CoverFX is gone. Mally Beauty is gone. Gwen Stefani’s Gxve Beauty is gone. Malin + Goetz shuttered its UK operation. Good.clean.goop folded. Ami Colé. Youthforia. Sknmuse - the list grows daily, and we’re barely halfway through 2026.

These closings are not as alarming as you might think when measured against the sheer volume of brands that flooded the cosmetic marketplace over the past decade. This wave of brands closing is the industry correcting itself, and honestly, it was overdue.

Before we get into why, I want to be clear about something: I don’t want to sound insensitive, like I’m just throwing around industry statistics and don’t care about the people this has affected. These were not faceless companies quietly winding down. Behind every one of these brands were founders with a vision, teams who showed up every day and worked hard to make that vision a reality, and communities of customers who bought and loved their products. That matters, and it deserves to be acknowledged before the autopsy begins.

But to understand why these brands died, an autopsy is necessary. Because what’s happening in 2026 is not random, not simply bad luck - it’s structural. And understanding these structural changes is the only way to make sense of what comes next, and which brands will (hopefully) survive.

The Body Count

AS Beauty, a New York-based multi-brand beauty holding company, owned CoverFX and Mally Beauty and shuttered both brands simultaneously. CoverFX had been around since the late 1990s, and was considered an expert on complexion makeup, with formulas and finishes that makeup artists loved. They were among the earliest consumer-facing brands to take shade inclusivity seriously before the industry made it a talking point. CoverFX was a staple in my pro makeup kit before Sephora decided it was “too pro” for consumers and demanded that the brand change its formulas and shade matrix. Sephora was responsible for the beginning of their demise, but we’re used to this scenario. Sephora’s marketing team has destroyed so many indie brands with short-sighted, trend-driven forecasting and thuggish threats if brands don’t follow their direction. Yet even with all these brand failures, due to Sephora’s inept forecasting, I still see indies tripping over themselves trying to get their attention. Go figure.

Mally Beauty was built on the personal charisma and genuine talent of celebrity MUA Mally Roncal, a QVC institution with a fiercely loyal following who bought into her authenticity as much as her products.

Both brands had real audiences. Both had real histories. AS Beauty cited tariffs and a shifting global market as the reasons for closing both. While those were major contributors to their demise, it’s not the whole story either.

Gxve Beauty, Gwen Stefani’s color cosmetics line, launched in 2022 with Sephora distribution and the built-in press attention that comes with a famous name. By early 2026, Sephora had quietly removed the brand from its shelves. No farewell campaign, no statement - just gone. A few years seems to be a marker for how long celebrity-driven brands last when nothing is holding them up beyond the celebrity name.

The Malin + Goetz news stings. Founders Matthew Malin and Andrew Goetz built something genuinely special - a minimalist, gender-neutral apothecary-style brand with real aesthetic integrity and meaningful formulas. The UK store closures were unexpected, and seventy-two people lost their jobs. The brand itself isn’t shutting down, but closing a market that abruptly rarely happens without a reason. I’m keeping an eye on this one.

Then there’s a pile of smaller indie closures that didn’t make headlines but collectively tell the same story. Good.clean.goop, the beauty extension of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire, folded without fanfare. Ami Colé, a makeup brand designed specifically for melanin-rich skin tones and backed by genuine community support, shut down. Sknmuse, a body care brand that made it to Nordstrom’s prestige cosmetic shelves, was sold off.

Each of these brands offered something consumers wanted. Most of them ran out of gas before they could get to their destination.

Youthforia warrants its own paragraph.
I’ll be direct, because I covered the Shade 600 controversy when it happened, and my position has not changed. As a cosmetic developer who specializes in calibrating complexion products to match real human skin tones, I called bullsh*t on the release of Shade 600 immediately.
After reading the ingredient list (INCI), I identified what Youthforia’s “darkest shade” actually was: Black Iron Oxide (CI 77499), the universal black mineral pigment in cosmetics, with a touch of titanium dioxide (a white pigment) added for opacity. Those two pigments, on their own, cannot create a human foundation shade. Every skin tone on this planet, regardless of shade depth, has an undertone. Cool, warm, or neutral. The lightest skin has it. The deepest skin has it. Any working cosmetic developer understands this as a basic complexion shading reality.
The fact that Shade 600 was approved for production by the brand founder and landed on Sephora shelves was no oversight. It was a decision made by a founder who had already been called out for failing to properly represent dark skin tones at its original foundation launch.

Youthforia’s closure lands differently than the others mentioned in this article because they committed brand suicide by intentionally failing a community that deserved better. The brand repeatedly proved it was unwilling to do the work, and consumers refused to support such behavior.

It’s Not Just the Economy

The easy narrative is that tariffs, rising raw material costs, and soft consumer confidence took these brands down. That’s not entirely wrong. But the real story started years earlier.

The marketplace became unsustainably overcrowded. Why? The barrier to launching a cosmetic brand has dropped to near zero over the past decade. Finding Private Label or White Label manufacturers with low Minimum Order Quantities (MOQ), setting up a Shopify business account, and opening a social media “shop” were enough to call yourself a cosmetic company. The result was an overwhelming volume of new brands flooding the industry. Genuine consumer fatigue set in. Too many products, and not enough meaningful differentiation between them. The signal-to-noise ratio on retail shelves and in social feeds became impossible to navigate.

Now let’s look at cash flow. Most indie brands were undercapitalized from the start. Raising enough money to launch is difficult. But raising what you actually need to scale once you’ve been noticed is an entirely different problem. Many brands that looked healthy at $5M in revenue started burning through capital when they tried to grow to $20M. The brands that raised capital during the 2020-2022 investment window, when capital was cheap and beauty was a hot category, have already burned through that money with no clear path to profitability. And as the marketplace has become oversaturated, the funding environment has shrunk considerably.

We can’t discuss brand failure without discussing margins. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) was never the salvation it promised to be. The appeal of having a direct line to your customer, cutting out retail overhead, and scaling through social media shopping sounded great at the time. But US DTC beauty spending is down 14% year-to-date in 2026. The DTC business model and its margins belonged to a specific economic moment, and that moment is over. Brands that built their entire distribution model around DTC margins are now scrambling to adjust, or simply failing.

Most indie brands manufacture overseas because it’s less expensive, and the lower manufacturing costs provide healthier margins. The Trump import tariffs destroyed those margin gains, and brands without the cash reserves to cover tariffs and keep products in stock hit a wall.

And here is the number that should stop you cold:
54% of beauty executives identify uncertain consumer spending as the top risk going into the second half of 2026. Read that again - more than half of the people running cosmetic companies say the floor could give way at any moment because consumers are exhausted by an oversaturated marketplace. The industry built significant infrastructure on DTC margins through social distribution channels (such as TikTok Shop), which are rapidly becoming less viable.

The Celebrity Brand Problem

Gxve Beauty deserves a deeper conversation, because it represents a failure mode that the industry keeps repeating - without seeming to learn from it.

It had everything a celebrity beauty launch is supposed to have. Gwen Stefani is a genuine pop cultural icon with decades of style credibility. Sephora distribution is the closest thing prestige beauty has to a guaranteed audience. The products were well formulated (for the price point), and the packaging was aesthetically pleasing. By every pre-launch metric, this should have worked.

But, it didn’t.
When a brand launches without purposeful innovation or a distinct hero product, the question is, was the brand built solely on the assumption that celebrity association alone would carry it?

Let’s be honest, the celebrity brand model always had a shelf life. Most celebrity beauty brands were never designed for longevity. They were designed to capitalize on a moment of cultural proximity - what we affectionately call a celebrity “cash grab”. But consumers have wised up to this type of marketing and aren’t as motivated to purchase a product simply because a celebrity name is attached.

But why are some “celebrity brands” working? Simple, they were designed to stand alone if the celebrity founder stepped away. Rhode has moved well past its Hailey Bieber origins because the products it offered built genuine consumer loyalty on their own merits. Rare Beauty continues to grow because Selena Gomez built a brand with products that stand on their own, regardless of the founder’s name. In these cases, celebrity connection is a useful marketing asset, but not the DNA of the brand.

The Brands That Are Surviving

Let’s be clear - the $670 billion global cosmetic industry isn’t failing, it’s adjusting. The brands holding on, and in some cases growing, share characteristics worth paying attention to.

Probably the most important factor in building brand loyalty is transparency over marketing claims. Brands leading with actual published third-party research on their formulas and active ingredients are outperforming brands built primarily on an aspirational identity or founder fame.
There is a HUGE difference between a brand citing its own internally commissioned testing and one pointing readers to independently published, peer-reviewed third-party test data. In-house scientific studies are nothing more than marketing collateral, with data designed solely with the brand’s financial interest in mind. Independent third-party, peer-reviewed research is entirely different and provides verifiable facts, not carefully controlled data that fits a brand’s narrative. Consumers in 2026 have become sophisticated enough to ask which one they’re looking at when a brand starts making scientific claims. The brands that present actual third-party, peer-reviewed scientific data to validate their marketing claims are the ones gaining ground.

The surviving brands also understand that social media shops aren’t a business model. Consumers want a brand philosophy that resonates with their lifestyle, a founder who speaks honestly and earns trust over time, and products they want to repurchase — that’s the foundation of a successful brand. The businesses holding on through this wave of closures have built communities that don’t evaporate when social platforms’ algorithms shift or trends change.

#MyTwoCents

The 2026 closure wave isn’t an anomaly. It’s the delayed reckoning of a decade of product oversaturation, with social media success standing in for genuine brand equity.
It was a good run while social feeds sustained the insanity, but the climate has changed. This inevitable collapse of many brands was necessary for an industry in desperate need of editing, but unwilling to do so while the money was flowing freely.

The brands that remain after this cycle will be stronger for the experience. And the ones that closed had warning signs long before 2026 and could have survived if they had paid more attention to building brand longevity and not chasing viral sales.

The uncomfortable truth is that some of these closures aren’t tragedies. They’re outcomes of a lack of foresight. The actual tragedy is in the jobs lost and the communities left without something they loved. That part is real and worth mourning.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

Men have been spending an unprecedented amount of money on personal grooming (skincare, haircare, body products, fragrance) since COVID. So why is the cosmetics industry still doing the bare minimum, still pushing uninspired, dumbed-down, gender-coded products on them? This is 2026, and the data is ALREADY telling the story. When are cosmetic marketers going to WAKE THE F*CK UP?

Let’s begin by talking about the wall the cosmetic industry has built to segregate genders, and then have the audacity to pat themselves on the back for being “inclusive.”

We’re living in the 21st century, yet cosmetic marketing remains notoriously antiquated and gender-specific. Serious, cutting-edge skincare, haircare, and body products are formulated for and marketed to women. Men are placated with a few oversimplified basics that smell like cologne and are presented in “masculine” packaging, with the word “MEN” prominently displayed - so there could be no question as to who this product is for. The message is clear, even if no one says it out loud. This space is not designed for men, but here’s a bar of soap named after Bigfoot to make you feel included (looking at you, Dr. Squatch).

Then COVID happened. Men stuck at home looked at themselves in the mirror for over a year, realized they could look better, and quietly started researching and making choices.

The industry noticed the influx of money (and liked it), but the way they’ve responded makes it obvious they’re not reading the room. Or the data.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

This isn’t a trend. It’s a shift that was building slowly for years, then hit fast-forward when the world went into COVID lockdown. And the numbers don’t just show men spending more. They show something the industry has been trying to ignore: the brands embracing gender-neutral marketing are outpacing brands that continue to push gender-coding to women or men separately.

Here’s the thesis, backed by three years of revenue data. Circana and the SeeMe Index have tracked beauty brand performance annually, and the results are unambiguous: inclusive beauty brands grow 1.5X faster than non-inclusive competitors. That’s an 18% collective growth rate versus 12% for brands still operating on a gender-specific model. For the third year in a row. That’s not a cultural moment. That’s a structural market shift, and the gap isn’t closing.

The consumer behavior backs it up. 62% of consumers globally now prefer beauty products that don’t conform to gender stereotypes. Among Gen Z, 38% actively seek gender-inclusive products, and 40% explicitly prefer gender-neutral brands. These aren’t niche preferences - they’re the mainstream consumer in the fastest-growing demographic in the category. And 45% of Gen Z plus 50% of millennials say they’d stop using a beauty brand that lacks inclusivity. That’s an active loyalty penalty for gender-specific marketing, and it compounds every year.

Now for the category picture:

Skincare is the sharpest growth story - and the clearest proof point. By 2024, 52% of U.S. men reported regular daily use of facial skincare, up from just 31% in 2022. Among Gen Z males specifically, adoption rose from 42% to 68% over the same period. Nearly doubled in two years. Here’s what makes that number interesting: a significant portion of those men are buying from brands that have never once said the word “men” in their marketing. CeraVe. The Ordinary. Bubble Skincare. None of them make “men’s” products. All of them have substantial and growing male customer bases. CeraVe ran a Super Bowl campaign in 2023 built on a single idea - skincare is for everyone - and male adoption spiked. The market has been sending this message for a while now. The industry hasn’t been listening.

The men’s skincare market itself has grown 65% from $11.6 billion to $19.2 billion, and is projected to reach $52.1 billion by 2036. But that figure doesn’t actually give us the complete picture and undersells what’s happening, because it doesn’t count the men buying from gender-neutral or women-positioned brands. The real number of men investing in personal grooming products is much larger.

Haircare is following the same trajectory. The men’s hair care and styling market is on track to surpass $54.7 billion by 2030. Men aren’t just washing their hair anymore. They’re investing in treatments, scalp health, and styling products - and choosing based on performance, not because something says “For Men” on the bottle.

Body care, the category the industry arguably dismissed the most, is seeing 14% year-over-year usage growth among men aged 25-49, and their expectations have moved well past soap on a rope.

Fragrance is one of the fastest-growing segments, with a CAGR of 8-11%. Men are building collections, layering, and talking about scent with the same enthusiasm they once reserved for sneakers. The online fragrance community is significantly male-driven at this point, and most of the brands attracting that attention don’t market themselves as “men’s fragrance” brands; they market as unisex.

The numbers don’t lie. Men are taking better care of themselves across the board. The brands winning their business are the ones that didn’t ask them to use a separate entrance. The white-space opportunities for the global cosmetic industry are enormous. The industry’s response so far? Embarrassing. But I’m getting to that.

Skin Is Skin. Hair Is Hair.

There is no meaningful biological reason for men’s products to be different or “simpler” than women’s. None.

Yes, there are real biological differences. Men’s skin is about 25% thicker and tends to produce more oil (men generally have larger, more active sebaceous glands than women), while facial hair can affect how a product is absorbed in some areas. These are real differentiators that a well-crafted product could accommodate - WITHOUT being gender-specific. Here’s what those differences don’t call for: dumbed-down formulas with fewer active ingredients.

Active ingredients are the ones actually doing something: hydrating, rebuilding, protecting, repairing. Think retinol for cell turnover. Peptides that support collagen. Antioxidants that defend against environmental damage. Thicker, oilier skin, if anything, is an argument for MORE active ingredients, not less. The logic of selling men simplified products because their skin is “different” falls apart the moment you look at the biology. The “simplified” men’s formula argument holds up in a marketing brief. Nowhere else.

Haircare is no different. Keratin is keratin. Hair and scalp are not gender specific. Most “men’s” shampoos are little more than a basic cleanser with a masculine scent, while equivalent women’s products are packed with conditioning and strengthening ingredients. This is not product development based on science; it’s based on the outdated gender-segregating marketing story the industry perpetuates. Why? Because they continue to position men as ingredient-illiterate. That might have been true before - but not now.

The Industry Responded. Just Not Correctly.

This is where it gets frustrating.

The playbook most brands reached for looked like this: Men are spending more money on personal grooming products, so let’s take an existing product we originally developed for women, remove most of the expensive actives, add a sporty fragrance, put it in masculine packaging (typically dark colors), and make sure it says “men” on the label.

Calling this lazy AF (and sexist) is an understatement.

This pattern runs deep across the industry. Walk into any major beauty retailer, and you’ll find products that are functionally similar, presented on shelves with separate gender assignments, and the men’s products are typically watered-down versions of those offered to women. The industry perpetuates this two-tier system to cash in on the growing men’s personal grooming market, and actually believes it’s “serving” its customers by providing the most basic, bullsh*t formulas in a package labeled “MEN”.

And then there are the brands that knew better, began by marketing themselves as gender-neutral and inclusive, and then somehow talked themselves out of it.

Lume Deodorant is the case study I keep coming back to. Founded in 2017 by Dr. Shannon Klingman, Lume launched the category of whole-body deodorant built on a simple, honest premise: body odor doesn’t discriminate by gender, so neither should the product. The science was sound, the positioning was inclusive, and it worked. For everyone. Men were using it. Women were using it. The whole-body deodorant category basically didn’t exist before Lume created it.

So what did they do next? The brand was sold, and the new owners decided to launch a separate men’s brand - Mando. Let that sink in for a second. MANdo. I guess the new owners thought they might be missing a few sales from “dudes” who can’t wrap their heads around the concept of gender-neutral deodorant, and won’t buy a product if they don’t see the word MEN printed in BIG letters on the packaging. It’s not subtle. It’s not clever. It’s the most on-the-nose piece of gender-coding in recent memory, and it tells you everything about the antiquated industry mentality behind it.

Let me be clear about what MANdo actually is: it’s Lume. The exact same formula, the exact same mandelic acid technology, just in differently decorated packaging with “masculine scents” and a gender-coded name. They took a product already working for everyone, decided men needed their own masculinity-coded version, and called it a new brand. That’s not product development. That’s a cash grab dressed up as (misguided) consumer insight.

IMHO, as a brand and product developer, Lume should have continued marketing to everyone. Full stop. They had the science, the efficacy, and the proof that men were already buying their products. The smart marketing move, one that actually respects the male consumer, would have been to invest in ensuring men knew Lume was for them, too. Run campaigns that include men using it. Let the formula do the talking. Instead, they blinked, built a wall that wasn’t necessary, and gave men a patronizing brand name to go with it.

MANdo launched in late 2022, with its exclusive Target brick-and-mortar debut in 2024. And here’s what that decision actually cost the Lume brand: Lume had a first-mover advantage in a category it created from scratch. It was the only name in whole-body deodorant; it had the science, and it already had customers across all genders spending. That is an extraordinarily rare position for any brand to be in. Instead of building on it, the decision was made to give the male customer base a separate brand, and, in doing so, MANdo cannibalized the category dominance Lume had worked for years to establish. Mammoth Brands, the parent company that acquired Lume in 2021, wanted to capture revenue from both sides, so the split makes a certain kind of misguided corporate sense. But for Lume as a brand, voluntarily spinning off Mando, after already being the definitive name in whole-body deodorant for EVERYONE, diluted the brand equity and category dominance. At the exact moment, the data was pointing in the other direction.

What Men Are Actually Being Sold

Next time you’re in Sephora or Ulta, try this: pick up a gender-coded men’s moisturizer and a comparable women’s moisturizer at the same price point. Read both ingredient lists (INCI).

The women’s product will typically contain more actives, including ceramides, peptides, retinols, and other ingredients that deeply hydrate and repair. The men’s version usually has a shorter INCI, lower concentrations of meaningful actives (if included at all), and leans harder into a simplified, “no nonsense” formula to signal it’s “for busy guys.”

Same price, less efficacy, better margins for the brand. That’s the deal men have been getting because the industry counted on them not educating themselves. News flash - it’s 2026, and they’re reading, and they’re not ok with “men’s” products doing less.

Brands that genuinely include men rather than segregate them are building real customer loyalty. Brands that still operate on the gender-specific “for men” sales model are losing market share.

The Language Is the Problem Too

Formulation is only part of the problem. Advertising and marketing language tells men which products are and aren’t for them before they even purchase one.

Gender-specific marketing of skincare, haircare, and body products is like a velvet rope. It tells men to stay on their side and use only products made for them. But educated men know that the better, more effective products are on the other side, and they aren’t on the guest list. And until recently, most men accepted this and grudgingly chose the black tube with “FOR MEN” printed on it.

