Back to the future!
The modern skincare scam
You're paying outrageous prices for little more than skin-harming water!
That $60 moisturiser? Less than 10% is active ingredients. The rest is water, skin-toxic emulsifiers, skin-toxic preservatives, advertising budgets, and retailer margins stacked on top of each other.
If modern skincare sold you 60ml of actual actives, it would be $300. That's a whopping $600 for a 120ml!!
My 120ml tallow oil based balms are less than $40, and are 100% active ingredients. No water filler. No retailer cut. No million-dollar ad campaigns built into the price.
100% natural actives. A fraction of the cost.
The tiny jar scam
It's not about ingredient cost—the difference between 60ml and 120ml is pennies.
That 60ml moisturiser lasts only 3 weeks—that's 18+ sales per year instead of just 3.
My 120ml tallow oil based balms last 18 weeks—that's only 3 jars a year!
That tiny jar - sadly just another industry scam!
The misleading practices that are the modern skincare industry:
1/ Social Media Death Scroll:
Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok.
Endless filtered faces, strategic lighting, paid partnerships disguised as genuine recommendations—social media has become a 24/7 skincare infomercial. "Influencers" push products they've never used beyond a single post, before/after photos are manipulated with lighting tricks, and the algorithm feeds you an endless stream of false transformations designed to trigger and keep you buying.
2/ Customer Reviews:
Five star customer reviews everywhere you look—these days most customer reviews are carefully curated theatre. Any negative reviews get buried, deleted, or drowned out by fake testimonials. What you're reading isn't real feedback—it's now just marketing scam.
3/ 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 dust!
4/ Natural Washing:
Natural-washing is when products are falsely marketed as "natural" while containing chemically-suspect 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.
The list goes on ...
5/ 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.
6/ 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 ...
7/ 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.
8/ 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.