Your Skin After Forty: Different Care For Different Times

Our founder set out to create an all-natural skincare brand for women over 40 that embraced the concept of skincare as a ritual for you, not a regime followed for others.  She learned a lot working with a fabulous team of advisors and vendors.   Hopefully that knowledge helps you be a more informed consumer.  

If you have bought a serum for $185, the brand paid about $15.00 to make it. Thats a big difference.  

The punchline here is that prestige brands have margins of 75-85 percent on their products. That can go as high as ninety percent for ultra luxury brands like La Mer. Frankly, even drugstore brands have margins in the 40-60 percent range.  

So where is all that extra money going?  It’s not all profit but it’s not all going towards more effective skincare either. The bottom line is that you are paying for a lot of things that don’t have to do with effectiveness at all. So what are some of those things?

Packaging is at the top here. When a company is creating a prestige product with a prestige price, it has to look prestige. So you get expensive glass with etching and heavy boxes with yet more expensive decoration. Some skincare bottles look like your perfume bottles and in fact, the same glass company may have made both.  

Then there is marketing and distribution. Prestige products are advertised in prestige places. A full page ad in Elle or Vogue is expensive.  A contract with a big time musician or actress is hugely expensive.  

As for distribution, there is a reason direct to consumer e-commerce brands can charge less. If a brand wants into Saks, it has to pay Saks ― a lot. Those beautiful displays at the department store? The brand pays for that. The brand even pays for the sales rep at the counter (this one was a huge surprise to me).So you pay for that salesperson.

You should also know that when a brand decides how much to charge you, it actually will price a product specifically to signal to you, the consumer, that this is a prestige level product. It recognizes that it can’t price too low, otherwise you won’t think it provides prestige level effectiveness ― even if it does. Price is a big part of perception so perception is a big part of price. Brands know that and price accordingly.  

So is there any reason at all to buy high end skincare? Actually yes.  Research and development is often worth paying for. If a brand develops a new delivery system that allows ingredients to better penetrate your skin, that’s a tangible benefit to you. If a brand uses highly stable Vitamin C instead of a lower cost version, the product will last longer. Again, good for you.  If it adds ingredients that ensure the product works well under your makeup, that definitely makes getting ready quicker and easier.  

We have all seen these sorts of claims: “90 percent of trial participants said their skin was plumper after four weeks.”  How much should you rely on these claims?  In short, probably not much.  

As you develop a skincare product, fairly early you need to decide what sort of claims you hope to make.  These guide the formulator and are also a central element of your marketing.  You can’t just make these up of course; you need to have some credible factual basis for them (although in reality there has been very little monitoring of skincare claims by regulators).

I was very lucky to have a host of advisors who had longtime experience in the industry and they quickly explained that I had two options. I could (1) use scientific experiments for brand claims (where things like wrinkle depth, level of moisture etc. are measured by labs using specialized equipment) or (2) I could conduct consumer surveys where participants rate their subjective experience with the product.  At one point or another, you may well have seen both — although you likely have seen way more consumer surveys.  

So why do brands almost uniformly choose the consumer surveys? The answers are probably fairly obvious. First, they are far less expensive to conduct. Second — and most importantly— positive results are far more likely.  The bottom line is that if you give someone a product, they are very likely to see a positive result.  The infamous placebo effect.

That is not to say that products that rely on consumer surveys don’t provide the results claimed. But I wouldn’t rely on the consumer surveys to come to that conclusion. Because there is a second, equally important reason consumer surveys can be suspect — you have no guarantee that anyone in the survey truly reflects your skin.  And the number of people included in these surveys is usually amazingly low (rarely would they ever stand up to generally accepted standards of scientific credibility).

Bottom line? Reliance on consumer surveys shouldn’t immediately eliminate a product from consideration (small brands may simply not have the funds to do rigorous scientific studies), but you can be much more confident that a brand will deliver the results it claims if it does have scientific studies to back them up.

Frankly, though, if you want truly credible information, you should identify ingredients that have third party studies establishing their effectiveness and then seek out products that include these ingredients at high enough  concentrations to achieve the claimed benefit.

Coming soon!

The truth of the matter is that effective skincare is available to you in multiple ways.  There are high cost products with legitimately powerhouse ingredients and unique delivery systems, there are tremendous drugstore brands that dermatologists love and you can even create skincare at home.  The last is more complex and deserves a separate section (see below!)

It takes time and dedication to formulate at home, but for certain products it’s an effective cost saver.