The industry built that division deliberately because gendered categories are more profitable. Two worlds, two shelves, two sets of messaging, double the revenue. Tidy system. For them.

It also does something more insidious: it shapes what men believe they’re allowed to want. When every signal in the store tells you that the nourishing, high-performance products are “for her,” many men internalize it and don’t question it. They reach for a black “For Men” tube, not because it’s a great option, but because they’ve been conditioned to stay away from products marketed with women as their target audience.

The problem is that it only works as long as men don’t know what they’re missing. Once they’ve seen what a well-formulated serum or moisturizer with functional actives does for their skin, that sport-scented moisturizing “after-shave” lotion stops being good enough. They’re shopping in whatever aisle has the products that make their skin look and feel better. They’ve stepped over the velvet rope without an invitation from the industry.

Gender-Neutral Is Not a Niche. It’s the Answer.

Let’s be direct: gender-neutral formulation and market positioning isn’t a progressive experiment. It’s the correction this industry keeps trying to avoid. And the market has already started making it happen without them.

The Circana/SeeMe data isn’t a projection. It’s three consecutive years of documented revenue performance showing that inclusive brands outgrow gendered ones every year, without exception. 18% growth for inclusive brands versus 12% for less inclusive competitors. And 45% of Gen Z plus 50% of millennials say they’d stop using a brand that lacks inclusivity. That’s not a preference gap. That’s a churn risk that compounds annually.

The biggest beauty retailers in the country have already read the data. Ulta and Sephora are pulling men’s products out of dedicated “men’s” sections and integrating them into gender-neutral, skin-care-first displays. They’re not making this move for philosophical reasons. They’re making it because that’s where the sales are going.

The message is straightforward. Lead with what a product does: which skin type it’s for, which concern it addresses, and what results to expect. Not which gender it’s supposedly designed for. Build one well-formulated product that works for EVERYONE, and talk about it in a way that doesn’t segregate. That’s not a radical idea. It’s what the fastest-growing brands in the category are already doing.

The Lume example says it all. They had the proof of concept, an engaged gender-neutral customer base, and dominance as the category originators. The new owners blinked because they were greedy, and ended up diluting their category dominance by splitting into gender-specific branding. At that exact moment, the data told them to do the opposite.

The industry can’t afford to keep blinking. Men are putting real money into skincare, haircare, fragrance, and body care. They want products that perform. They aren’t asking for gender-coded masculinity baked into their products. They’re asking for the same thing every consumer wants: What does this product do, and how does it enrich my life?

The brands answering that question without a gender qualifier are already outgrowing those that aren’t.

#MyTwoCents

The cosmetic industry spent decades making sure men knew they weren’t their target audience, then acted shocked when men demanded more. Now men are spending serious money, and they’re reading labels. The industry’s response has been to dress up the same old gender-restrictive bullsh*t in better packaging and hope that’s enough.

It’s not enough. Not anymore.

The data is in. Inclusive brands grow 1.5X faster. Three years running. 62% of global consumers prefer products that don’t conform to gender stereotypes. Ulta and Sephora are reorganizing their shelves. This correction isn’t a prediction. It’s already underway.

Men don’t want simpler, “guy” formulas. They want the technically advanced formulas marketed to women. And they’re willing to spend money on them. The brands still insisting on gender-specific, dumbed-down product lines for men will stagnate, and no amount of clever “dude” marketing will convince men to come back.

The brands that embrace gender neutrality, invest in formulations that work for everyone, and stop treating men as if they need their own separate, inferior product line will win market share and real customer loyalty. The rest will be explaining their declining numbers to investors. Good luck with that.

What do you think? Let’s discuss this in the comments.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

The Patrick (Ta) Problem is bigger than blush, it’s bigger than withholding payments from assistants and other creators, it’s bigger than undercutting peers, and devaluing an entire profession. We’ve watched Patrick Ta’s behavior evolve into a pattern over a decade, and at this point, that pattern no longer looks like a series of rookie missteps or misunderstandings; it looks like a lack of ethics and a broken moral compass.

Well, the 💩 (or should I say blush?) has finally hit the fan, and people are over Patrick’s attitude, problematic past, and are finally saying - ENOUGH!

But to better understand how we reached the boiling point, we need to go back to the beginning.

The Pattern Begins: Working for Free

Long before Patrick Ta launched a beauty brand, he was making a name for himself in the unethical way too many social-media-era makeup artists do — by doing celebrity makeup for free in exchange for permission to post about it on social platforms. That was how he climbed the social media celebrity ladder quickly and became “Insta-Famous”. It was a time when follower counts were becoming a powerful negotiating tool, and Ta wanted the clout and leverage that came with them.

It worked - it also enraged working makeup artists who had spent decades building their professional reputations and establishing their rates. These artists were not “jealous” of his fame; these were busy, working professionals who understood that the moment you start handing out your skills for free, you devalue the entire profession.

Pati Dubroff, a top celebrity makeup artist with an extensive list of accomplishments, didn’t stay quiet about it. She went on record: “I’m appalled when I hear about it because it’s people like Patrick Ta that are sabotaging the entire industry by doing that. Lucky for him that he can afford to do that, but the rest of us have to work for a living.” That quote landed in 2017. Many of us joined Pati in denouncing the practice. Ta kept doing it anyway.

Working for free in exchange for exposure is the oldest hustle in our profession, and it is always the self-absorbed attention seekers (narcissists?) that don’t care how it impacts others, as long as it serves them. When you work for free, you don’t just devalue yourself — you’re making a statement that a professional makeup artist’s rates can’t be taken seriously, because their skills can be found for free. You make it harder for every artist to negotiate a fair rate and make a living.

The industry noticed the drama - and then, because the industry has a relentless appetite for the next thing, and a short memory, it moved on.

Rinse, Repeat: The Pattern Continues with Black Creators

Fast forward to December 2024. TikTok creator and beauty influencer Avonna Sunshine, who has nearly 500K followers, posted a video calling out brands for failing to compensate Black content creators. She never called out Patrick Ta by name. She didn’t have to - she spent the entire video destroying Patrick Ta Beauty products over a garbage pail.

The video has over 11.2 million views.

Sunshine had sent emails. She DM’d Ta directly. She had, as she put it, “gone the nice way.” She wasn’t angry when she first reached out. She was a professional asking to be compensated for her work. But after being ghosted, she did get angry, recorded the video, and it went viral.

Ta’s response? A tearful TikTok apology. Except here’s the thing — he posted one apology video, then deleted it and replaced it with a duplicate, but in this one, he was crying. Ta claimed the crying take was “the most authentic” one. Influencer Tiffani Davis called it out immediately. “He knows he f—ed up,” she said, noting the manipulative fake tears in the second apology video.

“I want to get you compensated as soon as possible, today if you are willing to answer me,” Ta said in the video, adding that his finance team was responsible for the oversight.

His finance team. Right. 🤨

This was not an isolated incident for his “finance team”. Around the same time, Jools LeBron — the creator behind the viral “very demure, very mindful” phrase — also came forward claiming Ta had failed to pay her for a campaign they’d done together in New York. Two Black creators not being compensated? The receipts weren’t just piling up. They were exposing a pattern.

The Transition Blush Takeover

Which brings us to May 2026 and the move that finally broke the internet’s patience with Patrick Ta’s shenanigans.

Patrick Ta Beauty launched its Transition Blush Collection — the Liquid Transition Brightening Blush, the Transition Blurring Blush Duo, and a matching double-ended brush. The internet recognized the “transition blush” aesthetic immediately because it had been a signature technique of makeup artist Painted by Esther (Ngozi “Esther” Edeme) for years.

Esther is a UK-based celebrity makeup artist whose client list includes Naomi Campbell, Kelly Rowland, and Viola Davis. She built her professional reputation and following around a bold, high-set blush technique — layered blush gradients that sweep above the cheekbones and into the temples, specifically designed to create a seamless, elevated blush look on deeper skin tones. It was called “transition blush,” and the internet recognized it as a technique Esther popularized - not Ta - even though he has repeatedly called it a technique HE created - but more on the technique’s origins later.

Ta’s response, via TikTok, was a masterclass in non-apology apologizing. He tagged Esther, acknowledged that she “popularized this look through her artistry,” and then immediately qualified his own position, claiming he’d been doing a version of this blush since 2021. He went on to say he’d been developing these products for a year and a half, that his interpretation was different, and that he’d even reached out offering a paid collaboration before launch. Basically, he wanted Esther to “collaborate” as a seal of approval so he couldn’t be accused of stealing and profiting from her technique. Esther’s team declined that offer — a fact he made sure to state, to demonstrate his due diligence. The internet didn’t buy it.

What makes this even harder to dismiss is that Ta had already tipped his hand in earlier videos. When followers noticed his work shifting away from the cream-over-powder technique he’d become known for (not without its own questions of origin), they asked him about it directly on social media. His reply was candid to the point of self-incrimination: he was leaning into Painted by Esther’s techniques. Which means he was very aware of her work and liked it enough to emulate it. He made that comment, in writing, voluntarily. The receipts, in this case, were his own.

Then came the detail that turned “suspicious” into “damning.”

Creators began playing back one of Ta’s tutorials, side by side with Esther’s content, and the language wasn’t just similar — it tracked almost verbatim. The structure, the phrasing, the cadence, the application techniques. People who knew Esther’s work recognized it immediately. But the moment that sealed it was four words: “back of my palm.”

If you’ve followed Esther’s tutorials, you’ve heard that phrase. That specific type of mistake is called a malapropism or a lexical error, because an incorrect word was substituted to convey a thought. The correct expression is “back of my hand.” Esther has acknowledged it was an accidental verbal fumble in one of her own videos, the kind of slip unique to a specific piece of content. When Ta used that exact phrase in his tutorial — her mistake, her switched words — TikTok collectively stopped scrolling. You don’t accidentally repeat a mistake like that. You repeat it because you were reading from a transcript of Esther’s video while recording yours.

But here’s where the story takes a turn from messy to chillingly calculated.

Patrick Ta Beauty filed a trademark claim for the phrase TRANSITION BLUSH with the USPTO on May 7, 2025 — a full year before the product launched. It’s been suspended due to a conflict, but it is still a live trademark request. No one outside his team would have known about this. Ta’s public narrative was “I reached out to collaborate, Esther declined, so I launched my own version.” What he didn’t disclose was that a year ago, he began legal action to seize ownership of the term most closely associated with Esther’s work. Patrick knew his trademark move was shady AF, but he didn’t care because it benefited him. If the trademark goes through, and Esther ever wants to launch a product under the name she popularized, she would now face legal obstacles created by Patrick Ta.

This is a deplorable, unethical strategy we’ve watched play out before, and don’t dare call it “the price of doing business” - it’s a dirty way to legally STEAL from other creatives. This is no different than Jaclyn Hill stealing “KOZE” from fellow content creator Kalyn Nicholson and forcing her to close an established business and social media channel. This is no different than Hailey Bieber stealing “Rhode” from a successful $14.5 million clothing brand that lost the trademark battle and was forced to close.

Patrick Ta knew what he was doing and didn’t care about how it would impact Esther’s career and future opportunities. It was cold, calculated, and right in line with the pattern of behavior he’s established over the years.

The Contrast That Says Everything

What makes this particularly heartbreaking is how Esther handled it.

She didn’t explode. She didn’t go scorched earth. In her response video, she said what any artist with real integrity says: “I did not start anything. I am 29 years old. That would be ludicrous to claim ownership of anything. But what you will not belittle is my influence.”

She credited the artists who shaped her — Kevyn Aucoin, Sam Fine, Danessa Myricks, Pat McGrath. She spoke about wanting to move the way they do: with grace and intentionality. She positioned herself as a link in a long chain of creative tradition, not its originator, while making it clear that her contribution was real, specific, and should not be dismissed.

The Kevyn Aucoin estate weighed in, and while their statement was measured, who they chose to validate and who they chose to ignore spoke volumes. They confirmed that Aucoin was an originator of the technique (which he learned from his mentor, Way Bandy) and named Painted by Esther as one of the artists who had refined it and brought it to contemporary mainstream audiences. Patrick Ta’s name was notably left out of the conversation. The Aucoin estate didn’t drag him. They just didn’t include him. And in a conversation about artistic legacy, being purposely omitted speaks volumes.

And then, almost as a side thought, they pointed to their own Neo-Blush, a gradient blush product the brand introduced nearly a decade ago, which is VERY similar in function to what Ta is now calling his “Transition Blush.” A product that predates this entire conversation by almost 10 years. The message from Aucoin’s estate was polite. The implication of imitation, not innovation by Ta, was not.

👏👏👏 (slow clap for the Aucoin estate)

Esther didn’t claim ownership of this technique. She claimed to have adopted a technique from an iconic artist (Aucoin), put her own spin on it, and popularized her contemporary version through her influence. There’s an enormous difference between embracing an existing technique and claiming ownership of it, and she articulated it perfectly. Patrick Ta, in glaring contrast, filed for a trademark so he could legally steal something he DID NOT CREATE, and call it his own.

What This Is Really About

Every single incident in Ta’s history follows the same pattern. He crosses lines that impact others, either financially or artistically, gets called out, and produces an apology carefully calibrated to sound contrite while admitting no accountability. His behavior doesn’t change. The only thing that changes is who his latest insincere apology is directed at.

The trademarking of “Transition Blush” is the tell that makes the rest of the pattern impossible to dismiss as a misunderstanding. You do not accidentally file a federal trademark application for a term you know damn well is a shared technique. You do not covertly build a legal wall around another artist’s signature look and language, then turn around and say you reached out to collaborate - when the reality is, Ta attempted to secure her seal of approval for the THEFT of her artistic contribution.

This was not a misunderstanding. It’s a person who has spent a decade telling us, through his actions, that the rules of professional ethics, of creative integrity, of basic human decency — simply don’t apply to him. Ta has consistently proven himself willing to sacrifice anyone else’s career, livelihood, or creative legacy in the service of his own ambition. Every single time.

#MyTwoCents

I’ve watched this industry romanticize rabid ambition for so long that we’ve stopped calling it what it actually is: a career ascent defined by ruthlessly climbing over others, assimilating their accomplishments, calling them your own, and then attempting to erase the originator from history.

Patrick Ta is not a cautionary tale about ambition. He is a case study in what happens when there are no real consequences for repeated, documented disrespect of professional norms and creative ownership.

• Pati Dubroff called Ta out in 2017. The industry took notice for a week and moved on. No consequences.

• Avonna Sunshine called Ta out in 2024. Patrick cried crocodile tears on TikTok, and the industry moved on. No consequences.

• Now, Painted by Esther is calling Ta out, armed with a trademark filing date and a receipts trail that stretches back nearly a decade.

Are we going to be outraged for a moment, then move on as if nothing happened, giving Ta permission to do it AGAIN? When is enough, enough? When does the cycle stop???

The strategy to end this is pretty simple: use your critical thinking skills and take the time to know who you’re supporting. How did they acquire their fame? Have they acted ethically? Do they support the rest of the community? Or do they manipulate it solely to serve themselves?

If people followed this strategy, unethical people like Jaclyn, James, Mikayla, and Patrick wouldn’t have the platforms or influence we’ve mistakenly given them.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

The vindication arrived without fanfare, just data, quietly confirming what I’ve been predicting for years:

Consumers now realize how much they’ve been manipulated and deceived by top beauty influencers. They’re finally understanding that an influencer is PAID to promote products, reciting carefully worded scripts from a brand’s marketing sheet full of half-truths and pseudo-science. It’s their JOB to INFLUENCE YOU TO BUY what they’re reviewing - that’s why they’re called INFLUENCERS.

Back when I was young, and dinosaurs roamed freely, we called them SALESPEOPLE.

I get it, it’s embarrassing to admit that the top beauty influencers you’ve built a parasocial relationship with are not the trusted “friends” you thought they were. That even though they claim to “love you,” in reality, they view your relationship as purely transactional. You have every right to be pissed off that your good faith has been taken advantage of.

These revelations have caused a considerable shift in consumer trust, and we find ourselves returning to the EXPERT ERA on social media platforms. Consumers are now actively seeking the point of view of industry experts with the credentials and years of experience to validate their reviews and ingredient data.

If you’re imagining me smiling smugly as I write this, you’d be correct. 😉
Oh, and I’ll try not to say “I told you so” too loudly.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

McKinsey’s State of Beauty report puts it in plain numbers: only 7% of consumers across the EU, the US, and Asia are discovering brands via influencers - that’s down from 15% in 2023. In just over two years, influencer-driven brand discovery has been CUT IN HALF. And when consumers were asked where they go for trusted beauty information, only 18% pointed to influencers.

The report cites that consumers are seeking information and honest reviews from expert voices in the industry: cosmetic chemists and product developers, dermatologists, estheticians, hair stylists, and makeup artists. The report does not cite beauty influencers. The report does not cite celebrity brand founders with large social media followings. The report cites EXPERTS. The people who have spent their entire careers developing real, demonstrable knowledge.

I’ve observed the shift in trust beginning as we emerged from the COVID pandemic, then accelerating rapidly after the Mikayla Nogueira L’Oréal #LashGate incident in January 2023. But even then, industry insiders kept giving me side-eye when I’d warn them that a shift was underway and the influencer bubble was about to pop. Well, now there are multiple published reports, with real numbers, that confirm what I’ve been saying.
And yes, I’m smiling smugly again.

The Trust Shift Driven by Dupe Culture

A key driver in the trust shift has been “dupe culture”. Dupe culture grew out of consumer frustration with beauty influencers pushing high-priced products (products they were paid to promote).
Suddenly, dupes of the most viral cosmetics were popping up everywhere - at a fraction of the price! But here’s the thing - dupe brands weren’t a knight in shining armor, magnanimously addressing the consumer demand for better-priced products; they were running the exact same playbook. They paid influencers to deliver carefully scripted talking points like “This is JUST AS GOOD as the $75.00 version by blah-blah-blah.” “Honestly, I like it BETTER.” These sales pitches were written by marketing teams whose objective was to convince consumers that prestige and luxury products are a scam. And they enlisted top beauty influencers as the key drivers in a coordinated campaign to demolish confidence in premium-priced formulations… and it worked.

Thanks to deceptive, often misleading dupe marketing, we now have an entire generation of cosmetic consumers who have been brainwashed (by paid beauty influencers) to feel ripped off by prestige or luxury brands. And to believe that a dupe, which costs a fraction of the price, is a credible, almost exact replacement. These influencers were not just misleading their followers; they were paid to LIE.

Numbers back this up. According to the Better Business Bureau’s (BBB) 2025 Influencer Trust Index, a survey of more than 3,700 U.S. consumers found that 70% felt negatively toward an influencer when they discovered that brand sponsorship wasn’t disclosed. 37% said they felt outright deceived. The industry’s response was to require influencers to add the hashtags #ad or #sponsored somewhere in the video or description box. Interestingly, the same report found that 57% of consumers said those disclosure hashtags did not build trust whatsoever. Which proves you can’t solve a credibility crisis with a hashtag.

Pros Get Caught In The Crossfire

The damage didn’t stop with manipulating consumers. It followed beauty professionals into the (makeup) room and caused quite a bit of tension.

Working makeup artists outfit their kits with professional-grade products and tools that meet the performance and durability demands of their job across all media formats (photo, film, video). But clients who had spent months absorbing paid influencer content started showing up with opinions about the products we used. Why was your kit full of brands they never saw on socials? Why weren’t you using the products that their favorite beauty influencer called a “holy grail”? Back then, they didn’t realize their favorite influencers were paid for a glowing review. They trusted their opinion, like a good friend, so if the products they praised weren’t in your kit, you couldn’t be very good at your job. 🤬🤬🤬

RECAP: Consumers are walking away from the influencer-driven marketing model because they realize most top influencers are paid to sell, not inform. Their trust was broken for a paycheck.

Online Product Reviews

McKinsey’s data also shows where else a shift is happening: online product reviews on retail websites. Consumers no longer believe the “compensated” reviews by people who receive products gratis (free) because they’re on a PR list. “Verified Buyer” reviews have become the trusted source of beauty discovery for 51% of consumers surveyed. Consumers want to hear from people who PAID for the product, have used it consistently, and offer uncompensated, real-world experience in their review.

