Skincare Products–Who is the Fairest of them All?

Skin Care Products—Who is the Fairest of them All??

Are skincare companies treating you fairly?  Or are you being ripped off?

In  recent weeks there have been a number of articles and ads comparing the effectiveness of a skincare products in relationship to their cost.  While these reports raise some interesting questions, they generally don’t provide any meaningful answers.   Consumer Reports concluded that just because a product is expensive doesn’t mean that it’s effective, and just because it’s inexpensive doesn’t mean that it’s worthless.  I agree—to a point.

How do you know? That’s a complex issue.  I want you to make informed decisions, so let’s face the facts and see what factors influence the cost of skincare products.

• The nature of active skincare ingredients. Some ingredients (peptides, entrapped or encapsulated active ingredients and rare extracts) are very expensive.  That’s because frequently these ingredients are patented, and sometimes are very difficult to manufacture.

Some of the least expensive ingredients are water, alcohol and glycerin – they’re basic, generic ingredients that are mass-produced.  They may be nice additions, but they won’t affect a change in your skin.

Other inexpensive skincare products contain heavy fillers which can clog your pores.  Some inexpensive skincare products contain an ingredient that’s almost like glue—it may tighten your skin temporarily, but it also clogs the pores and prevents your skin from breathing.

You shouldn’t have to be a polymer chemist to figure out which products contain skincare ingredients that really work.

• The number of skincare ingredients. Some of the least expensive products (typically sold on infomercials and via multi-level marketing)  have very few ingredients, because they’re quicker and easier to produce.  Since water is an ingredient in most skincare products, the fewer the ingredients, the more watered-down the formula.  Do you want to pay a lot for a product that is mostly water?

If a manufacturer wants to produce a product that is highly active, that generally requires “loading” the formula, so you get a long list of ingredients, and obviously, that adds to the cost.  A good case in point here is the ZO® Skin Health Oraser Daily Hand Repair.  Instead of just producing a product that made softer, smell-good hands, I wanted a skin care solution that would provide immediate and long-term anti-aging benefits, and that includes lightening age spots, softening hands, strengthening the skin and reducing wrinkles. The Oraser Daily Hand Repair is jam-packed with active ingredients. Could we have produced something less ambitious?  Sure.  But there are already too many hand lotions that don’t do anything.

• The concentration of active skin care ingredients. This, I think, is one of the biggest scams in the industry.  Two products can have the EXACT same list of ingredients, and one is highly effective, and the other totally useless.  The difference is the concentration of those ingredients.  One product may use only a miniscule amount, the other uses a clinically active level but unfortunately, there’s no way to understand that distinction.  That’s because all ingredients are supposed to be listed in order of their concentration—but for ingredients with a concentration less than 1%–they can be listed in any order.  There’s a big difference—an enormous difference—between a concentration of .01% and 1%.  But you’d never know it from the label.

Since formulations are proprietary, cheap products can easily disguise themselves as looking like quality products.  So just reading the labels when comparing two products is not sufficient.  The credentials of the manufacturer, and the positive results experienced by bona-fide customers make all of the difference in skincare.

• Skincare Innovation. Most mass market companies either use the same inexpensive ingredients in their skin care products that they have been using for years, or try to copy quality products by claiming that they have the same ingredients.  Companies like ZO Skin Health by Zein Obagi are always working towards new and innovative formulas with the latest technology.  They may take years to develop, test, refine and produce a new lotion, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on research and development.  After the product has been available for several years, those R and D costs have been amortized.  But initially, the manufacturer will attempt to recover some of those costs.

If you want a skincare product that is innovative, there is usually a premium to be paid.  The old adage holds true, you get what you pay for.

As an analogy to another industry, Dell Computers is known for its low costs and mass market appeal, and it used to brag about the fact that it didn’t even have a Research and Development department.  Understandably their costs can be lower, if they don’t create or innovate anything.

• Sunscreens.  I believe that there is no better example of the disparity between cheap, mass-marketed skincare products and effective, high quality products, than in sunscreen.  I am constantly amazed at mass-marketers who tout outrageously high SPF ratings on their sunscreens.  They mislead people into believing that just because their SPF numbers are high, they’re more effective.  Nothing could be further from the truth.   In fact, those sunscreens with ultra-high SPFs are loaded with chemicals.  The increase in protection is negligible.    And they claim things like “waterproof”.  There is no sunscreen that is waterproof—mine or any other.  I’m happy that the ZO Skin Health Oclipse SPF 30 sunscreen was named the #1 sunscreen in the US—and part of that is because we don’t misrepresent the product.

In my next blog I’ll talk about some of the other factors that influence the cost—and effectiveness—of skincare products.