032 - What I'm Reading: Week of February 25th

Feb 25, 2022

👋 Hello everyone.

🔗 Every link in this newsletter routes back to my blog where I provide a summary, my opinion, and access to the original content.

⭐️ = What excites me most this week.

💭 It has been one heavy week, to lighten the mood…this week’s newsletter includes a section on 🦖 news… several articles on China’s beauty expansion, T-Beauty, a device using micro-current to stimulate the vagus nerve, exciting new research on acne and retanioc acid, our inability to distinguish between GANS and real faces, a study showing microdosing LSD may not be all its cracked up to be, and so much more…

But first, some thoughts on the use/abuse of ‘scientific’ language in beauty…

It is impossible to not notice the number of up & coming beauty brands playing into claims around ‘scientifically backed’ formulas or ‘clinically tested’, and like in many past newsletters, I have called out the loose usage of this language. As a backlash to clean, brands are now putting themselves in a space that would seem more credible, if there were actual data to support it, by saying their products are based on science. This is an important step forward, but I fear this is quite misleading to a consumer.

Take for example the brand Habitual Wellness, featured in this week’s newsletter, the brand is ‘science backed’. To their credit they have specifically chosen formulas with well researched ingredients, including a supplement where they are using the same amount of hydrolyzed protein found in a placebo controlled double-blind study. Do not be fooled, the double-blind study is on the ingredient in isolation, not their formulas, which to a lay consumer is not clear due to the language.

Habitual Wellness is not alone in this, it is an industry wide issue, and exists because there is simply NO regulations/definition around what this wording actually means.

There is no regulation around the phrase ‘scientifically backed’ and the retailers have not stepped up and provided their own definitions. Neither are there strict regulations/definitions around what is defined as a ‘clinical test’ vs ‘consumer test’ in the cosmetic world, which is an area that has become increasingly murky if you dig one-step deeper on many brand sites. For example a brand may claim they conducted ‘clinical testing’ on 8 people, where the actual questions are self-perception, not skin measurement nor dermatologist ratings, and there is no control product for comparison. If you look at many brands this is not uncommon.

Ourself Skin, a new brand from Glo Pharma, launched this week. Glo Pharma is a healthtech startup with deep pockets and has the funding to put in the research to develop new ingredients, file patents, and conduct the testing. For their product launch they did conduct perception and clinically tests. A number of their products have been put through both clinical testing and consumer perception studies. Some products are tested on 59 people (a healthier number of individuals for a clinical or consumer test), and other products are tested on 14 or 15 people (a pretty small consumer set to be truly representative of a population).

Testing is expensive and time intensive whether it is consumer perception studies or clinical testing, so it is understandable why so many small brands cannot do this. The challenge I put forth is around looking deeper at brands when they make overarching claims around science, and product efficacy, to see whether their data really measures up to what they say. Just as consumers have smartened up to the ‘clean’ movement and are beginning to question ingredient inclusion & exclusion, I believe there will be a larger reckoning around testing, where companies will have to show the methodology and share the data (beyond the cherry picked data used for claims).

Now to the weekly news…