Experts Have Always Been The Best Resource - And Consumers Finally Got the Memo.

Which voices have been providing accurate, citable information through all of this? Experts with no brand compensation attached to our point of view. Which is exactly why consumers are returning to us.

Social media began with experts as its most trusted voices. Then, affiliate codes, sponsorship money, and brand deals arrived - this was the birth of the beauty influencer, where follower counts and conversion rates were favored over credentials. Scripted talking points replaced expert knowledge.
But top influencers got greedy fast, and every week they pushed another “must-have” product, which replaced the Holy Grail they insisted you had to own last week. Then, dupe culture started to gain traction, and consumers began to realize they were being sold to from both directions at once: first, they were convinced by influencers that prestige products were worth the high price tag; then, the exact same influencers were telling them those prestige products were a scam, and dupes were the way to go.

When consumers realized how they were being manipulated, the only rational response was to revolt and stop trusting reviews from beauty influencers. And when they went looking for honest advice without a sales pitch, they found themselves back where social media reviews started: with the experts. But this time, they chose us deliberately. This is not a pendulum arbitrarily swinging back to experts; it is a full-circle moment in which consumers are returning to the people who always had their best interests in mind.

They are choosing the voices of industry professionals who have watched their credentials downplayed and their expertise disregarded in favor of beauty influencers with a million followers and a brand deal. Consumers are returning to critical thinking before purchasing. They want to know how a product will enrich their lives. They want to understand how it’s made and why it works. And they want to hear it from actual experts, not influencers paid to parrot a brand’s talking points.

Many of us have spent decades building a knowledge base that cannot be faked. We know how formulas behave across skin types and in different climates, understand ingredient interactions, and know how products perform under real professional conditions: video and film production, photography (commercial & editorial), red-carpet and special events (bridal). We evaluate a product’s ability to do the job it was intended to do. PERIOD.

Brands that continue to build their marketing strategies on the influencer-driven sales model are about to experience a rude awakening.

The brands winning right now are genuinely transparent about their product development and formulation process, sourcing decisions, and pricing structures. They’re not afraid to reference their failures alongside their wins. And they actively seek validation from experts, because the credibility economy runs on exactly one thing: the truth.

#MyTwoCents

I have been in this industry long enough to remember when “influencer” wasn’t a job title. I watched brands pull budgets from consumer product education and abruptly end relationships with industry experts, redirecting their marketing dollars toward people with ring lights and large follower counts. I watched the input of industry experts systematically devalued in favor of a marketing model built on paid opinions disguised as heartfelt recommendations from trusted “friends”.

For years, I sounded like a broken record, stating clearly and repeatedly: This is not sustainable. Consumers are smarter than this. A correction is inevitable. I was told I was being naive. That expertise didn’t sell. That the era of the credentialed professional as a trusted voice was over, and I needed to make peace with it.

I would like to pause a moment to bask in being unapologetically right.
And yes, I’m smiling smugly AGAIN.😉

If you are a working beauty professional, a chemist or product developer, an educator, or anyone who has spent years building a genuine knowledge base in this industry - THIS IS YOUR MOMENT. Not to reinvent yourself into a content creator and chase an algorithm. But to show up as exactly what you already are: the credentialed, experienced voice that consumers are now actively looking to so they can make informed purchasing decisions.

Consumers are walking away from carefully lit, highly filtered talking heads regurgitating a brand’s advertising points straight from a marketing sheet. They want to hear from experts who can read a product’s ingredient list and explain whether it aligns with the brand’s marketing claims. They want to hear from experts who have actually stress-tested a product’s performance under real working conditions. They want transparency, not a sales pitch fueled by an undisclosed sponsorship.

The cosmetic industry is finally catching up to what we’ve known all along - trust the experts.

What do you think? Have you noticed the shift? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

Saying the cosmetic industry is oversaturated is an understatement; since the surge in skincare sales during the COVID lockdown, the category has spiraled out of control.

Walk into any major beauty retailer, and you’ll find shelves bulging and overflowing with serums that promise to change your skin overnight, moisturizers with ingredient lists longer than a celebrity pre-nup, and eye creams priced like a Birkin that are no more than a basic moisturizer in a smaller jar.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that slick marketing full of technical terms signals sophistication, and that a $300 price tag means the formula inside is doing something extraordinary.
Spoiler Alert: It usually isn’t. (looking directly at you, Dr. Barbara Sturm 🤨).

So when a brand has the audacity to say “fewer products, better formulas, real transparency,” it either earns serious respect or gets lost in the noise.
DIEUX has done the former (in my opinion). It has built a loyal, informed customer base and become one of the most talked-about brands in modern skincare - not because of slick marketing, not because a celebrity is fronting it, but because it actually does what it says it does.

That’s worth talking about, so let’s get into it.

The Founders

DIEUX launched in September 2020, right in the middle of a global pandemic — which, in retrospect, is either terrible timing or perfect timing depending on how many skincare TikTok rabbit holes you fell down during lockdown. The brand was built on two distinct but deeply complementary areas of expertise, and that pairing is the foundation of its success.

is the brand’s Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer, and if you follow anyone on TikTok who talks about skincare, without lying, you’ve probably encountered her. She’s a licensed esthetician with a background in media, marketing, and editorial, having spent years as an editorial director building and scaling digital audiences for some of the world’s biggest media brands before pivoting to skincare.
Before DIEUX existed, she was already running a newsletter called Nice Paper, debunking beauty myths, interviewing scientists, and building an audience that expected substance over spin. Her social media presence grew from that same foundation: genuine skepticism, science explained in plain language, and no particular interest in telling you what you want to hear. That made her a credible voice long before she was a brand founder.

Joyce de Lemos is the Co-Founder and Head of Product, a clinical cosmetic chemist with a Master’s in cosmetic science and a résumé that spans L’Oréal’s suncare division, COSMAX (one of Korea’s most formidable contract manufacturers), Kiehl’s, and SkinCeuticals. At SkinCeuticals, she was part of the team that developed the iconic Triple Lipid Restore 2:4:2 — a project that took nearly four years to complete, with an entire year devoted to the approval of a single ingredient. That’s the level of rigor she brought to DIEUX. Her presence as a co-founder is not cosmetic (no pun intended). It means the person asking hard questions about ingredients and efficacy is also the person in the lab developing the formulas. That closed loop matters more than people realize.

These two extremely intelligent, passionate people were genuinely frustrated with the state of skincare. The outcome of that frustration is the incredible standards they’ve set for every product decision they make.

The DIEUX Philosophy: Edit Your Routine, Not Your Standards

DIEUX operates on a thesis the industry finds quietly threatening: you don’t need more products, you need better ones. In a category where growth is traditionally measured by SKU count and the relentless onslaught of new launches, that’s a radical position. It’s also the correct one.

The brand’s approach centers on what they call a “moisture wardrobe”, based on the idea that your skin’s needs shift depending on season, climate, and circumstance, and that a small, thoughtfully curated collection of products can address all of those variables without requiring a twelve-step routine. This isn’t minimalism for minimalism’s sake. Its efficiency is built on clinical rigor.

Every DIEUX product undergoes clinical vetting before reaching the market. Claims are tested. Formulas are iterated, often through dozens of versions, before one is approved. When your Head of Product spent four years developing a single moisturizer at SkinCeuticals, “good enough” isn’t part of the vocabulary.

The DIEUX Products: What Doing More With Less Looks Like

Forever Eye Mask ($25.00 USD) was the product that put DIEUX on the map, and it’s a fascinating choice for a debut because it’s not a serum or a moisturizer - it’s a reusable silicone under-eye patch built to replace the avalanche of single-use under-eye masks filling trash cans.
The concept is almost insultingly simple: one pair of medical-grade silicone patches that you rinse, dry, and use again. No active ingredients, no fragrance, no drama. Just occlusion, forcing your skin to absorb more of whatever serum or moisturizer you’ve applied under it. They’ve since collaborated with brands like Violette_FR and Eckhaus Latta on limited edition versions, but the original premise hasn’t changed. It’s a sustainability play that actually works, which is truly refreshing in a category full of greenwashing claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Deliverance ($69.00 USD) is their serum, showcasing Joyce’s undeniable expertise in formulation. It’s a 3-in-1 repair serum that picked up an Allure Best of Beauty nod in 2025. This lightweight but potent multitasker soothes inflamed skin on contact, targets fine lines and wrinkles, and visibly smooths skin texture and tone. The peptide complex comes in at 5% total: 2% N-Prolyl Palmitoyl Tripeptide-56, clinically studied for visible firmness and reducing fine lines, alongside 3% Palmitoyl Hexapeptide-52, a blend of passionflower, white tea, and peptides shown to reduce the appearance of expression lines. A 1.4% encapsulated cannabinoid complex (CBD, CBG, and CBN) addresses redness and irritation, and 4% niacinamide handles tone correction. The encapsulation detail matters: these aren’t trend ingredients sprinkled in at trace levels to earn a spot on the label. They’re stabilized for actual delivery. That distinction is rarer than it should be.

Instant Angel ($45.00 USD) is the “hero” moisturizer, and it became a cultural moment when Hailey Bieber mentioned it in a 2022 skincare video, and the internet briefly lost its mind. The formula, though, was doing interesting work long before any celebrity co-sign turned it into a sellout. It’s built on a hydrolipid blend — phytosterols, free fatty acids, ceramide NG, glycerin, urea, squalane, sodium PCA, and meadowestolide — designed to mirror the composition of the skin’s own lipid barrier. This isn’t a moisturizer that makes your skin feel temporarily smooth. It works with your skin’s biology to rebuild what’s actually depleted.

If that sounds familiar, it should. As I mentioned earlier, Joyce was part of the team that built SkinCeuticals’ Triple Lipid Restore 2:4:2, long considered one of the gold standards in barrier repair and currently retailing at $155 for 1.6 oz. (more than triple the price of a similar-sized tube of Instant Angel).
Instant Angel is her modern evolution of that concept: more sophisticated, more refined, and priced at a fraction of what dermatology offices charge for its predecessor. You’re getting the chemist who helped create the benchmark, this time without the luxury markup.

Air Angel ($34.00 USD) is Instant Angel’s lighter counterpart, now formally called the Peptide Plumping Gel Cream. It shares the same hydrolipid framework but is calibrated for oilier or acne-prone skin, as well as humid climates. Clinical testing on acne-prone skin confirmed it doesn’t trigger breakouts or compromise the barrier.

Creating two versions of a moisturizer that address the same skin concerns, but are tailored to skin types, means you’re not missing key attributes from one formula to the other. You’re offered thoughtfully formulated variations based on the same core principles, which you can interchange as your skin’s immediate needs change. That’s SMART product development.

Auracle Eye Serum ($44.00 USD) arrived around the same time as Air Angel. It’s DIEUX’s dedicated eye treatment, formulated specifically for the delicate orbital area and designed for maximum results when applied under the Forever Eye Mask for a 10-minute intensive under-eye treatment.
The formula is a lightweight gel-serum with active ingredients at clinically studied doses: 1% Algae Polysaccharides Complex to visibly reduce the appearance of dark circles, 1% Algae Complex to smooth skin and reinforce its integrity, 3% Palmitoyl Tripeptide Complex to reduce puffiness and reinforce firmness, and 10% Glycerin for deep hydration.

Ethereal Cleansing Oil ($28.00 USD) is DIEUX’s cleanser for dry and sensitive skin, and a first-step cleanser for normal, combo, and oilier skin types. The formula tells you a lot about how they approach product development. Just seven ingredients - an Instant Dissolve Complex of emollient oils that melt waterproof makeup and SPF on contact, and a Double Cleanse Emulsifier Complex that allows the whole thing to rinse clean with water, leaving zero oily residue. This is important in a category full of cleansing oils and balms that just smear your makeup and SPF around, leaving a film unless you use a washcloth to remove them. Ethereal Cleansing Oil actually rinses clean, taking all the debris with it. The simplicity of the formula is kind of amazing.

Baptism Gel Cleanser ($34.00 USD) is a stand-out foaming gel cleanser built around Glycerin, Betaine, and Glycolipids — surfactants that remove makeup, sweat, and SPF without stripping the skin’s barrier or impacting your skin’s healthy pH. It’s formulated at a pH of 5.5, which is deliberate because it mimics the skin’s natural slightly acidic pH range (4.5 to 5.5). Many foaming cleansers disrupt your skin’s pH and leave it in an alkaline state - unbalanced and prone to irritation. Skin in an alkaline state is also forced to rebalance itself, and until it gets back to a comfortable pH, it ignores any skincare you apply.
Baptism is also ophthalmologist-tested, so it’s safe for removing eye makeup. That’s a lot of boxes checked for one cleanser.

Skin Mercy Recovery Cream ($38.00) is the third piece of Dieux’s moisturizer trinity. It’s a colloidal oatmeal recovery cream built specifically for sensitive and eczema-prone skin. At 1% colloidal oatmeal, it meets the FDA’s standard as a clinically proven OTC skin protectant. This is the product you reach for when your skin is irritated, sensitized, and your barrier is compromised. This formula was created with intention, not as an afterthought, trying to appeal to the current barrier balm trend.
Skin Mercy completes the warbrobe of Dieux moisturizers, thoughtfully formulated to address all your skin’s moisturizing needs, flowing seamlessly from one to the other - and always delivering the results promised.

Transparency as a Business Model

Here’s where DIEUX does something most brands talk about and almost none actually execute: real pricing transparency. On every product page, they break down exactly where your money goes — formula costs, packaging, labor, warehouse and shipping, and payment processing fees. All of it, in real numbers. You can see what the product costs to make and how the retail price was arrived at.

This isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s a structural commitment to the consumer relationship, and it fundamentally changes the conversation. When a brand shows you exactly what something costs to produce, they’re telling you the formula is doing the work — not the markup. That accountability is baked into the model by design.

The transparency extends to sourcing and ingredient provenance. DIEUX vets its suppliers’ labor practices, adheres to European regulatory standards for formulation (which are stricter than U.S. standards in several meaningful ways), and maintains a fully vegan and cruelty-free supply chain.
These commitments aren’t buried somewhere on a FAQ page. They’re woven into how the brand presents itself at every level.

Sustainability That Actually Means Something

The Forever Eye Mask is the most visible example, but DIEUX’s sustainability commitments run deeper than one hero product.
You can read their “Commitment To Making Better Trash™” HERE.

Their planned skincare studios in New York and Los Angeles for 2026 will include refill stations and upcycling labs — a signal that reducing waste is a long-term operating principle rather than a launch talking point. Interactive ingredient workshops led by their in-house formulation team will give consumers a more direct line to understanding what’s actually in what they’re buying, and why it matters.

Their development lab in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood is already working on what may become the most consequential product in the brand’s history: sunscreen. They’re experimenting with Parsol Shield, a chemical filter with FDA approval expected as early as June 2026 — which would make it the first new sunscreen filter approved for U.S. use in more than 25 years. They’re also developing nano zinc-based formulations for consumers with allergies to chemical filters. DIEUX approaching SPF with the same clinical rigor they’ve applied to everything else is a significant development in a category that has historically underdelivered on texture, inclusivity, and innovation in the U.S. market. If anyone is going to fix American sunscreen, these are the people I’m betting on.

#MyTwoCents

I have spent a significant portion of my career watching brands promise transparency and sustainability while delivering nothing more than marketing spin, mediocre formulas, and greenwashing to sound eco-conscious.
DIEUX does not do that, and I think it’s worth having a conversation about why that matters.

The skincare industry is crowded with brands built around a story first and a formula second. DIEUX inverted that model. The formula comes first, the story follows, and the transparency isn’t a marketing campaign - it’s the whole architecture of the brand. This business model is much harder to build and sustain, and the fact that they’ve done it so successfully while cultivating genuine consumer loyalty says something important about where the skincare market is headed.

Consumers have become much smarter than brands give them credit for. When a brand shows you exactly what your $69 serum costs to make, offering a genuinely sophisticated formulation, with clinically supported claims, and packaging designed to reduce waste, THAT builds incredible trust.
Many inside the industry label this as disruptive, but since when has HONESTY been disruptive? This business model should be the norm, not an anomaly.

FACT:
DIEUX has figured out how to future-proof their brand, and the rest of the industry should be taking notes - or get left behind.

What do you think? Let’s have a conversation in the comments.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

Summer is almost here, and if you’ve ever stepped out of an over-air-conditioned building into suffocating July heat and felt your skin go hot, prickly, and uncomfortable, you’re experiencing what I like to call compound dehydration. It can quickly undermine all the good intentions of your regular skincare routine. You need some additional tools to prevent this and keep your skin happily hydrated.

As temperatures climb, your body ramps up perspiration to regulate your body temperature, releasing a higher percentage of your skin’s stored water through your pores and depleting your reserves. Meanwhile, the forced-air cooling that keeps you comfortable indoors does the opposite, by removing moisture from the air and accelerating the dehydration of your skin's surface.
Your barrier is getting hit from inside and out: THAT is compound dehydration.

The smart move is to get ahead of this early with a two-part strategy: fortify your skin barrier, then flood it with additional, stable hydration. Today, I’m offering a few recommendations for mists, essences, and serums you can layer into your existing skincare routine before summer arrives to help protect your skin's moisture level. Many of my favorite targeted hydrators feature polyglutamic acid (PGA), a significant upgrade over hyaluronic acid (HA).
Let’s discuss why…

Hyaluronic Acid Is Sooooooo Yesterday

Many board-certified dermatologists and plastic surgeons, who remain up to date on advances in skincare ingredients, now recommend PGAs over HAs. Particularly because many of their clients have experienced irritation and skin-barrier damage from skincare formulations containing improperly calibrated HA molecule weights.

About HAs:
Hyaluronic Acid (HA) is allegedly capable of absorbing about 1,000 times its weight in water, but it has some nasty side effects. HAs absorbtion rate is determined by molecular weight. Some HAs have medium-to-low molecular weights and penetrate beyond the stratum corneum (skin’s surface) into the epidermis, while others with ultra-low molecular weights can penetrate even deeper into the upper dermis. If you do not apply sufficient moisture (water) on top of HAs, they will absorb your skin’s subcutaneous water reserves, dehydrating it as the molecules swell, disrupting and damaging your skin barrier.

About PGAs:
Polyglutamic Acid (PGA) is a fermented soybean peptide that holds approximately 5,000 times its weight in water, far surpassing the water retention capacity of HAs.
The biggest difference is that PGAs remain safely on the skin's surface, primarily in the stratum corneum, forming an occlusive, hydrating film that locks in moisture and significantly slows water loss throughout the day. For dehydrated skin with a compromised barrier, PGA’s surface-level molecular structure provides immediate hydration while protecting against environmental stress. PGA also stimulates your skin’s natural moisturizing factors, helping it maintain hydration on its own, making it far more effective than HAs for safe, lasting results.

What to Look For

From all the clinical data I’ve researched, the winning combination for dehydrated skin with a compromised skin barrier is:

• Polyglutamic Acid for superior moisture retention

• Ceramides to rebuild your barrier

• Glycerin to draw and bind moisture from the atmosphere to the skin

Products combining these three powerhouse ingredients address both dehydration and compromised skin barrier function, delivering significant hydration that actually lasts rather than evaporating hours after application and cannibalizing your skin’s moisture reserve.

First, An Emergency Treatment:

La Roche Posay - Cicaplast B5 Spray ($25.00 USD) is a relatively new product, but it has already made a BIG impact in the treatment of compromised skin barriers. The targeted barrier-calming and repair spray contains 5% panthenol and madecassoside, a powerful soothing compound derived from the Centella Asiatica (Tiger Grass) plant. Madecassoside is used extensively in K-Beauty skincare and is known for its potent anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and skin-barrier-strengthening properties.

