Did you know that the most expensive anti-aging formulas share many of the same ingredients, from the same suppliers?
Most people find this interesting. Twenty years ago a face cream was botanical extracts and vitamins, mostly. Inexpensive ingredients that all work, but not enough. In the last few years chemists, mostly in Europe, developed a series of actives that do a great deal more. The only downside is that they cost much more than extracts and vitamins. That is why the creams you've heard people swear by are $200 an ounce.
Those formulas work because the ingredients work. The second secret is that the ingredients are not exclusive. The same labs will sell to anyone who orders in quantity and meets their standards. Lubrizol in Barcelona makes Argireline. dsm-firmenich in Basel makes Pentavitin. They don't mind whose logo goes on the jar.
So what are you paying for at $200 an ounce? Mostly the things around the cream. The jar, which can cost more than what's in it. The counter and the person behind it. The perfume, which is usually there to make the base smell expensive. And the margin that a department store needs to keep the lights on. None of those touch your face.
That doesn't make the expensive creams bad. It makes them expensive. The formulas that people swear by work because the actives in them work, and the actives are available to any company willing to buy them and put them in at a useful amount.
That last part matters. An ingredient can be on a label at a trace, enough to print the name, or it can be in there at the level the maker's own studies used. You can't tell the concentration from the label, but you can tell the position. Ingredients are listed in order of quantity, so an active that sits near the bottom, after the fragrance and the preservatives, is decoration.
Here is what changed, for anyone who tuned out of skincare a decade ago. Twenty years ago a face cream was extracts and vitamins: melon, pressed berries, vitamin E. Real ingredients, real science, but they only did so much. In the last few years labs in Barcelona, Basel and Germany have developed a series of actives that do considerably more: peptides that soften the look of expression lines, complexes that support a firmer look, sugars that bind moisture to the skin's surface. They are the reason a good cream today looks and feels different from a good cream in 2005.
What we do with that is simple. We buy the same actives from the same labs, put them in at useful amounts, skip the perfume and the counter, and name every one of them on the jar and on our science page, with the lab it came from. Our Day & Night Ageless Cream has five: Argireline, Lipogard, Pentavitin, Trylagen and GluCare. Search any of them. You'll find the maker, the studies, and other brands using the same thing at three times the price.
That's the two secrets. The ingredients are the same, and the ingredients are for sale. Once you know that, a label reads very differently.
-Jackie