20 years of unprotected exposure, 16 of those [ageing years] will be caused by the sun. For 20 years of protection with Prime Forever, this would equate to 20 – (88% X 16) = approx. 6 years”

The images were put together with a company called HautAI who have a database of more than 3 million facial images and can use this information to simulate facial ageing.

Look, I get it. I get it from their point of view: “In a world of image-led communication where people are obsessed with before and afters, how do you showcase a product whose main aim is to make things look the same?” But I also get it from the consumer point of view. “We’re bombarded with AI images and filters, all we want is to see a real face.”

One of the DMs I was sent complained that “they only reference consumer trials so if there are clinical trials, it would be great to see the data from those.” For what it’s worth, I know they were doing (relatively) long-term clinicals (but not 20 year clinicals) so I’m hoping — for their sake — they will have some results they can talk about soon.

Bottom line, should you buy it? People I have spoken to (who are in their 30s) who have been testing it for a while rate it. And, on paper, a bunch of antioxidants, those Future Renew peptides, and a 5* SPF50 primer are A Good Thing (and probably won’t interfere with your tretinoin or whatever else you’re using.) I don’t think you need the whole range but, if you are going to dabble, I’d look at the serum and the SPF50 primer

Phew…. that was a looooooong one. Let me know if you have any more questions on any of this. Next week, a response from that PR mailer I called out in my Unearthed beauty geekery newsletter, and a response from Bioderma about Yuka, which I talked about in my Demonised ingredients geekery newsletter.

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.