The Cicaplast B5 Spray also features a mineral complex containing copper and manganese, which are highly anti-inflammatory and reduce redness, swelling, and discomfort on contact while controlling inflammation and accelerating wound healing. Many dermatologists recommend the Cicaplast B5 Spray for patients whose skin has been sensitized by reactions to highly active skincare products (acids, retinoids, etc.) and invasive in-office procedures (lasers, microneedling, peels, etc.). The spray provides immediate soothing relief while initiating barrier repair.

My Recommendations for Advanced Hydration

(listed by price, not ranking)

The INKEY List - Polyglutamic Acid Serum ($16.00 USD) delivers 3% polyglutamic acid and glycerin in a lightweight, silky formula, widely available at Sephora, Ulta, and major US retailers. It holds 5 times more moisture than hyaluronic acid, creating a breathable, protective film that slows moisture evaporation throughout the day.

EXTRA CREDIT: This serum is inexpensive enough to cocktail with your favorite body lotion/cream to SUPERCHARGE its effectiveness at handling dehydrated skin on your body.

Prequel - Multi-Quench Plumping Hydration Serum ($28.00 USD) features dual-weight polyglutamic acid, glycerin, and ectoin, a powerful osmolyte that protects skin from environmental stress while supporting barrier health. The dual-weight PGA formula works at multiple levels to provide both immediate and lasting hydration. The focused formula omits unnecessary ingredients, making it ideal for sensitive or compromised skin.

Then I Met You - The Giving Essence ($53.00) combines polyglutamic acid with galactomyces, niacinamide, and antioxidant-rich berry extracts. The PGA works on the surface to deliver long-lasting moisture retention, while the other ingredients nourish, brighten, and strengthen the skin barrier.

Typology Plumping Serum with 3% PGA + Red Seaweed Extract ($55.00 USD) is a highly concentrated serum that applies more like an essence (very aqueous and fluid), and sets as a moisture-binding film on the skin’s surface, while the red seaweed extract stimulates natural ceramide synthesis. This formula is specifically formulated for significantly dehydrated mature skin.

#MyTwoCents

Over the past few years, an alarming number of licensed skincare “experts” (dermatologists, plastic surgeons) on social media platforms have shifted from peer-reviewed citations to validate their product recommendations, and have discovered the monetization ($$$) enjoyed by beauty influencers. Many of their posts are now motivated by brand sponsorships and affiliate links - not clinical scientific data. They use their licenses as “expert” validation to promote whichever brand is willing to cut them a check, not because the product is purposeful and effective, but because THEY ARE GETTING PAID.
And a disturbing number of them don’t disclose this properly.

If licensed skincare professionals are selling out for cash and clicks, the question becomes: Who do you trust?

THE DATA. PERIOD.
Do what I do and perform some research before you consider making a purchase. If a brand can’t support its marketing claims with peer-reviewed clinical data, walk away. And if you see the words “proprietary blend,” treat that as a red flag. It’s a marketer’s trick to avoid transparency about ingredients.

Trust the data — NOT the marketing.
Since 2005, IN MY KIT® (IMK) has been committed to providing the most factually sound reviews and product recommendations for beauty professionals and enthusiasts.

• IMK posts are not sponsored.

• IMK does not use affiliate codes or links.

• All links have been screened to find the best prices and avoid counterfeits.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

New NielsenIQ data confirms what many of us suspected: TikTok Shop is EXTREMELY successful.
It generated nearly $1 billion in US beauty sales over the last 52 weeks, making it the eighth largest health and beauty retailer in the country.

Eighth. Largest. Beauty. Retailer.

That puts it ahead of most regional chains, specialty boutiques, and every beauty brand that ever convinced itself a well-designed website counted as a retail strategy.
And TikTok Shop didn’t earn that ranking the way traditional retailers do - through decades of shelf and gondola real estate negotiations, carefully curated end caps, and in-store marketing activations.

It got there through a smartphone screen and an algorithm. You see something, you want it, you buy it …without ever leaving the app.
That’s the whole model, and boy oh boy, does it work!

We’ve already covered what TikTok Shop means for brands and consumers. But this number changes the tone of that conversation. A lot of established beauty brands have been treating TikTok Shop like a marketing experiment - a place to build awareness, not necessarily sell product.
To the brands still waiting to see the impact of TikTok shop, that ship has sailed. Nearly a billion dollars in annual sales doesn’t leave much room for your wait-and-see argument.

The brands that boldly adopted this emerging retail platform early on now have the advantage. And the ones still deliberating? Their caution has caused them to fall behind.

It’s Not Just About TikTok

The bigger picture here is what TikTok Shop represents within a broader pattern. For decades, the beauty industry was built around physical retail - department store counters, specialty chains, and the pharmacy aisle. Then Amazon showed up and rewrote the rules. Now it’s platforms like TikTok where shopping and entertainment happen in the same place at the same time. What you discover, what you buy, and what you think about a brand are all being shaped by the same algorithm - and that algorithm doesn’t care about your brand’s heritage or your relationship with a department or specialty store buyer.

The brands doing well on TikTok Shop aren’t necessarily the biggest or most established brands. They’re the ones who moved fast, kept prices accessible enough to drive impulse purchases, and let creators actually speak about their products — not hand them a marketing script to “control” the messaging. They’ve harnessed the real competitive advantage of TikTok Shop, and it’s showing in the sales numbers.

The Conversation Brands Keep Avoiding

The most common pushback I hear from established brands is the fear of upsetting their retail partners. If they start selling regularly on TikTok Shop, often at discount price points to drive impulse buys, will Sephora or Ulta push back? Will they lose shelf space? It’s a fair concern. Those are important relationships.

But here’s what’s actually happening: Sephora and Ulta are already actively responding. Both are building out their own online selling strategies and creator partnerships so they can compete in an environment that’s moving faster than traditional retail was ever designed to. That tension legacy brands are afraid of creating? It already exists. So, waiting won’t make it go away; it just means sitting on the sidelines while your competitors make sales.

The smarter approach is to build a TikTok Shop presence that is specifically for the platform — smaller size items at a lower entry price to introduce new customers to your brand, rather than competing directly with what’s on the shelf at Sephora. Done well, TikTok Shop attracts new customers, and some of them eventually become loyal buyers who will walk into a store to explore your brand's offerings in person.

The beauty industry has navigated many major retail shifts by adapting — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. TikTok Shop just handed us very clear data on where the industry’s future stands. Fearing or ignoring this retail channel’s viability is a major tactical error. And your competitors willing to take the leap of faith will be the winners.

MyTwoCents

Nearly a billion dollars. I’ve been watching this industry navigate every major retail shift for four decades, and that number stopped me cold.
TikTok Shop isn’t a trend anymore — it’s infrastructure. And the beauty industry has a long, uncomfortable history of ignoring infrastructure changes until their bottom line is affected, and it’s too late to recover completely.

The brands I worry about aren’t the small indies. They’re scrappy by necessity and tend to figure it out because they live in survival mode. It’s the established players - the ones with legacy retail relationships, lengthy approval chains, and quarterly targets that identify bold moves as dangerous. They are most at risk here. Caution is understandable. But caution comes with a cost, and right now that cost is a loss of market share.

I don’t think TikTok Shop is the end of traditional retail. But it is a clear signal that consumer shopping habits have evolved, and brands that refuse to evolve will suffer the consequences.

What do you think? Let’s have a conversation in the comment section.

Let’s talk about something that happens to professional makeup artists with alarming regularity. A photographer, a production, a brand, or a celebrity requests our skills, time, and resources. In exchange, we’re not offered a fair rate, we’re not offered payment at all - we’re offered “exposure” as compensation.

If exposure paid the rent, I would have been living in a luxurious Manhattan penthouse decades ago.

Let’s Define Who We Are

We invest in training and building our first working kit. We build a resume, a portfolio, and a client base. We develop a reputation in the industry. Lawyers, doctors, and other trade workers do the same - they invest in training and the tools required to be paid for their services.
We’re no different.

Yet there’s an interesting disconnect: nobody debates whether someone is a “professional” lawyer or a “professional” doctor. You don’t become a lawyer or doctor by cosplaying one on social media. There’s only one path: education, apprenticeship, and enough experience to justify charging for your services.

But the profession of makeup artist is perceived differently.
Social media changed that.

Beauty influencers and content creators apply makeup to themselves on camera, while identifying as makeup artists without the training, investment, or working experience that qualify someone to charge for these services. They demonstrate makeup application on their own faces, making it look simple and accessible - something anyone can do. But applying makeup to yourself and applying it to paying clients with diverse face shapes, features, skin tones, and skin types requires a completely different skill set.

Reality Check: Becoming a member of the Makeup Artist profession requires significant financial investment, training, and work experience, so that applying makeup to paying clients can become a primary source of income. PERIOD.

When people without those qualifications use our professional title, it fundamentally weakens the industry’s understanding of what we do. They’ve framed makeup as entertainment or a hobby instead of a skilled trade. And that perception directly impacts our ability to demand fair compensation. Because if applying makeup looks that simple, why should you be paid?

Your Work Is Part of The Vision, And It Has Value

When someone asks you to work for free, they’re asking you to subsidize their project at your expense. They’re asking you to use your professional expertise to create a fundamental part of their final product.

Look at a feature article in a lifestyle magazine (print or online). The photographer and art director set the tone for the story. What’s in it? The model or celebrity’s face, skin, hair, and makeup. Our work is not an inconsequential decoration; it is part of the storytelling. The publication is paying for the creation of this image. And your work helped turn the concept into a reality. You deserve to be paid.

Look at a red carpet. The celebrity is the focus. The makeup is reported on and often emulated. Your contribution is not optional - you are part of the creative process. You deserve to be paid.

Look at a commercial, TV show, or film. Production has a storyboard that maps out a vision, including how the actor(s) look. Makeup isn’t an optional detail; it’s part of what the director and producer have envisioned and approved. You deserve to be paid.

When you’re contacted for a project and told makeup isn’t budgeted for, they’re probably lying. They wouldn’t be requesting your talent on their project if your contribution weren’t an important part of the finished product. They need you, while pretending your contribution is optional.

The Hypocrisy Is Built In

Here’s where the hypocrisy becomes infuriating: the people asking you to work for free are getting paid.

A photographer reaches out to book you for a shoot and says, “We have no budget for makeup, but you’ll get a credit and exposure.” Ask the same photographer if they’re shooting this for “credit and exposure”. Doubtful.

That photographer is charging the client. They’re making money. Yet you’re supposed to work for free?

A celebrity’s manager or publicist requests that you do their client’s makeup for a red-carpet event or press tour - for free. They frame it as though the “honor” of working on their famous client is compensation enough. But aren’t they paid by the celebrity for their work? Yet you’re supposed to work for free?

Ask a lawyer for 40 hours of legal work for free in exchange for “exposure”.
The answer will be NO, followed by a side-eye and an incredulous chuckle. No explanation needed. Professional services cost money. Skilled work requires compensation. And a lawyer, even one who only recently passed the bar exam, is paid as a law clerk while they build their career. They respect their investment and demand compensation for their work.

The person requesting your services is being paid. They’re disrespecting the investment you’ve made to be qualified for this work. Why do they assume you’ll work for free?

The Investment They Intentionally Ignore

A career as a professional makeup artist requires an investment of tens of thousands of dollars just to get started. That investment deserves respect. Your compensation isn’t greed - it’s honoring what you’ve already invested in yourself.

Once your career is in motion, a professional makeup artist is continuously reinvesting.

Products get used up, disposables end up in the trash, tools wear down, break, or become outdated. We as professionals are required to constantly replenish, replace, and update our kits. My two makeup kits, an SFX kit, brushes, tools, ancillary products, disposables, lighting, etc., are insured for $250,000.00 - because that’s what it would cost to replace what I’ve built over decades of work.

When someone asks you to work for free, they’re asking you to absorb the cost of your time, your talent, and your materials. They benefit while you work at a deficit. They’re asking you to disrespect the investment you’ve already made in becoming qualified to do this work.

This Has Become Systemic

This isn’t accidental. Photographers and producers didn’t “forget” to budget for makeup. They’ve coded our work in the spreadsheets as non-essential and less worthy of compensation.

A photographer charges thousands for a single shoot (sometimes tens of thousands). A director negotiates a contract with a substantial payout. But when that same group of creatives has to budget for makeup, suddenly there’s no more money. Suddenly, your contribution is considered optional or of little value.

It’s not because your work is less important. It’s because the industry refuses to categorize it for what it is - integral to creating the finished product. And the “exposure” argument is the industry’s longest-standing scam. They continue to use it because they’ve been getting away with it for far too long.

Typically, when the next paying gig comes up, they hire the person who refused to do the gig you did for free. That person has made it clear that their contribution is valuable. You took the risk, worked for free, hoping for a break, and then the artist who refused to be taken advantage of is rewarded.

It sucks, but that’s reality.

You’re Not Being Difficult, You’re Just Saying NO

This is the part most makeup artists don’t realize - you’re allowed to say no.
There are too many high-profile makeup educators who scare artists into accepting free work, claiming it’s the only way to build a career. Many of these trusted educators have an agenda - but I’ll discuss more about that in another article.

But even more than that, if others on the same project are being paid, you MUST say no to working for free.

Every time a professional accepts free work, knowing others are being compensated, you’re telling the industry that your contribution is worthless. You’re agreeing that your skills, your investment, and your years of experience don’t deserve proper compensation. And when you agree to that, it becomes impossible for every other professional makeup artist to request fair rates.

If they claim they can’t afford to pay you, politely turn them down and tell them you’d love to work with them - when they have a budget. That’s not shady, that’s business.

If they push back, call you difficult, or expect gratitude for offering you the “opportunity”, you know what you’re dealing with: someone who doesn’t respect your skill, doesn’t value your time, and isn’t worth working with.

To the New Professionals

If you’re early in your career and you’ve already said yes to free work (for exposure, for a credit, for the experience), I’m not here to make you feel bad about it. Starting out is hard. You’re building your portfolio, making connections, trying to prove yourself.

You deserve monetary compensation for your work. Not exposure. Not line credits. PAYMENT. Because accepting fair payment isn’t about greed, it’s about respecting the investment you’ve made to become qualified to do this job in the first place.

By insisting on being paid for your work, you’re telling the industry that you understand your own value. And that clarity protects this profession for everyone who comes after you.

#MyTwoCents

When a production company contacts a photographer, a director, or a set designer, they aren’t asked to work for free. Everyone knows: professional work requires payment.

Professional makeup artists deserve the same respect. We’ve spent years building our careers and honing our craft. We provide skills that are necessary, not optional.
The question isn’t about our value. We know our value. The question is: why do people (who know better) feel justified in disrespecting us and devaluing our contribution?

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate.
Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

Exosomes are having a moment. They’re trending on social media, major suppliers have launched new exosome ingredients at In-cosmetics Global 2026, and consumers are convinced they’re the next frontier in skincare.

Here’s the thing: the FDA hasn’t approved exosomes for cosmetic use (yet).
Read that again.

The cosmetic marketing machine is moving at breakneck speed. Science is moving slowly. That gap between what’s being promised and what’s actually been proven is the real story—and it’s dangerous.

What’s Happening - Right Now

Google searches for “exosomes” have risen 206% globally over the past 12 months. Exosome treatments in medispas and dermatologists’ offices are up 162%.

Recently, at In-Cosmetics Global 2026 (an annual industry trade show featuring major ingredient suppliers), DSM-Firmenich launched its cosmetic exosome ingredient, Exovive Lift, claiming a 30% boost in elasticity and the equivalent of 8 years of age reversal—both achieved after just two months.
Symrise, another major global ingredient supplier, introduced its own exosomes for deep skin regeneration.

These are major players, making very specific claims.
But here’s the head-scratcher: Cosmetic exosomes are a market that technically doesn’t exist yet, because nothing’s FDA-approved. Yet the category is already projected to hit $26.6 billion by 2035.

Wait, what? 😳

That’s not healthy industry momentum. That’s the cosmetics industry doing what it does best: marketing innovation faster than science can validate it.

Why These Claims Don’t Hold Up (Yet)

The “30% elasticity improvement” claim is based on two months of data. Credible skin elasticity claims typically require at least a 12+ week trial. And we don’t know whether those gains hold beyond two months or revert when you stop using the product, because DSM-Firmenich hasn’t disclosed that information.

The “equivalent to eight years of aging reduction” claim was also measured over the same two month in-house study. Claims of long term skin age reduction require studies of 6 months or longer.

There has been zero independent third-party validation, but DSM-Firmenich still claims this ingredient can boost skin elasticity 30% and reverse 8 years of skin aging in only eight weeks. 🤔
These claims feel vastly overstated without proper independant clinical scientific testing.

There’s also a regulatory gap: DSM-Firmenich is making serious claims of specific percentage improvements and years of age reversal, in a product category the FDA has not yet approved for cosmetic use. They’re saying “trust our in-house data” while regulators are still saying “we haven’t reviewed or cleared this yet.”

Even if DSM-Firmenich’s exosomes work, that doesn’t mean we understand how exosomes function in skincare broadly or what the long-term effects they have. One company’s internal study doesn’t validate a whole ingredient category that lacks independent clinical evidence and FDA approval.

I understand the market incentive - DSM-Firmenich just launched Exovive Lift, and there’s enormous pressure to make your mark within a new ingredient category before competitors enter and flood the space. If you want to secure your advantage, you have to make aggressive marketing claims, even if they aren’t properly validated.

Exosomes Have Already Hit The Market

Meet SickScience Labs.
They’ve built an entire skincare brand around proprietary exosome technology called NX35, and they’re selling it at Ulta Beauty, a mainstream retailer, without basic FDA oversight. They claim clinical validation from 8-week studies (there’s that 2-month thing again 🤨) involving 50 volunteers. Sounds solid, right? Except that those studies live only on their website. Not in peer-reviewed journals. Not anywhere you can actually dig into them, replicate them, or have someone independent verify them. And they’re marketing exosomes for topical skincare with zero FDA approval, zero long-term safety data, and zero established protocols.

So basically, they’ve built a brand around an evolving technology and decided to sell it before the FDA or any third-party scientific data validates its safety.

I say this as someone who deeply cares about consumer protection - SickScience isn’t nessesarily hiding anything. They’re just not being transparent. They call it “proprietary technology,” which is industry code for, “we’re not going to be clear about actual ingredients or percentages”, and , “we’re not letting anyone outside our company look at the data.”

If you’re thinking about buying an exosome product, understand you’re not just trying something new. You’re paying to become a test subject. There’s no oversight, no standard protocols - just a slick marketing story moving faster than science can validate its safety.

SickScience might have some solid in-house data, but they’re making a lot of specific claims based on those preliminary results. They’ve bet a whole brand on being first to market with a new ingredient category before regulators and independent scientists can catch up.
That’s a problem.

Facts Worth Knowing

No FDA approval. Zero. And the FDA has issued warning letters to companies making exosome claims. Despite this, products are flooding the market.

Exosomes are highly unstable. Without standardized manufacturing guidelines, the exosomes in one batch might not match the next. You could be buying a product with inconsistent or unstable active ingredients every time you repurchase.

The science behind exosomes is real, but it’s early. Exosomes have been proven to mediate cell-to-cell communication - that’s not hype. But an ingredient that shows “compelling scientific possibilities” and one that is “clinically proven for skincare” are two entirely different things. The claims lack rigorous, long-term testing for cosmetic applications.

The professional-versus-consumer divide is also quite blurry. In-office exosome treatments applied by trained practitioners are gatekept because they understand that the technology is still evolving. Consumer products are not. Regulatory clarity on the use of exosomes in topical skin treatments hasn’t been established.

How to Navigate This

If you’re a professional:

• Don’t take the brand’s word for it. Ask for third-party clinical data—not just supplier studies.

• Understand your liability here: if something goes sideways with an exosome treatment because the scientific data was questionable, you’re the one answering to the client complaint (or legal action), not the brand’s marketing department.

• Your job is to be skeptical of non-validated technology on your client’s behalf. That skepticism is what protects you AND them.

If you’re a consumer look for these red flags:

• Overtly dramatic before-and-afters (usually digitally manipulated).

• Influencers who mysteriously forget to mention they’re being paid for their glowing review.

• Claims about “cellular-level regeneration” with zero independant clinical evidence to back them up.

