Cost Of Living Buster : Buy 3, Get $30 off! • Use Coupon "free"
the modern skincare scam
You're paying outrageous prices for little more than over-advertised water!
That $60 moisturiser? Only 20% is active ingredients. The rest is water, stabilisers, advertising budgets, and retailer margins stacked on top of each other.
If mainstream skincare sold you 60ml of actual actives, it would cost $300. That's a whopping $600 for a 120ml!!
My 120ml jar is $32.95—and it's 100% active ingredients. No water filler. No retailer cut. No million-dollar ad campaigns built into the price.
100% actives. A fraction of the cost.
The teeny tiny size scam.
Why the Tiny Bottles?
It's not about ingredient cost—the difference between 30ml and 120ml is pennies. It's about hiding the flaws of water-based skincare.
1/ Shelf life: Water breeds bacteria. Small bottles mean you finish it before it spoils.
2/ Unstable formulas: Synthetic actives oxidise quickly. Small sizes are damage control.
3/ Repurchase frequency: A 30ml serum lasts only weeks. That's 8+ sales per year instead of just two. Buy more, buy more - it's all part of the the modern skincare scam!
My unwhipped tallow balms have none of these problems—which is why I don't need to hide behind teeny bottles or tiny jars.
The other misleading practices dominating the skincare industry:
1/ Natural Washing:
Natural-washing is when products are falsely marketed as "natural" while containing synthetic preservatives, artificial fragrances, and chemical additives. Companies mislead you by emphasizing minimal natural ingredients while hiding the synthetic components and the water that make up most of the product's formulation.
2/ Fairy Dusting:
Fairy dusting is an industry term used in skincare formulation that refers to the practice of including trendy, "natural", marketable ingredients in a product at concentrations that are too low to provide any real benefit.
If your premium "natural" serum or moisturiser has more than 3 or 4 actives listed low on the label .... it's likely fairy dusted!
The list goes on ...
3/ Ingredient Manipulation:
- Botanical confusion - using Latin names to make common ingredients sound more impressive.
- "Free-from" fear mongering - highlighting the absence of ingredients that would never be included anyway.
- Proprietary complexes - giving fancy names to simple ingredient combinations to appear exclusive.
4/ Formula Deception:
- Concentration deception - highlighting active ingredients first in marketing but finding them near the end of the actual ingredient list on the label.
- Fragrance masking - hiding dozens of chemicals under the single term "fragrance" or "parfum".
And on ...
5/ Claim Exaggeration:
- Clinically proven claims based on studies with tiny sample sizes or without proper controls.
- Immediate results claims for ingredients that physiologically take weeks to show effects.
- "Up to X% improvement" citing the best single result rather than the average.
6/ Science Distortion:
- Cherry-picked studies citing only favorable research while ignoring contradictory evidence.
- Borrowed science featuring ingredients that have research backing but at concentrations higher than what's in the product.
- Correlation presentation showing before/after photos where lighting, angle, and makeup differ.
7/ Media Manipulation:
- Paid for (with advertising) reviews & beauty/natural awards presented as unbiased.
- Influencer social media seeding without disclosure of payment.