• Ask where the exosomes come from—plant, human, lab-grown? The source should be clearly stated in the marketing copy.

• See the term “proprietary formula”? Step away. That usually means the brand won’t be transparent about sources or percentages.

• If the brand’s clinical studies exist only in-house and are not published in journals, that’s a warning sign. Important breakthroughs get published in scientific journals so that everyone can see them.

#MyTwoCents

Exosomes aren’t going anywhere. The science is promising, the market demand is real, and there’s genuine potential here. But right now, people are adopting this faster than we have answers. Some of what’s on the market will turn out to be overpromising. Some might actually deliver. We won’t know until there’s FDA approval for the category and actual clinical third-party scientific data to back it up.

What concerns me isn’t exosomes themselves. It’s the pace. We’re watching major suppliers launch ingredients with specific claims while the regulatory framework is still being written. The gap between what’s being promised and what’s been proven is dangerously wide.

Patience is a feature, not a limitation. This story will keep unfolding. Your skin can wait. The smart play? Stay curious, stay skeptical, and don’t let slick marketing stop your critical thinking.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate.
Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

Conglomerates Built Their Empire

For decades, the cosmetic industry operated like a fortress controlled by a handful of absolutely massive corporations. We’re talking about companies so big they don’t just own a few brands—they own entire portfolios of brands (makeup, skincare, haircare, fragrance, beauty tools).

L’Oréal alone owns Maybelline, Urban Decay, NYX, Lancôme, Giorgio Armani Beauty, Yves Saint Laurent Beauty, and dozens more. Estée Lauder owns Estée Lauder, Clinique, MAC, Bobbi Brown, La Mer, Aveda, Smashbox, Too Faced, Origins, and on and on. LVMH—the luxury conglomerate that owns Louis Vuitton and Dior—also owns massive beauty portfolios including Dior, Givenchy, Fenty, and more. Even Coty, the company most people have never heard of, owns Kylie Cosmetics, Rimmel, Covergirl, Sally Hansen, and a bunch of other household names.

Each brand had its own positioning, its own customer base, its own identity (sort of). But they all fed into the same massive distribution machine owned by the parent company.

That distribution machine was the real power. These conglomerates owned relationships with every major retailer - department stores, specialty retailers like Sephora, Ulta, Blue Mercury, and Space NK. They controlled what got shelf space, what got promotion…what got seen.
Most don’t have manufacturing capability, although the global giants like L’Oréal and Coty do have some in-house production. Instead, they used their massive purchasing power with contract manufacturers to negotiate prices that indie brands couldn’t compete with. When you’re ordering millions of units across dozens of brands, you have leverage. You could negotiate prices with suppliers that indie brands couldn’t even dream of.

This system worked because retail was the only real battlefield. Whoever controlled shelf space controlled the market. And the conglomerates controlled most of it.

“If You Can’t Beat Them, Buy Them”

But conglomerates didn’t just maintain dominance through infrastructure. They did it through acquisition. When an indie beauty brand would suddenly take off, when some founder’s skincare line or new makeup product started gaining traction, the conglomerates had a simple response: buy them.

This became an inside joke in the industry. Estée Lauder Companies essentially made it their unofficial motto: “If you can’t beat them, buy them.”
When an indie brand appears to have solid momentum and its valuation is rising steadily, corporations come knocking with acquisition offers. Sometimes it was generous. Sometimes it was take-it-or-we’ll-muscle-you-out. Either way, the threat got neutralized. The brand either became part of the portfolio or disappeared.

It was actually a brilliant strategy. Why let a disruptive new brand steal a portion of your market share when you could simply acquire it, fold the brand into your portfolio, and control its growth? The acquisition strategy meant that successful indie brands had a very short window of independence. You’d either get acquired or you’d get out-marketed by corporate budgets.

This worked for more than three decades. It kept the conglomerates on top. It made them seem invincible. It meant that innovation and disruption in cosmetics were always, eventually, absorbed by corporations.

Then TikTok Shop changed everything.

The Disruption Nobody Saw Coming

TikTok Shop made it possible to build a multimillion-dollar indie beauty brand without needing to convince a Sephora buyer to stock your product. Suddenly, the entire system that gave conglomerates their power became irrelevant.

You didn’t need to develop retail relationships anymore. You didn’t need massive capital. You needed a product, praised by a popular beauty influencer, on a platform where millions of people could discover and buy it without ever leaving the app.

For the first time, an indie brand could build scale without being dependent on the conglomerate retail ecosystem. And more importantly, the acquisition strategy stopped working. Why would an indie founder sell their DTC brand to a conglomerate when they could grow it independently on TikTok Shop, keep the full margin, and maintain creative control? The leverage flipped.

Numbers Don’t Lie

NielsenIQ dropped its 2025 report, and the numbers were pretty wild.
Indie beauty grew 22.3% last year. The big players? 6.1%, actually down from 7.4% the year before. And that gap is only getting wider.

Fragrance is where you really see it happening. Indie fragrances jumped 46.3% while the conglomerate-owned houses grew just 11.4%. That’s not a small difference. Indie skincare, makeup, haircare, and fragrance are growing at double-digit rates, while legacy brands are barely hitting 5%.
Now, I don’t want to mislead you - the big conglomerates still own about 64% of the color cosmetic market and 60% of the skincare market, which sounds huge. But controlling the majority of sales doesn’t mean you’ve got the culture on your side anymore.

When you dig into where these sales are actually happening, the picture gets even clearer. Online beauty sales are growing 9x faster than in-store, and indie brands have figured out how to win there. Amazon has gained 7.3 points of market share since 2021.
But TikTok Shop? That’s the real game-changer. It’s now the fastest-growing beauty retailer NielsenIQ has ever tracked - with beauty representing nearly 80% of its U.S. sales.
Read that again - nearly 80% of TikTok Shop U.S. sales are cosmetic adjacent.

Here’s why TikTok Shop matters so much: you see a product in a TikTok video, you like it, and you can literally buy it in the same app without ever leaving. For indie brands, this is perfect. A beauty influencer demos your product, gives it a glowing review, and a consumer sees it and can buy it instantly without leaving the app. No retail relationships needed. No distributor in the middle. No corporate approval required.

For the big brands? They’re trapped. They can do social media marketing, sure. But they still have distributors and retail partners who control how their products reach stores. A conglomerate brand can’t cannibalize its Sephora sales by pushing too hard on TikTok Shop—that would upset its retail partners. They’re playing on both boards at once, which means they can’t go all-in on the channels where indie brands are winning.

The Constraint on Big Brands

Here’s what I find most interesting about this: conglomerates could compete with indies on DTC and TikTok Shop. They have the budget, the expertise, ALL the tools. But they can’t, because their retail partners - Sephora, Ulta, department stores - are too valuable to lose. Push too hard on TikTok Shop, and those retailers will retaliate. They’ll cut shelf space, stop promoting your brand, or drop it entirely.

Indies don’t have that problem. They have no retail relationships to protect, no retail partners to keep happy. They can put 100% of their energy into TikTok Shop and move at lightning speed. Conglomerates have to play it safe because they’re answerable to retailers and distributors.

Corporate cosmetics painted themselves into a corner. Their biggest advantage, retail control, has become their biggest constraint.

What People Actually Want From Brands Now

The market share numbers are one thing, but here’s the part that actually explains what’s happening: how people think about brands has genuinely shifted, and it’s not going back.

Beauty used to be about wanting something you couldn’t have. You bought Dior makeup because it was aspirational, expensive, and owning it meant you had status (genuine or perceived). You trusted Skinceuticals because it sounded scientific. The whole industry was built on prestige and slick marketing—the brand told you who you wanted to be, and you bought in.

But somewhere along the way, that stopped being enough for many people. Now, cosmetic consumers - and this cuts across every age group - want to know how a product will enrich their life or make it easier, and they want to know who’s actually behind the brand. They want authenticity. They want to feel like the person who created it actually uses it and believes in it. They want to support the founders of indie brands they’ve discovered and gotten to know on social platforms, rather than giving their money to faceless corporations that flood retail shelves with an endless sea of redundancy.

It’s about developing a parasocial relationship with the founder(s) and the influencers who promote them. It’s about joining that brand’s online community, not just buying more products. It’s a potent formula that is driving massive sales.

When you see an influencer test a skincare product on their actual face in their actual bathroom, that reads as real in a way a multi-million dollar ad campaign in a lifestyle magazine never will. When a founder jumps into the comments to respond to questions or concerns, it feels like they’re “friends” who really care. When an indie brand says, “we’re a small team solving a specific challenge brought to our attention by the community,” it hits differently than a corporate marketing machine pushing that their product is “trusted by dermatologists worldwide.” <insert yawn>

The big brands know this is happening, and some of them are trying to keep up by creating indie-looking marketing or investing in influencer partnerships. But here’s the thing: today’s educated consumer can smell the cosplay a mile away. They know when a brand is owned by a huge conglomerate, but “acting” indie. And for more and more people, that knowledge is what drives their purchasing decisions to legit indie brands.

The conglomerates built loyalty by making you aspire to something. The indie brands are building loyalty by making you feel something.

What This Means

For legacy brands: growth is stuck. Margins are still healthy, but that growth trajectory everyone’s been riding? Gone. Right now, money is flowing away from them.

The conglomerate response has been acquisition - buy the threat. But the problem is this: the moment you add corporate infrastructure to an indie brand, you kill what made it valuable. The founder leaves. The authenticity evaporates.

For indie founders: building a brand on a DTC sales model, selling exclusively through a social platform (and your website), could be incredibly lucrative, given the excellent margins. But can you cut through the noise on TikTok Shop and be seen?

For beauty consumers: you’re winning, for now. More choices, more (perceived) authentic voices, more products that might actually enrich your life. The tradeoff: some viral indie brands are waaaaaaaaay overhyped, and the line between actual authenticity and performative authenticity gets blurrier all the time.

#MyTwoCents

This shift is permanent.
We’re watching the power of a $650+ billion global beauty and personal care industry be redistributed, in real time. The “If you can’t beat them, buy them” strategy worked for thirty years, but not anymore.

What made conglomerates powerful—their scale, their retail relationships, their ability to eliminate threats—now works against them. It slows them down. It constrains them.

The brands that will actually thrive in the next five years are the ones that offer solutions and build authentic relationships with their customers. Conglomerates could win if they let acquired brands stay independent. Most won’t. They’ll optimize and integrate away the authenticity that made the acquisition valuable in the first place (looking right at you, Estee Lauder).

So yeah, the indie insurgency we’re witnessing through TikTok Shop? It’s not slowing down any time soon.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

A few weeks ago, I was benchmarking some premium skincare for a development project, and something struck me: some brands spend years perfecting their most active formulations, then package them cheaply, which pretty much guarantees those actives will degrade before the consumer gets their money’s worth.

Example: You’re selling a $185-per-ounce Vitamin C serum in an inexpensive, generic amber glass dropper bottle that begins to oxidize and lose potency the moment it’s opened and exposed to air? And don’t get me started on the contamination issues with the dropper (pipette) being exposed to bacteria with every application, then put back in the bottle.

The thing that infuriates me most? It’s not accidental. It’s deliberate.

The Chemistry Aspect

If you work in product development, you already know this part. Retinoids (vitamin A derivatives), vitamin C, high-concentration peptides, antioxidant plant extracts, fermented complexes, enzymes—these ingredients don’t sit still. They’re active. Light-sensitive. Oxygen-reactive. Air-reactive. They degrade. They oxidize. They break down.

Most premium skincare relies on at least one of these actives, often a carefully calibrated cocktail of a few. And when you’re formulating with them, you’re not just mixing ingredients; you're making a commitment to stability. Your mindset should be, “This formula needs to remain potent and effective from the moment it leaves our facility to the moment a consumer uses the last drop.”
That should be the implicit promise to justify the premium price point.

So you put it in a dropper bottle? 😠
Every time you open a dropper bottle and remove the pipette (the glass dropper), you’re introducing air into the bottle, causing oxidation, and then returning that pipette to the bottle after it has come into contact with your skin (fingers, palm, face).
So you put it in an open-mouth jar? 😠
That jar of premium moisturizer on the bathroom shelf, which you open twice a day, is exposed to light and humidity. Then there’s the bacteria from your fingers scooping out the product, and environmental particles going straight into the open, exposed jar. So you end up with a product that’s actively degrading the first time you open it, and every single time you use it.

Why Brands Make This Choice

Look, I get the business side of this. Opaque UV-protective and airless containers are more expensive. But when you’re already positioned at a premium price point, more protective packaging choices should be the standard, not optional.
But those additional manufacturing dollars spent on better protective packaging reduce profit margins. And that’s where brands cut corners.

But there’s also the aesthetic disconnect, which I find amusing - well, annoying.
Since when has a generic glass dropper bottle or basic jar you can pick up through LotionCrafters or MakingCosmetics evoke feelings of a premium product experience? But brands are charging upwards of $200 for an active serum or moisturizer in a generic package that does very little to preserve the product's stability or efficacy.
Yes, I’m looking at you, Skinceuticals, and don’t get me started about the Dr. Sturm bullsh*t - a wildly over-priced $350 HA serum (one ounce) in a generic glass dropper bottle with a cheap white plastic top.

Then there’s the accountability angle.
A consumer starts using an expensive skincare product in compromised packaging and, within weeks, notices diminishing results. Most brands will deny accountability, even though they know their packaging wasn’t ideal for the formula.
They blame the consumer: maybe you didn’t store it correctly, maybe your skin type doesn’t respond to these actives, maybe it’s just not the right formula for you…
Blah, blah, blah. 🙄
The brand’s packaging choice never seems to enter the conversation. Which is convenient for them, but frustrating AF for those of us forking over lots of $$$ for an allegedly stable, premium formula.

What Actually Works

A bottle or jar made of opaque UV protective glass, an aluminum bottle or tube, airless pump bottles, jars, and tubes - these options are not only functional in preserving product efficacy but can also be decorated to look premium while protecting the formula inside. Yes, this packaging costs more, but it says: we care about the stability of our formula and the investment you’ve made in our product.

Allies of Skin get this right.
Sophisticated, highly active formulations at a premium price point. BUT… their highly active serums are packaged in beautifully decorated, mirror-finish, opaque glass bottles with pumps - not cheap dropper bottles. Even their daily moisturizer comes in a tube with an airless pump, because they decided the formula’s integrity matters more than saving $$$ by putting it in a generic glass jar with an open mouth.

It’s a business choice that says: We spent time making sure this formulation met our standards. We’re going to spend the additional manufacturing dollars to ensure it survives the journey to the consumer intact and remains efficacious to the last drop. That’s the proper way to position premium-priced active skincare.
Not “We know it looks basic because we spent all the money on what’s inside, not the packaging”, which is a cop-out and a bunch of marketing bullsh*t to justify better margins and higher profits.

Allies of Skin’s packaging tells us, “This formula will remain intact at full efficacy from first use to last, because we designed it correctly.” Premium brands, like Allies, understand that protective packaging isn’t an add-on. It’s part of the formulation promise. And they’re STILL profitable. They’re STILL successful. So, that argument about cost-cutting being necessary for margins? I’m not sure it holds up when you look at brands that refuse to make that trade-off.

The Thing About Formulation

Here’s what I keep coming back to: when you’re a product developer working with unstable actives, the packaging isn’t a separate or secondary consideration. It’s part of the process. You develop the formula, then package it in a component that keeps the ingredients protected and active.

A dropper bottle and an open jar are poor development choices for highly active premium skincare. They’re choices that accept ingredient degradation as acceptable collateral damage. That might be acceptable if you’re selling a product at a much lower price point. But when you’re asking someone to spend $200 on one ounce of La Mer moisturizing cream - in an open jar - the question becomes: are you choosing packaging for stability or for margins? Because at that price point, the ethical choice should be pretty clear.

#MyTwoCents

I think there’s a fundamental contradiction in premium skincare right now. Brands are charging top dollar for formulations with highly potent, but unstable actives, then using packaging that pretty much guarantees those actives will begin degrading as soon as the consumer opens them. And they’re not really talking about that trade-off.

If you’re formulating premium skincare with retinoids, vitamin C, certain peptides, or other highly active oxidative ingredients, you’ve elected to play a high-stakes efficacy and stability game. So commit to it. Spend a portion of your development dollars on protective containers, airless bottles, jars, or tubes. Own the decision to formulate premium products and charge top dollar for them by protecting them.

Or don’t, and be dishonest. Because right now, a lot of very expensive skincare is packaged poorly, and the brands don’t seem to care about the end user’s experience.

What are your thoughts? Let’s have a conversation in the comment section.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate.
Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

A few months ago, I wrote about the evolving international cosmetic industry clusterf*ck created by the Trump tariffs. That was chapter one. This is chapter two, a critical update on tariffs, consumer price hikes, and why it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

The Numbers Nobody Is Explaining to You

Since Donald Trump’s April 2, 2025, “Liberation Day” tariff rollout, U.S. tariff rates have climbed to over 20% - the highest level in a century.
Let that sink in. We’re operating in a trade environment not seen since before we were born. And the US beauty industry, which imports a vast majority of its printed packaging, components, raw materials, and finished cosmetic goods, is fully exposed.

Here’s where the math gets uncomfortable:

• China, which manufactures an enormous percentage of the cosmetics on US retail shelves, is now subject to tariffs of up to 55%.

• South Korea, another top source of beauty imports into the U.S. and the engine behind the K-Beauty market here, faces tariffs of 25% or higher.

• France and Italy, our main resource for fine fragrance and prestige skincare, both face tariffs of over 20%.

• And BASF, one of the world’s largest ingredient suppliers, just announced price increases on amines used in personal care formulations across North America, effective today, April 6th. NOTE: Amines are organic compounds derived from ammonia and are primarily used as pH adjusters, emulsifiers, surfactants, and foaming agents in products such as shampoos, conditioners, and lotions.

Packaging costs alone are projected to rise by 5%-10% industry-wide. In aluminum-heavy categories - aerosols, tubes, closures - the exposure is significantly higher. And these cost increases don’t happen in isolation; they stack up. Raw materials (ingredients), components, secondary packaging, freight, and now legal fees (more on that later) are all rising simultaneously.

Industry analysts now project that retail prices on cosmetics and personal care products will increase by at least 10% to 15% across ALL categories. And a meaningful portion of that increase has already begun to hit the market.
I’ve used Haus Labs as an example of the price increases in the image at the top of the article. There’s been a $7.00 increase in the price of their bestselling Triclone foundation since April 2025. That’s a 15% price increase for one (1) ounce of foundation in less than 12 months!

It’s Not Just Indie Brands Anymore

In my original piece, I focused heavily on independent and emerging brands with no hedging strategies, alternative supply chains, or corporate treasuries to buffer the tariff shock. That story is still true and still urgent. But if you thought the cosmetic conglomerates were immune, I have some news for you.

Procter & Gamble has already raised prices. And Estée Lauder Cos. has publicly disclosed $100 million in profitability headwinds attributable to tariffs. Their “Profit Recovery Plan” includes cutting up to 7,000 jobs and a full reevaluation of pricing across their brand portfolio. That’s not a niche brand making hard choices. That’s one of the most powerful beauty conglomerates, restructuring its business model in real time in response to the tariffs.

E.l.f. Beauty, the brand that built its entire identity on accessible price points to a mass market, raised prices by $1 per SKU starting in August 2025.
On a product that retailed for $10, it’s only a 10% increase, but on a $3 product, that’s a 33% increase. The CEO, to his credit, was remarkably transparent about the reason, and the brand communicated directly with consumers via social media.
The result? About 98% positive sentiment (according to the company), suggesting that consumers are aware of the impact of these tariffs and aren’t necessarily opposed to price increases. They’re opposed to price increases from companies that aren’t being transparent about what’s happening.

The Lip Bar’s founder, Melissa Butler, was candid about the brand’s vulnerability. She shared that 85% of their products are manufactured in Taiwan, with much of the packaging sourced from China and some manufacturing done in Italy. They’ve been hit with a tariff exposure trifecta. Ouch.

The brands being hit in a fundamentally different way are the mid-tier. Established indie brands that have scaled up but are not at a level to absorb these costs as easily as multinational corporations are now stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Meanwhile, Conglomerates Are Suing

Here’s the detail that didn’t make many consumer headlines but absolutely should: L’Oréal, Sol de Janeiro, and Dyson filed lawsuits in February 2026 against the U.S. government, seeking refunds on tariffs already paid.
They’re not alone. More than 1,400 importers have now filed similar suits, following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found Trump overstepped his authority by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose the tariffs in the first place.

Economists at Penn Wharton estimate that reversing the IEEPA tariffs could generate up to $175 billion in refunds across all industries.

So let’s be clear about what’s happening:
Major cosmetic corporations are pursuing legal action to recoup costs they have already passed along, or are in the process of passing along to consumers.
The consumer pays higher prices now. The brand will potentially recover the cost later.
BUT (there’s always a BUT) the consumer, who is being asked to pay $38 for a foundation that used to cost $30 just months ago, will not receive a refund.
Oh, and don’t hold your breath waiting for these brands to reduce prices once they’ve been reimbursed.

The Consumer Backlash Is Building

Consumers are quite aware of the price increases, and they are not amused. A CivicScience survey found that nearly 3 in 10 beauty shoppers (29%) are already planning to cut back on their product purchases if tariff-driven price increases continue. More strikingly, 60% of U.S. consumers said they would stop buying their favorite cosmetics if prices rose more than 10%.

That’s not a fringe group of disgruntled consumers. That’s a majority of your customer base telling you, in plain language, that even brand loyalty has a price ceiling.

The behavioral shift is already visible in purchase data. Some 38% of beauty consumers say they’re buying fewer products due to inflation. Another 37% say they will only purchase with coupons and discount codes. And 35% have traded down to cheaper brands.
Dupe culture, which I’ve written about as a consumer trend, is looking less like a Gen Z phenomenon and more like an economic survival strategy.

What’s making the backlash grow faster is the transparency gap. Most brands have not communicated clearly with their customers about why prices have gone up. A quiet $4 increase at checkout, with no explanation, breeds resentment.
E.l.f.’s transparency about their price increases demonstrated that honesty - even about unwelcome news - can actually strengthen brand loyalty. Unfortunately, that mindset has not been widely adopted across the cosmetic industry, and consumer resentment is growing quickly.

Which Categories Are Most Exposed

Not all products face the same risks, and if you’re a professional advising clients or a consumer trying to protect your budget, it helps to know where the pressure is most concentrated.

Color Cosmetics: Faces significant exposure because of heavy reliance on Chinese raw materials, manufacturing, and packaging.

K-Beauty: This is deeply ironic given that K-Beauty has spent a decade positioning itself as high-quality skincare at an accessible price point. That positioning becomes impossible to maintain when you’re faced with import costs of 25% or more.

Aerosols: Hair sprays, setting sprays, dry shampoos, body mists, etc., are particularly vulnerable because aluminum tariffs compound the already increasing materials and manufacturing costs.

Fragrance: France and Italy, two of the world’s premier sources of fine fragrance components, are now both subject to tariffs of 20% or more. Expect some of the sharpest price increases to hit prestige fragrances.

What Happens Next

The honest answer is: we don’t fully know. The tariff landscape is still in legal limbo, with multiple court challenges proceeding simultaneously. If the IEEPA tariffs are ultimately struck down, there will be refunds to brands - but the likelihood that those refunds reach consumers is slim to none.

It’s pretty clear that in 2026, we will continue to see price increases. The brands that haven’t raised prices yet are likely to do so before year-end, particularly in Q3 and Q4, as new inventory cycles through at post-tariff costs.

The brands that will navigate this best are those with diversified manufacturing and those with genuine consumer trust built through consistent communication.
The brands that will struggle are those that relied on marketing price point as their primary value. They are now being forced to pivot their marketing strategy toward product efficacy rather than affordability.

#MyTwoCents

Let’s call this what it is: a slow-moving price crisis that the industry knew was coming and is handling with wildly inconsistent levels of honesty.
The tariffs aren’t a surprise. The supply chain exposure wasn’t a secret. What is surprising is how many brands assumed they could quietly pass along cost increases without a single word to the consumers who’ve been loyal to them.

The e.l.f. strategy is illuminating. They told their customers what was happening, why it was happening, and what it meant for prices. They were rewarded with 98% positive sentiment. That’s not an anomaly; that’s what happens when you respect your customer’s intelligence and are transparent.

The truth underneath all of this?

• Indie brands can’t build and scale their businesses without capital, which will be scarce if their products become unaffordable.

• Prestige and Luxury cosmetic conglomerates can’t hide behind their sheer size or legacy status. Price increases could prompt consumers to trade down to mass market products or dupes…and they might not return.

• And today’s cosmetic consumer, who has more information and more options, has run out of tolerance for the industry’s lack of transparency.

The brands that come out of this strongest won’t just be the ones with the savviest supply chain strategies. They’ll be the ones whose transparency allowed customers to trust them enough to stick it out through this difficult stretch.

What are your thoughts? Will you continue to purchase your favorite cosmetic products at higher prices, or downgrade to less expensive options?

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

Hairstory just made its first move into brick-and-mortar retail.
As of April 5, the cult-favorite New Wash conditioning shampoo (co-wash) is on shelves at 370 Ulta Beauty stores and Ulta.com. For a brand that spent twelve years selling almost exclusively through salons and its own website, this is a big deal.

I’ve not only tracked Hairstory since its launch, but I was also a New Wash customer for a while. There’s a lot to like. But some of its marketing needs a reality check and some clarification, especially for folks with specific hair concerns.

Now that the brand is about to reach a much wider audience, let’s dive into exactly who should use New Wash and who should stay away.

Where This Brand Came From

The founder, Michael Gordon, isn’t some beauty influencer or celebrity who decided to launch a hair line. He’s the guy who built Bumble & Bumble from the ground up before selling it to Estée Lauder in 2006. He knows this industry inside and out. And after the sale, instead of cashing out and disappearing into the sunset, he spent years trying to solve a problem that had been bothering him for decades.

That problem? Shampoo.

Most traditional shampoos are built around a detergent called sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS). It’s what makes your shampoo lather, and it’s effective at cleaning. Maybe a little too effective. For many people, especially those with dry, color-treated, curly, or coarse hair, it strips the scalp of everything, including the natural oils your hair actually needs. Then you buy conditioner to restore moisture. Then, a targeted treatment to repair the damage (caused by the shampoo). It’s an endless loop, and it’s a loop the industry is quite happy to keep you in.

Now, to be fair, the industry has already moved on from the harshest formulas. Most mainstream shampoos today use Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES), a milder cousin of SLS that’s considerably gentler. And there’s a whole range of other mild modern cleansers that have become standard in more refined formulas. Cocamidopropyl Betaine, derived from coconut oil, is one of the most common secondary surfactants and is significantly gentler than SLS. Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate gives a creamy, gentle lather with minimal stripping. The glucosides, Coco Glucoside, Decyl Glucoside, and Lauryl Glucoside, are sugar and coconut-derived, very mild, and common in baby shampoo and sensitive-scalp formulas. Amino acid-based cleansers like Sodium Lauroyl Glutamate and Sodium Lauroyl Sarcosinate are appearing more frequently in prestige formulas and are very gentle yet effective at cleansing.

There’s also one worth flagging as a marketing sleight of hand: Sodium Coco Sulfate (SCS). You’ll see it on labels of brands that advertise themselves as SLS-free and coconut-derived. The catch? It’s a coconut oil sulfate that still contains the same lauryl sulfate chains as SLS, just dressed up in more natural-sounding language. Functionally, it’s nearly identical.
”SLS-free” doesn’t always mean what it sounds like.

Gordon’s answer to all of this was New Wash: a hair cleansing cream with no detergent at all. It cleans with natural oils and fatty acids rather than a lather. And one product does the job of both shampoo and conditioner.
The concept isn’t new; it’s called co-washing, and it’s been a staple in curly/coily hair care for years. But Gordon cleverly repackaged the technology for a broader audience, backed it with real salon development, and built a devoted following.

Over two million units sold before landing in a national retailer.
That’s genuinely impressive.

The binary he built the brand around, harsh detergent shampoo versus no detergent shampoo, made perfect sense - a decade ago. That doesn’t mean New Wash is irrelevant. It just means the conversation about co-washing hair has become more nuanced than their marketing suggests.

What the Brand Gets Right

For the right hair type, New Wash is legitimately excellent.

If your hair is naturally dry, coarse, curly, or fried from aggressive color-treatment, this product was designed for you. Skipping harsh detergents and conditioning while you cleanse makes real sense. Less stripping, less damage, better color retention. Many people who’ve switched report softer, healthier hair, and they’re not wrong.

The brand’s original commitment to sell through salons also matters. Hairstory’s history (and credibility) was built on its reliance on salon professionals, who can tell you honestly whether a product is right for you. That’s a very different model from most brands, which just want to move more product and let consumers figure out what works for them at their own expense ($$$).

The refillable packaging is grounded in genuine sustainability; it’s not a PR stunt. And the “fewer, better products” philosophy is consistent with what they offer - right now.
NOTE: The “fewer, better” philosophy often changes abruptly because some national retailers demand that a brand regularly offer new products to drive sales (this is how Sephora has destroyed sooooooo many brands).

Now Let’s Talk About the Part They’re Getting Wrong

The “all hair types” claim.

When you look at the description of New Wash “Original” Formula, it clearly states on both the Amazon shop and the Hairstory website that it’s a “Cleansing & Conditioning Cream FOR ALL HAIR TYPES”.
And yet, Hairstory also sells three (3) other versions - Rich, Deep, and Fragrance-Free. You can’t say one of your formulas works for everyone while also offering additional versions to address different needs. That’s contradictory marketing and deserves to be called out.
And if this co-washing system is so effective, why does Hairstory also offer a PRE-WASH Prebiotic Micellar Scalp Rinse to remove build-up before you use New Wash?

Here’s the reality: Co-washing is not for everyone. If your hair is fine, bone straight, or tends toward oiliness, adding lots of oils and creamy conditioning agents to your scalp won’t clean it. It’s going to coat it. And product buildup on the scalp can cause inflammation, clog follicles, and, over time, contribute to thinning. That’s not a scare tactic, it’s basic scalp biology backed by published research and documented by the American Hair Loss Association.

The “your scalp will stop overproducing oil” promise.

This one really bothers me. Hairstory claims that once you switch to New Wash, your scalp will eventually stop overproducing oil. The idea is that years of harsh shampooing have trained your scalp to overproduce, and now it can relax.

Here’s the reality: Your scalp’s oil production is controlled by hormones, not by your choice of cleanser. There’s a modest argument that extremely aggressive shampooing could contribute to some reactive oil production in certain people. But the broad promise that New Wash will regulate your sebum? That claim runs well ahead of the science.

The “transition period” bullsh*t.

When people with fine or oily hair try New Wash and report greasy, heavy, flat results (an issue which reviews verify happens consistently), the brand’s default response is: "You're in a transition period. Your scalp is adjusting. Try using more product, or rinse longer.”

Telling a customer that their bad experience with your product proves it's working is gaslighting them and avoiding accountability. They aren’t experiencing a “transition period” - the reality is that this product is a mismatch for their hair and scalp needs.

If this “transition period” dialogue sounds familiar, it should. The skincare industry has been gaslighting consumers for years under the term “skin purging.”
To be fair, purging is a real thing, but only with specific ingredients, like prescription retinoids or certain exfoliants, that accelerate cell turnover and briefly uncover underlying congestion. That’s a legitimate response to a legitimate mechanism.

But somewhere along the way, the industry stretched that logic to avoid accountability for people’s reactions to skincare:

• New Cleanser breaking you out or causing irritation? It’s Purging.

• New Serum or Essence breaking you out or causing irritation? It’s Purging.

• New Moisturizer breaking you out or causing irritation? It’s Purging.

“Skin purging” became a catch-all excuse for products that were simply wrong for someone’s skin. “Transition period” is the Hairstory version of the same bullsh*t excuse.

So What Happens at Ulta?

For most of its life, Hairstory had a built-in filter: the salon professional. A good stylist would look at your hair, assess your scalp, and tell you honestly whether New Wash made sense for you. That filter doesn’t exist in Ulta.

The typical Ulta shopper who picks up a premium “shampoo alternative” is completely unaware that co-washing may not be the right call for them because New Wash Original Formula makes the misleading “All Hair Types” claim.
The brand says it plans to use Ulta’s in-store salon space for consumer education, which is a great idea - but those salons reach only a fraction of the foot traffic in Ulta.

New Wash has the potential to convert the right customers into lifelong fans. My question is, what happens when a significant number of Ulta customers have a bad experience with New Wash and don’t understand why, because the brand's marketing tells them it’s their fault?

#MyTwoCents

Michael Gordon built something real here. A brand with actual roots in professional expertise, a genuine formulation philosophy, and the patience to grow slowly and do it right. That deserves credit.

But I’d be doing you a disservice if I just told you that part and left out the rest.

If you have dry, coarse, curly, or color-treated hair, New Wash is absolutely worth trying. It might genuinely change your hair.

If you have fine hair, an oily scalp, or you’re concerned about thinning, skip it. Not because it’s a bad product, but because it’s the wrong product for your hair. No transition period is going to change that.

And if a brand has the audacity to tell you your dissatisfaction is actually progress? That’s usually a sign they know the fit isn’t right for everyone, and they’d rather not say it out loud.

So, now you know the whole story, and I hope it helps you make an informed decision if you're considering trying New Wash by Hairstory.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

There are many alleged “skincare experts” on social media who claim there’s no difference between facial moisturizers and eye creams. So why “waste” money on a dedicated eye cream?
They’re WRONG.
This is not my opinion; this is based on SCIENTIFIC FACT.

Will applying a facial moisturizer around the eye area hurt you?
Of course not, as long as it doesn’t contain strong exfoliating acids or a high-level retinoid.

Will a dedicated eye cream be better at addressing specific concerns?
Of course. The anatomy (structure) and physiology (function) of the skin around the eye area is structurally different, ages differently, and responds to treatment differently from the skin on the rest of your face. So a properly formulated eye cream will provide targeted results.

Let’s begin with science.

Why the Eye Area Ages Faster Than the Rest of Your Face

To understand why eye creams exist as a category, you have to start with anatomy. The skin around your eyes - the periorbital zone - is about 40% thinner than the skin on your cheeks or forehead (think of the difference between tissue paper and poster board). It has far fewer sebaceous glands, which means it produces almost no natural oil to help maintain skin elasticity and protect the moisture barrier. And unlike much of the other skin on your face, it moves constantly. Did you realize you blink an average of 10,000 to 15,000 times a day? Every one of those blinks is a tiny mechanical stress event on delicate thin skin, which has a very limited ability to protect and repair itself.

Because of its structure, the eye area typically shows the first visible signs of aging on the face, and in very specific ways:

• fine lines at the outer corners (crow’s feet)

• crepiness and thinning of the upper lid

• puffiness from lymphatic fluid accumulation

• dark circles that can stem from vascular pooling or structural shadowing from volume loss (which is what I have).

A well-formulated facial moisturizer is built to support barrier function and hydration on a much denser, more resilient surface. Using it around the eyes isn’t harmful. It just won’t effectively address the specific needs of that delicate skin.

What Does a Well-Formulated Eye Cream Look Like?

Let me begin by acknowledging that thanks to unscrupulous cosmetic marketers, the eye cream category has developed a credibility problem. They’ve flooded the market with products labeled as eye creams that are simply moisturizers repackaged in smaller jars or tubes, accompanied by exaggerated marketing claims and higher price tags.
Well-formulated eye creams are specific - they deliver specific actives, calibrated to address specific concerns, in a texture designed for a specific part of the anatomy.

Let’s match the most common concerns with the correct ingredients:

For fine lines and loss of firmness:
Peptides are the workhorses of this concern. Ingredients like acetyl hexapeptide (sometimes called Argireline) work by subtly relaxing the repetitive muscle contractions that etch expression lines into the skin over time. Palmitoyl peptides (you’ll see names like Matrixyl) signal the skin to produce more collagen and elastin, helping to firm and thicken the thin, delicate tissue around the eye.
Peptides aren’t an overnight miracle, but with consistent use over weeks and months, the cumulative effect is real and clinically documented.

For puffiness:
Caffeine is the gold standard, and for good reason. It can stimulate lymphatic drainage, reducing fluid accumulation that causes morning puffiness. The key here is the formula's caffeine concentration.
A product needs to deliver enough caffeine to the tissue to actually do anything. A token amount buried in the tail end of the ingredient list (INCI) for a marketing call-out on packaging and in ads won’t do much. Make sure caffeine is listed in the first quarter of the INCI.

For dark circles:
This one is more complex because dark circles aren’t all the same, so let’s break it down by concern:

• If your under-eye area has a bluish or purplish tint, the cause is vascular, meaning blood has leaked and pooled near the surface of the thin skin. Ingredients like vitamin K are considered a vasoconstrictor, which causes blood vessels to narrow, or “constrict,” by tightening the muscular walls of the capillaries. Now add a meaningful dose of caffeine to the formula, and it will strengthen capillary walls and improve microcirculation, alleviating the pooling.

• If your dark circles are brownish, you’re dealing with pigmentation, which means your system is triggering too much melanin to be transferred to the skin’s surface. This is where niacinamide and/or tranexamic acid come into play. Both inhibit melanin transfer to the skin’s surface and will brighten the area over time.

• If your darkness is a shadow created by volume (fat) loss and under-eye hollowing, no topical ingredient can fix that structurally. It’s time to have a conversation with a dermatologist.

For hydration and barrier support:

First, Let’s Talk About Hyaluronic Acid:
We’ve all heard the marketing - Hyaluronic Acid (HA) can absorb up to 1000x it’s weight in water. Amazing, right?
So amazing that the relentless buzz around this trendy ingredient has unfortunately prompted cosmetic marketers to add it into EVERY product imaginable…but more of something is not nessesary better, especially if it has the potential to cause damage.

I’m purposely omitting HAs as an ingredient option due to rising concerns over skin dehydration and barrier damage. There’s legitimate concern, especially over the use of low molecular weight HAs, some of which are small enough to penetrate deeply into the stratum corneum, and act like a tiny, aggressive sponges inside your skin. If these low weight HA molecules aren’t "fed" enough moisture from the outside, they will pull subcutaneous water from the deeper dermis, causing serious dehydration, which triggers inflammation that further degrades your skin’s barrier health.

Reality: If you haven’t applied a sufficiently hydrating moisturizer over the HA to feed it, or you’re in a dry environment (forced air heating, air conditioning, long flights) there is no moisture for the HA to absorb and it will cause irritation and damage.

• Glycerin is the OG and a near-universal hydrating ingredient, and with good reason: unlike HAs, it is inert, non-reactive, and incredibly gentle on skin, while attracting moisture to plump fine lines so they look less noticeable.

• Polyglutamic Acid (PGA) is slowly replacing HAs because it is 5x more effective at attracting and binding moisture to the skin, and its molecular structure is too large to penetrate the stratum corneum, so it won’t dehydrate your skin if it’s not fed enough moisture, and it won’t disrupt barrier function.

• Ceramides are another important ingredient. They are a family of waxy lipid molecules that make up roughly 50% of your skin’s barrier, and act as the structural “mortar” that holds your skin cells together. Because the skin around the eyes is significantly thinner and contains fewer oil glands, it has much lower natural ceramide levels, so adding ceramides to an eye cream is a no-brainer.

When formulated properly, these ingredients provide crucial hydration and resiliency to the delicate, thin skin around the eye.

For antioxidant protection:
The eye area is constantly exposed to UV radiation and environmental oxidants, both of which accelerate the breakdown of collagen and elastin. Vitamin C (in its more stable forms, such as ascorbyl glucoside or 3-O-ethyl ascorbic acid), vitamin E, and resveratrol all provide meaningful antioxidant protection against environmental stressors to this delicate skin.

Texture Isn’t a Marketing Story, It’s a Formulation Requirement

Properly formulated eye creams feel different from facial moisturizers, and that difference is intentional. The periorbital area needs hydration and emollience without weight. Heavy occlusives, like dense butters or high concentrations of petrolatum, can weigh down this delicate skin and physically block the tiny meibomian glands along the lash line, contributing to milia (those small white bumps that look like tiny pimples).
Properly formulated eye creams are designed to deliver moisture and emollience without an overtly occlusive texture.

Texture is also a practical concern for makeup wearers. An eye cream that doesn’t fully absorb and remains emollient (oily) on the surface will break down concealer, cause mascara to run, and generally undermine everything you apply on top of it. A well-formulated eye cream absorbs cleanly and should actually improve makeup adhesion by creating a smooth, hydrated surface.

Do You Need an Eye Cream? Let’s Look at the Checklist.

You can probably skip a dedicated eye cream (for now) if:

• You are in your late teens or early twenties with no specific eye area concerns.

• Your facial moisturizer is a gentle, lightweight formula without retinoids or strong exfoliating acids that can irritate and damage the delicate skin around your eyes.

• Your skin is generally well-hydrated, and you have no consistent puffiness, dark circles, or fine lines around the eyes.

It’s time to invest in a dedicated eye cream if:

• You wake up with consistent puffiness that takes hours to dissipate.

• You have visible dark circles, regardless of how much sleep you get.

• You’re starting to see fine lines at the outer corners of your eyes or crepiness on the upper lid.

• You’re in your late twenties or older and want to be proactive about prevention.

• Your current moisturizer contains retinol, AHAs, BHAs, or other actives that are too strong for the eye area.

• You wear makeup daily and need a product that works with your concealer, not against it.

#MyTwoCents

Eye cream is one of those skincare categories where skepticism is understandable, thanks to questionable marketing and misinformation promoted by alleged “experts”.
Yes, there are products that are nothing more than facial moisturizers with a prestige price tag.
But the category itself is legitimate - the anatomy is real, the aging patterns are distinct, and the active ingredients that address those patterns are well-documented and clinically validated.

Your eye area ages first, ages fastest, and ages most visibly.

You don’t need a chemistry degree to find the correct product; you just need to know what ingredients to look for. My suggestion is to focus on your main concerns, learn the two or three ingredient names that address those concerns, and look for their prominence in the eye cream’s INCI.

Let’s do a quick review of how to match your eye area concern to what you should be looking for on the eye cream’s ingredient list (INCI):

Puffiness: Look for caffeine, prominently listed. The higher it is on the INCI, the better the chance that the concentration is meaningful.

Dark circles (bluish or purplish): Vitamin K and caffeine for vascular constriction and augmenting micro-circulation.

Dark circles (brownish or pigment-based): Niacinamide or tranexamic acid.

Fine lines and crow’s feet: Peptides. Look for Argireline, Matrixyl, or any Palmitoyl peptide on the label.

Overall thinning and loss of firmness: Peptides combined with ceramides.

Dryness and dehydration: Glycerin, polyglutamic acid, and ceramides.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate.
Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

When you see “parfum” or “fragrance” on an ingredient list, have you been trained to run in the other direction?
Please stop running; you’ve probably been misinformed.
Organizations like the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and their “Skin Deep” Cosmetic Database have spent decades fear-mongering about synthetic fragrance while promoting “natural” alternatives. But here’s what they’re intentionally not telling you: for many, that lavender essential oil in your moisturizer is more likely to trigger a dermal reaction like contact dermatitis (redness, burning, stinging) or allergic contact dermatitis (itching, rash, blisters) than a synthetic fragrance.

There’s a reason for that silence. EWG isn’t an unbiased consumer advocacy group; it’s a lobbying organization whose donor base includes suppliers of organic and natural products that profit when you’re afraid of synthetic anything and reach for “natural” instead.

Let me walk you through what the research actually shows.

The Essential Oil Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Essential oils sound harmless; they’re from plants, after all. But lavender oil contains over 450 different chemicals, many of which are known allergens. When you use a product with lavender essential oil, you’re getting all of those compounds, whether your skin can handle them or not.

The scientific data is clear. There are nearly 80 essential oils that have been shown to cause contact or allergic dermatitis. 9 of the 80 showed patch test reactions in more than 2% of the test groups. Those 9 include tea tree, peppermint, sandalwood, and yes, lavender essential oils. Lavender reactions were so common that the American Contact Dermatitis Society (ACDS) added it to their core patch testing series.

Just to be clear, ACDS does not conduct small “study groups” like those used in a clinical trial for a new product. Instead, they focus on diagnostic patch testing, and their data comes from large-scale retrospective analyses of those clinical results.

But tea tree oil?!? 😲
It’s supposed to be therapeutic, antimicrobial….
Agreed, yet studies show it has caused more allergic contact dermatitis than most other essential oils, with up to 3.5% positive patch-test reactions in core study groups.

The Oxidation Factor

Here’s where things get really interesting. Two of the most common fragrance ingredients are limonene (a synthetic citrus scent) and linalool (a synthetic lavender scent). In their pure, synthetic forms, they rarely cause reactions. But when they’re blended with essential oils and exposed to air, they oxidize into hydroperoxides, which are potent allergens.

Limonene and linalool have been identified in up to 80% of OTC personal care products, and oxidation transforms these compounds into far more potent allergens than their non-oxidized forms. In a large UK study of over 4,700 dermatology patients, 5% showed positive reactions to oxidized limonene and 5.9% to oxidized linalool.

You know that “natural” lavender essential oil in your cleanser? They don’t bother telling you it’s probably blended with about 50% linalool, and every time you open that bottle, oxidation creates more allergens that could irritate and/or damage sensitive skin. Meanwhile, a product containing only pure synthetic linalool fragrance can be stabilized with antioxidants to prevent oxidation and significantly reduce the risk of a dermal reaction.

What “Clean🤬Beauty” Gets Wrong About Synthetic Fragrance

The unregulated, fear-mongering clean beauty movement loves to claim that synthetic fragrances are “toxic” or full of “harmful chemicals.” But they’re merging two very different issues, allergens and toxicity, for maximum dramatic effect.

I’m aware that some people are allergic to fragrance compounds, whether natural or synthetic. But allergies are individual responses, not an example of toxicity. Some synthetic ingredients are safe, stable, and effective, and can reduce the allergenic potential present in the natural fragrance compounds that the clean beauty folks praise.

When I formulate with synthetic fragrance, I can:

• Choose specific molecules that smell beautiful without including known allergens

• Control exact concentrations to minimize irritation risk

• Add stabilizers to prevent oxidation

• Ensure batch-to-batch consistency so your skin gets the same experience every time

With essential oils, I get none of that control.

The Airborne Allergy Risk

Here’s something that surprised me while I was researching this article: there’s been a significant uptick in airborne allergic contact dermatitis from essential oils used in aromatherapy. It’s being reported that more patients are developing eczema on exposed skin simply from aroma diffusers that either heat or nebulize essential oils into the atmosphere. And with the explosion of “natural” fragrance oil diffusers (Pura, Aera, AromaTech, etc.) being marketed so aggressively, cases of airborne contact dermatitis have been rising sharply.

The Marketing vs. The Money

Here’s where it gets interesting. The Environmental Working Group positions itself as a consumer protection organization, but it’s actually a lobbying group funded by organic and natural product companies. When EWG publishes its “recommendations based on scientific studies” (cough, cough), and they label synthetic fragrances as high-risk while giving essential oils a pass, they’re willfully deceiving (lying to) their followers, because they’re not following the CLINICAL science; they’re serving their donors’ financial interests with pseudo-science.

These organizations have built their empires on fear. They’ve convinced consumers that “chemical-free” is their ONLY safe possibility.
Realty Check: IT IS NOT.
Everything is made of chemicals, even WATER (H₂O). They want you to believe that “natural” means safe… but poison ivy is natural - is it safe? Arsenic is natural - is it safe? They’ve brainwashed and gaslighted people into believing that anything synthetic is automatically dangerous. It’s brilliant marketing for their donors’ products. But it’s not supported by clinical scientific data or dermatological evidence.

Meanwhile, “natural” essential oils, many of which are known irritants, can cause significant damage to a compromised skin barrier, especially in individuals with atopic dermatitis. The very people who need the gentlest, safest products are being lied to and steered toward ingredients with a high likelihood of HURTING THEM…
because it’s profitable for the organic and natural product industry.

What This Means for Your Routine

I’m not saying all essential oils are bad or that all synthetic fragrances are good. What I’m saying is that the narrative you’ve been sold is backwards.

If you have sensitive skin, reactive skin, or atopic dermatitis:

• Question any product that markets “natural fragrance” or essential oils as a selling point.

• If you prefer scented products over non-fragranced (which smell like their ingredients), well-formulated synthetic fragrances are generally a gentler choice.

• Pay attention to how long products have been sitting on the shelf after you opened them; oxidation makes natural fragrances more irritating over time.

#MyTwoCents

Organizations like EWG have done real damage by teaching people to fear the wrong things - not because they made an innocent mistake, but because their business model depends on it. When your donors are selling essential oils and organic ingredients, you have a financial incentive to demonize synthetic alternatives, regardless of what the science actually says.

As someone who formulates for sensitive skin, I can create gentler, more predictable, more skin-compatible products with synthetic fragrance than I ever could with essential oils. The data backs this up. The patch testing results back this up. The dermatology literature backs this up.

It’s time to stop letting lobbying groups disguised as consumer advocates override actual clinical science. Your skin’s health deserves better than a fear-based formulation that serves someone else’s bottom line.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate.
Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

If you follow the beauty community on social media, you’ve seen the Lipstick Lesbians’ Leaked Labs controversy - the launch, the product selling out, the backlash, and the (fake) press conference to address all the questions and confusion, which ended up causing more confusion and pissing off a lot of people.

I’ve been flooded with texts, emails, and DMs from folks asking why I’ve been so quiet about this controversy. I’ve been carefully watching this unfold, and I’ve waited to voice my POV because I want to give this controversy the honest, balanced conversation it deserves, because there’s a lot to unpack here. Most of the online narrative has been either too much praise or too much outrage, which is polarizing and prevents us from understanding what’s actually happening.

Now that I’ve done the research and looked at the information through multiple lenses, I’m ready to talk about Leaked Labs.

First, Who Are the Lipstick Lesbians?

If you’re not already following Alexis Androulakis and Dr. Christina Basias, they are known to their 1.75 million combined social media followers as the Lipstick Lesbians.

Here’s the short version:
Alexis spent years in the cosmetic industry, working as a retail makeup artist for NARS (for 9 yrs) before moving into product development. Christina holds a PhD in education technology. Together, they built one of the most genuinely educational beauty platforms on social media. Alexis walks into a Sephora, Ulta, or a high-end department store, picks up a product, swatches it on her hand, and correctly identifies key ingredients and their contributions to a product’s formula. She’s also known for correctly guessing a product’s country of origin (without looking at the label). Many times, she even recognizes the contract manufacturer behind the product.
She has offered all of this premium cosmetic education…for free.

That content has legitimate value. The Lipstick Lesbians occupied a niche that hadn’t been explored very deeply, breaking down the wall between brand, manufacturer, and consumer. People were entertained, engaged, and learned things. That matters. This generous sharing of “insider” cosmetic knowledge laid a foundation of trust, which made what came next so complicated (and messy).

Worth noting:
Before Leaked Labs, Alexis and Christina founded Fem Power Beauty, a lipstick brand they launched in 2019 that, by their own admission, nearly bankrupted them. They self-funded it, it didn’t work out, and they moved on. They’ve been candid about how painful that experience was. Which is exactly why people expected that their next brand would be, as YouTube creator Kiki Chanel put it, “ironclad” - bulletproof, built on everything they’d learned from their previous failure. That expectation matters and is why the reaction to Leaked Lab’s debut product was so intense.

So What is Leaked Labs?

In March 2026, the Lipstick Lesbians launched Leaked Labs, a cosmetic product incubator that sources innovative cosmetic products directly from manufacturers’ in-house R&D libraries. These innovations have been presented by the manufacturers at trade shows and in product development meetings, but were passed over by cosmetic brands, for whatever reason(s).

The Leaked Labs debut product, Leak 001: Amplify Flexi Powder, is a pigment disc built on a carrageenan-based flexible membrane technology that reactivates when dampened with water or setting spray. Amplify Flexi Powder was retailed as a set of four of these flexible discs in metallic shades, housed in a small generic tin with sticker labeling, for $34.00 USD ($40 with shipping).
The product sold out the day it launched.

The brand premise:
Instead of waiting the typical 12 to 36 months for product innovations to wind through development timelines, Leaked Labs sources existing lab-stage formulas, what Alexis called “innovation orphans”, because nobody wanted them, and releases them directly to consumers in limited quantities.
You’re not really buying a retail-ready product (although the marketing makes it sound that way). You’re buying into the development process. Your feedback, as a verified purchaser, determines whether the product becomes a permanent offering or rides off into the archival sunset.

The concept has genuine intellectual appeal on paper, especially for anyone who’s ever seen a disruptive, stand-out formula at a trade show, only to watch it get shelved because no brand saw the value in developing it further for consumers.
I’ve been a brand and product development consultant for almost three decades, and I’ve often been frustrated by a client’s lack of motivation to pursue genuine innovation. They default to imitating successful products from competitors because it’s a “safer” investment.

What Went Wrong (And It’s Not What You Think)

I realize the brand founders don’t agree, but the criticism of the product was real and fair.

• Consumers documented inconsistent disc thickness across shades, with some paper-thin and others substantially thicker.

• A common complaint was the discs ripping on first use, possibly because the user made it too wet or didn’t handle it gently enough.

• One reviewer noted the product had degraded into what she described as a “gelatinous blob” within a week of leaving it in open air, indicating that Flexi Powder absorbs moisture from the atmosphere and must be stored in an airtight container when not in use to preserve its stability. BUT you have to make sure each disc is completely bone dry before you store it back in the tin, or the residual moisture in the closed tin will dissolve the discs and could become a breeding ground for bacteria.

  Flexi Powder, in its current form, has the potential to create a sanitation nightmare in a professional makeup artist’s kit.

• The swatches, even in the brand’s own promotional videos, were inconsistent. So the product has a distinct learning curve, which is not presented clearly in the marketing. Comparable liquid, cream, and gel eyeshadow formats already exist in the market in more user-friendly delivery systems.
  This raised an obvious consumer question: If there are existing products that offer the same results, in a far more user-friendly format, what problem is this product solving?

But here’s where it gets more interesting than a bad product launch. The core issue wasn’t the Flexi Powder itself. It was the business model, and what it asks of consumers.

Kiki Chanel, whose nearly hour-long breakdown of the launch has racked up almost a million views, put the structural argument most clearly. Leaked Labs has found a way to transfer all of the risk onto the consumer. In a traditional focus group, the brand either pays participants or, at a minimum, compensates them in some way, because consumer feedback has real economic value.
Leaked Labs inverts that concept entirely. Consumers pay $34 plus shipping ($40 total) to receive lab samples, provide feedback, and essentially conduct the market research for them.

As one commenter framed it with uncomfortable clarity: “Collecting data from people while charging them to participate in a focus group isn’t user research—it’s exploitation.”

And then came the detail that, for me, tips this from a controversial business model into something that genuinely needs to be called out.
In a clip circulating on social media, recorded during the launch window while consumers were waiting for their shipments to arrive, Alexis mentioned she was already reformulating the Flexi Powder. Let that sink in for a moment.
The brand’s explicit promise was that these products are finished, safety-tested, and ready for consumer hands. Not prototypes. Not works in progress. Not lab samples. Finished goods. And yet, before the product had even landed on many customers’ doorsteps, the founder was already on record saying she was reworking it.

If the product was truly finished and ready, what exactly is being reformulated?

The reviews documented a product that ripped apart easily during use, or degraded into a gelatinous blob within a week of exposure to air, with wildly inconsistent disc thickness across shades. That is not aesthetic nitpicking. Those are stability issues. The kind that gets flagged and corrected during a PROPER development process.

That clip where Alexis makes the reformulation statement shouldn’t be considered a footnote. It’s the thread that unravels their whole narrative. You cannot simultaneously tell consumers they purchased a finished product and tell a social media audience you’re not satisfied with its performance and are already fixing it. That’s not a communication problem. That’s a credibility problem that damages trust.

The ‘State of the Union’ Made It Worse

When the backlash hit, the Lipstick Lesbians addressed the criticism by posting a response video that felt like a staged FAQ briefing - they called it a Leaked Labs’ “State of the Union”. The intent was transparency, but the delivery read as condescending and combative.

The State of the Union video’s central claim, “you’re not paying to do the work for us,” was in direct conflict with their earlier Leaked Labs messaging.

They had used the words “lab sample.” They had described customers as part of “beauty’s largest public focus group that’s being documented.” A founder publicly stated that they were reworking the product while some customers were just receiving the version she no longer considered good enough. And when negative reviews came in, the brand responded by liking a comment that said people who don’t work in the industry “just don’t get it,” - which is a strange message from two people who built their entire platform on the promise of making the industry transparent and understandable to everyone.

The feedback survey, when it arrived, asked customers to write in their own words how the product could be improved and what would make it stand out more. That is, functionally, asking paying customers to do the product development for you. The survey came weeks after the launch, after the brand stated they were reworking the formula. A little too late to feel like genuine engagement rather than damage control.

Days after the State of the Union, they pinned a comment acknowledging the video “missed the mark on tone,” while noting they were traveling and would respond to concerns when they returned. That timing, for a brand in active crisis communication mode, did not help.

What the Industry Actually Thinks

The professional consensus is more nuanced than the consumer outcry. The underlying concept, using consumer response to validate formulas before committing to full commercial production, has merit. It flips a process that usually requires manufacturers to convince brands to invest in new technology, without knowing if consumers actually want it. That’s legitimately smart.

The concern from industry professionals wasn’t the feedback loop itself. It was the framing. The narrative that these formulas are hidden treasures that the industry has been keeping from you misrepresents why most lab-stage formulas don’t make it to market. Sometimes it’s corporate inertia. Sometimes it’s a timeline. And sometimes it’s because the formula had unsolved problems that made it commercially unviable. One developer noted it plainly: a lab sample and a finished product are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where most of the actual science happens.

What I Think They Got Right

I want to be careful here, because I think Alexis and Christina are genuinely talented, and I think the instinct behind Leaked Labs came from a real place. Alexis has decades of cosmetic experience. She knows this world. The frustration of watching innovative formulas gather dust in the “frustration drawer” (her phrase) is real and industry-wide. The desire to close the gap between discovery and consumer access is legitimate.

The sustainability angle is genuinely interesting. A business model that only scales what consumers actually want, using sustainable formats that don’t contribute to packaging waste, has real environmental merit. Very few reviews addressed that, which suggests the launch communication prioritized concept over consumer benefit.

The seed of the idea, that the wall between consumer and manufacturer could come down, that people could engage with beauty innovation before it gets focus-grouped into mediocrity, is worth pursuing. Just not like this.

The Precedent Problem

Here’s what keeps me up at night about this whole situation, and it’s the point Kiki Chanel makes most forcefully in her breakdown: this is a precedent conversation, not just a product conversation.

If Leaked Labs succeeds, if this model gets normalized, the beauty industry will notice. Brands are already watching their margins and looking for ways to reduce the cost and risk of innovation. A model in which consumers fund the market research, generate the content, provide the feedback, and absorb the financial risk of an underperforming product is extremely attractive from a business logic standpoint.
That’s the danger.
Not that one brand tried something unconventional, but that an unconventional model gets copy-pasted industry-wide before anyone has seriously interrogated what it costs consumers.

Consumer feedback has always had economic value. The beauty industry has always paid for it, through focus groups, paid panels, seeding programs, and product sampling. The moment we accept paying for that privilege ourselves, we’ve handed something real away. And once a precedent is set in this industry, it tends to stick.

#MyTwoCents

I’ll be honest: I root for Alexis and Christina. They built something real before they built a brand, and that foundation matters. But trust isn’t just about transparency. It’s about what you do with the trust people have already extended to you. Their audience showed up with years of goodwill, genuine belief in their expertise, and real money. That deserves a product that’s been finished, tested, and packaged with the same care they’ve always told us to demand from other brands.

The concept of consumer participation in innovation is not the problem. The problem is asking people to pay for the privilege of doing your work, then framing their reasonable questions as a failure of comprehension. The audience understood exactly what was happening. They realized they were being taken advantage of, and they were upset.

But I keep coming back to the reformulation. That’s the detail I can’t get past. Because everything else, the messy launch, the defensive State of the Union, the late survey, the condescending liked comment, could in theory be chalked up to first-brand growing pains. Miscalculated messaging. Underestimating the audience’s reaction. We’ve all seen founders stumble on their communication and recover.

Reformulating a product you just charged $34 for, while customers are still opening their packages, is different. That’s not a communication problem. That’s a product problem. If the product wasn’t ready, it shouldn’t have shipped. Full stop.

Product development is exciting and very fulfilling - if you follow the correct steps.

1. Develop innovative products with the end user in mind. If the innovation doesn’t enrich or simplify the user’s life, it’s not viable in the current marketplace.

2. Finish and stability test the product properly, and only bring it to market when it’s ready.

3. Present your product in consumer-friendly retail packaging.

4. Charge a fair price.

5. Learn from your reviews and consumer feedback, and don’t become defensive or combative if the product isn't well-received.

That’s not a revolutionary business model; it’s the foundation of building consumer trust. And trust, once lost, is difficult to rebuild.
Leaked Labs “Leak 002” will tell us everything we need to know about whether the Lipstick Lesbians are listening rather than reacting.

What do you think?

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

Skinification is a beauty trend that applies advanced skincare principles and ingredients to cosmetic categories beyond facial skincare. It emphasizes treating the body, hair, scalp, and nails, as well as color cosmetics, with the same active ingredients used in facial skincare.

I spoke with BeautyMatter editor, Sophie Pitt, about the overwhelming impact of “skinification” on the cosmetic industry - product development, formulation, marketing, and potential consumer danger.

Read the article HERE.

There’s a sentence sitting inside a recent Skin Inc. article discussing a brand founder’s “Considerations in Private Label” that should not have survived an editorial review. It was written by the publication’s managing editor, Kitty Lin, and it reads:

“...only to discover that many of the waxing products available contained mineral oil or talcum powder, both of which are known carcinogens.”

That claim is factually incorrect. Not edgy. Not provocative. Not a matter of ongoing scientific debate. Incorrect.
And the reason I’m alarmed - genuinely alarmed - is that Skin Inc. isn’t a wellness influencer’s Instagram page or a TikTok account. It’s a professional trade magazine. The estheticians and spa directors who read Skin Inc. trust it to provide accurate information they can carry into their treatment rooms and share with their clients. That trust has been violated. And printing this article without correction is a failure of professional journalism.

Right now, somewhere, a spa owner or esthetician who trusted this trade publication to fact-check properly could be passing misinformation to their clients. Or they’re quietly second-guessing all the products they’ve used safely for years.
That is the real-world cost of getting information wrong in print.
So let’s dive into it.

First of all, I’d like to clarify that I did not discover this article or its misinformation randomly. This article was featured in the Skin Inc. March newsletter. (see image below)
Think about it, Skin Inc., a trusted information resource to the spa industry, directed its subscribers to this article, which means they knowingly promoted misinformation. That’s NOT OK. 🤬

Mineral Oil Is Not a Known Carcinogen. Full Stop.

Cosmetic-grade white mineral oil — listed on ingredient labels as Mineral Oil, and regulated under USP and NF monographs — is classified by the FDA as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) for direct food applications under 21 CFR 172.878, and is fully approved for cosmetic and pharmaceutical use. It is used in food, drugs, and cosmetics across the U.S., EU, Canada, Japan, and virtually every other major regulatory market on earth. It is an ingredient in pharmaceutical-grade skin protectants, laxatives, and pediatric formulations.

There is an IARC classification that applies to certain mineral oils — but context is everything. IARC Group 1 ("known human carcinogen”) applies to untreated and mildly treated mineral oils used in industrial metalworking fluids and occupational settings, where workers experience chronic, direct skin exposure to impure, unrefined product. That classification is based on evidence of scrotal and skin cancers in industrial workers — not cosmetic users, not waxing clients, not anyone in a treatment room.

Cosmetic-grade white mineral oil is a different material. The refining process that produces it - removing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and other impurities to meet pharmacopoeia purity standards - creates a substance that no regulatory authority classifies as a carcinogen for cosmetic use. Not the FDA. Not the EU’s Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety. Not IARC. Not Health Canada.

Conflating industrial mineral oil with cosmetic-grade white mineral oil because they share a name is the kind of error you’d expect from a random wellness blog optimized for clicks. It is not what you expect, or should accept, from the leading trade publication for professional estheticians.

The Talc Conversation Is Complicated. That’s Exactly Why Precision Matters.

Talc deserves more careful handling precisely because the science is genuinely evolving — and sloppy language obscures the real story rather than telling it.

In July 2024, the International Agency for Research on Cancer reclassified talc (not containing asbestos) from Group 2B — “possibly carcinogenic” — to Group 2A — “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
That is a meaningful development. It reflects limited human evidence for ovarian cancer risk and sufficient animal study data, and it is driving real regulatory action: the EU’s Committee for Risk Assessment classified talc as a Category 1B carcinogen in September 2024, separate from the asbestos contamination question, and the EU is moving toward a 2027 ban on talc in cosmetics. These are consequential developments that professionals absolutely need to know about.

But here is what IARC Group 2A means: probably carcinogenic, with limited human evidence. It is the same classification as that of red meat, aloe vera extract, and the herbicide glyphosate.
It is not a Group 1 “known carcinogen”, which requires strong, consistent, replicated human evidence.
That distinction is not a technicality — it is the difference between a serious precautionary concern and a settled verdict. Remember, the same “probably” classification applies to red meat.
I’m not trying to be dramatic, but Skin Inc. calling these ingredients “known carcinogens” is no different than the Nation's Restaurant News (NRN), known for comprehensive coverage of the food industry, calling red meat a “known carcinogen”. Words mean things, especially in professional education.

When you replace a nuanced, important story with an inaccurate label, you don’t protect people — you frighten them. And frightened, ill-informed clients are harder to help, not easier.

Furthermore, the FDA has not banned talc in cosmetics. It proposed a rule in December 2024 that would require standardized asbestos testing for talc-containing cosmetics. This rule was subsequently withdrawn under political pressure by that idiot RFK Jr. in November 2025, not due to scientific reassessment. The FDA’s own 2024 testing of 50 talc-containing cosmetic samples found no asbestos. The agency has stated it will issue a new proposed rule, though no timeline has been announced.

A trade publication covering this space has a genuine, important story to tell about talc - the EU’s trajectory, about supply chain contamination risk, about what brand reformulation timelines should look like. Telling these stories requires precision. Dropping a bomb like “known carcinogen” doesn’t inform professionals. It adds more noise to an industry already drowning in unfounded ingredient hysteria.

This Is What Happens When Fear Culture Infiltrates the Trade

Special interest groups and lobbyists like EWG have built enormously powerful platforms on ingredient fear-mongering to promote their donors’ agendas and hurt their donors’ competitors. They found a formula that works: take a complex scientific classification, strip out every qualifier, cherry-pick phrases, add words like “toxic”, “carcinogen,“” endocrine disruptor,” and let anxiety do the rest.
Drama drives engagement. It has very little to do with helping people understand actual risk.

That vocabulary has now saturated wellness media so completely that it bleeds into professional coverage without anyone stopping to ask if the information is factual.
I don’t know whether Kitty Lin was leaning into information gleaned from the EWG misinformation ecosystem when she wrote this piece. What I know is that Skin Inc.’s editorial process should have caught this mistake before it went to print. The fact that it made it to print and then was FEATURED is a failure of the institution.

The trade press is supposed to be where professionals come to escape the noise, where the information has been fact-checked, contextualized, and held to a standard that respects the intelligence and professional responsibility of the people reading it. When it stops doing that job, the consequences aren’t abstract. They show up in treatment rooms, in client conversations, in purchasing decisions made on bad information.

The Professionals Reading This Deserved Better

I keep coming back to the estheticians. The spa directors. The waxing specialists who opened Skin Inc. read that sentence and had no reason to question it because it came from their trusted trade magazine. They are good at their jobs, care deeply about their clients, and do exactly what professionals are supposed to do - stay current, read the trades, and bring that information to work.

Unfortunately, they were handed information that wasn’t true.

That’s what upsets me most about this. Not the regulatory nuance. Not the classification terminology. The fact that real professionals were misled by a source they had every reason to trust, and real clients are now on the receiving end of that misinformation.
A clear, explicit correction from Skin Inc. is not optional. It’s owed.

#MyTwoCents

Cosmetic-grade mineral oil is not a carcinogen - not by any scientific or regulatory standard, anywhere, period. Calling it one in a professional trade publication is not an editorial choice; it’s a factual error with real consequences for the professionals who read it and pass the misinformation to their clients.
Talc deserves more serious, accurate coverage, and genuinely important information is evolving all the time. I published an article about it earlier this week.
The accurate version of the current talc story is complicated and nuanced. Labeling an ingredient as “carcinogenic” without proper citation is fear-mongering.

Our industry is already fighting a losing battle against the flood of ingredient misinformation from special-interest groups and consumer media. The trade press is supposed to be the place where we get it right. Skin Inc. got this one wrong, and the people sitting in treatment rooms right now are paying the price. That’s not okay and shouldn’t be allowed to stand without correction. PERIOD.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, educator, and consumer advocate. Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

1. Venture capitalists (VCs) invest in high-growth, early-stage startups, usually taking minority stakes. They focus on long-term growth.

2. Private equity (PE) investors target mature, established companies, often buying a controlling interest (50-100%) to improve operations and profitability. PE firms focus on short-term optimization and a quick exit.

Before you sign anything, let’s have a conversation your accountant won’t have with you, but I will.
Raising capital can be transformative. It can also be the beginning of the end - not because the money was bad, but because the relationship was. Here’s what you need to know before that wire transfer lands at your bank.

More Money = More Problems

Let’s start with the obvious thing nobody wants to say out loud: you don’t need as much money as they’re offering.

Private equity and venture capital firms operate at scale. Their business model depends on deploying substantial capital and generating returns that justify their investment. That means they’re often incentivized to write bigger checks than your business actually needs because bigger checks create bigger ownership stakes, bigger oversight roles, and more pressure on you to grow faster to give them back their money - with interest.

The Rule:
Only take what you can deploy strategically to actually scale your business. Capital you can’t put to work efficiently becomes dead weight — or worse, pressure to spend unwisely just to look like you’re growing. Overfunding a brand in the beauty space is a well-worn path to inflated overhead, misaligned retail expansion, and a Founder/CEO who spends more time in investor calls than in product development.

Ask yourself: What specific initiatives will this capital fund? What does success look like in 18 months? Can you articulate a clear, credible use-of-funds story?

If your answer is “we’ll figure it out,” you’re not ready to take the money.

Values Alignment Is Not a Soft Skill, It’s a Survival Skill.

Here’s where founders get burned the most, and it’s almost never talked about in funding announcements: Does the investor’s values align with your brand’s DNA and planned evolution?

Investors are not a monolith. Some genuinely want to build great brands. They understand the beauty industry, they respect creative vision, and they know that rushing a product into mass retail before it’s ready can permanently damage a brand’s equity. These investors exist. They are wonderful. They are also a minority.

The majority of institutional investors — particularly in PE — are primarily interested in a return on their investment within a defined window, usually three to seven years.
They are not there to fall in love with your packaging or to protect your brand story. They are there to grow revenue, maximize EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), and position the business for a sale or IPO. PERIOD.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s their job. But it may not align with your brand vision.

Before you take a single dollar, do your homework.

• Look at their portfolio.

• Talk to founders they’ve backed before - not the ones on their website, the ones they don’t use in their marketing.

• Ask what happened when growth targets weren’t met.

• Ask what the conversation looked like when a founder wanted to slow down a project to ensure they launch a high-quality, stable product.

• Ask if they’ve ever pushed a brand into a channel or retail partnership the founder was uncomfortable with.

The answers to those questions will tell you everything.

Treat It Like a Marriage, Not a Mortgage.

Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to: taking on an investor is less like a business loan and more like getting married. You don’t just get the money - you get a relationship that comes with opinions, expectations, and often complications that require compromise.

And just like a marriage, the early courtship is when everyone is on their best behavior. The investor is attentive, enthusiastic, and full of big promises about what they can bring to the table beyond capital — distribution relationships, operational expertise, and marketing support. Some of it is real. Some of it is theater.

The question isn’t how they treat you when things are going well. It’s how they treat you when a launch underperforms, when a key retailer pulls back, or when the market shifts and your growth trajectory takes an unexpected detour. Structure your relationship accordingly.

Get the hard conversations in writing before the deal closes:

• What happens if growth targets aren’t met?

• Who has approval authority over key hires, product decisions, and retail partners?

• What does the exit process look like, and who drives it?

These aren’t adversarial questions — they’re professional ones. Any investor worth working with will respect you more for asking them.

And do not - I cannot stress this enough - do not treat the capital injection as a finish line. It’s a starting line. The relationship begins the moment the wire transfer clears, and it requires the same intentionality, communication, and mutual respect as any long-term partnership.

Exits…

This is the part that nobody talks about at the funding celebration dinner, and it’s maybe the most important thing I’ll say here.

The beauty industry has a complicated relationship with investors. There’s a pervasive narrative that selling a stake in your brand to a VC or PE represents capitulation. That if you really believed in what you built and were serious about its growth, you wouldn’t “sell out”. That a founder with integrity would never invite some conglomerate to absorb their creation.

That narrative is unfair, and frankly, unrealistic.

Some of the most influential brands in beauty history were founded, built, funded by investors, scaled, and sold. An exit isn’t a surrender. It’s a chapter closing.

What matters is that you built something real. Something with integrity. Something that genuinely served your customer, pushed the industry forward, or changed the conversation in your category. If what you built wasn’t worthwhile, you wouldn’t have attracted investors or a buyer.
The measure of what you built is based on the quality and values you baked into the brand before stepping into an investment or sale negotiation.

You can be proud of what you built, no matter how you end your participation.

#MyTwoCents

Founders who navigate investor relationships successfully are the ones who go in with clear eyes, ask hard questions, and hold on to their values even when pressure to meet quarterly sales goals builds.

Capital is a tool, not a lottery ticket. Only take what you can deploy. Only partner with people whose definition of “success” is similar to yours. Treat the investor relationship with the same respect and intentionality you’d give any long-term business partnership — because that’s exactly what it is.

And if the chapter closes? Hold your head up. The work was real. The impact was real. That doesn’t disappear when the brand does.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and discuss in the comments below.

Kevin James Bennett is the publisher of In My Kit®. He is an Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, cosmetic developer, industry expert, and educator.
Learn more at www.kjbennett.com

If you’ve been following the talc saga (you have if you read In My Kit regularly), you’ll remember that MoCRA mandated that the FDA finally do something it has managed to avoid for over 80 years: establish standardized, enforceable testing methods for detecting asbestos in talc used for cosmetic manufacturing.

This is not a rule about banning talc. This is not even a rule about restricting it.
This is simply a rule to require testing for carcinogens in a raw material that has generated over 100K lawsuits globally.

The proposed rule landed in December 2024. It was genuinely substantive, requiring manufacturers to test every batch using two specific methods: Polarized Light Microscopy and Transmission Electron Microscopy. Rigorous, science-backed approaches developed by an interagency group that had been deliberating since 2018. Products that failed testing, or manufacturers that skipped it entirely, would be deemed adulterated under federal law. Finally, some teeth.

The final rule was targeted for this month, March 2026. It did not arrive.
WHY?
The proposed rule was withdrawn on November 28, 2025, signed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There is currently no mandatory federal testing requirement for asbestos in talc-containing cosmetics. No new proposed rule has been issued. No timeline has been announced.

So what actually happened?

The official explanation, per the Federal Register withdrawal notice, cites the “legal considerations under the Administrative Procedure Act,” and — perhaps most eyebrow-raising, it’s not a priority of the tRump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. 🤬

Industry groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers, argued that the FDA’s proposed definition of “asbestos” was broader than that used by other federal agencies, and that the testing methods could generate false positives, flagging non-asbestos mineral fibers as asbestos, triggering unnecessary recalls and reformulations. Those aren’t frivolous concerns in a regulatory context.

What’s harder to square is the timing and the outcome. The FDA didn’t narrow the rule, clarify the definition, or adjust the methodology. It withdrew the proposal entirely, with a vague commitment to issue a new one…eventually.
As of January 2026, over 90,000 lawsuits have been filed against Johnson & Johnson alone, with the company ordered to pay over $2.5 billion to talc victims in 2025. For an ingredient with such a litigious history, this “we’ll get back to you” messaging is a head-scratcher as a regulatory stance.

Meanwhile, in the EU…

While the U.S. regulatory machinery idles, the EU’s Committee for Risk Assessment did something more definitive in September 2024: it classified talc itself — not just potentially contaminated talc, but the ingredient — as a Category 1B carcinogen, based on evidence linking it to ovarian and lung tumors. That classification is entirely separate from the asbestos contamination question.

Under EU cosmetics law, a Category 1B carcinogen classification typically triggers a ban on use in cosmetic products. The formal regulation hasn’t been finalized yet, but industry experts anticipate it could take effect around 2027. That’s not a testing standard rule - that’s an exit ramp for talc in cosmetics.

The regulatory deviation between the U.S. and the EU on this ingredient is now stark and accelerating. Brands formulating for global markets are already doing the math: if talc is heading toward a European ban, does it make sense to keep it in your formulations at all — regardless of what the FDA does or doesn’t do?

What this means right now.

For consumers, the practical reality is unchanged from last year: there is no federal requirement for how your setting powder, blush, bronzer, or eyeshadow gets tested for asbestos. Testing happens voluntarily, by manufacturers, using methods of their own choosing. Some brands do it rigorously. Some don’t at all.
Unfortunately, you can’t tell from the label if the talc in your product has been tested.

For brands and formulators, the signal, however confusing and messy its delivery, is clear enough. The direction on talc is toward intensified scrutiny, not less, even if the U.S. regulatory path seems derailed. The EU’s carcinogen classification didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it won’t stay contained to European markets. Talc-free reformulation isn’t just a clean beauty marketing choice anymore; it’s become an increasingly important supply chain and liability management decision.

The FDA says it will eventually issue a new proposed rule. It’s statutorily required to. But “eventually” and “no timeline announced” are phrases that should sound familiar to anyone who’s been watching the painfully slow rollout of MoCRA.

#MyTwoCents

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the FDA was legally required to finalize this rule. Congress put it in writing. MoCRA mandated it. And the agency still withdrew the proposal — citing industry pushback over testing methodology — with no replacement and no timeline.

Meanwhile, the EU has gone in the opposite direction entirely, classifying talc itself as a probable human carcinogen — independent of the asbestos contamination issue. Two completely separate regulatory bodies, looking at the same ingredient, arriving at conclusions that couldn’t be more different. One is pressing pause. The other is heading toward a ban.

The talc story isn’t over. It’s just waiting for its next chapter, and the US cosmetic industry would be wise not to wait for Washington to write it.

If you’re a brand still formulating with talc and your distribution is global — or aspirationally global — the EU’s 2027 timeline should be the number on your radar, not whatever Washington eventually proposes. Reformulating ahead of a mandate is always less expensive, less disruptive, and better for the brand story than scrambling after one.

And for consumers?
Until there’s a federal standard with real enforcement - which we now know isn’t happening anytime soon - opting for talc-free products is the only reliable way to make an informed choice.
I know, it shouldn’t be that way. But here we are.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this industry-changing issue in the comment section.

Kevin James Bennett is a multiple Emmy Award-winning makeup artist, respected industry expert, cosmetic developer, and educator. He is the publisher of In My Kit®