6 Tricks Companies use to get you to overspend on beauty products - Episode 237

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

Welcome to The Beauty Brains, the show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty product questions and give you an insider's look at the cosmetic industry. This is episode 237 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and today is a solo episode. Valerie is off metaphorically fighting fires in California. You know, sometimes I think living in California would be great with the ocean and the mountains. You can go skiing one day, to the beach the next day. It sounds great. They have beautiful scenery, and they have those gigantic trees.

But then you hear about all those earthquakes, and mudslides, and droughts, and pollution, and well, forest fires. So I guess I'll just stay here in Chicago for a bit longer.

All right, since today is a solo show, I thought I'd just mix it up a little bit and just give you some thoughts on a couple of topics that I think will make you a smarter beauty product buyer. Valerie and I actually just recorded our first Patreon-only event where we answered some questions live. That was a lot of fun. Actually, if you'd like to be part of future exclusive Patreon events, go to patreon.com/ The Beauty Brains and subscribe.

All right, so what do I want to talk to you about today? Today, I want to talk to you about beauty product marketing. And specifically, I want to cover some of those marketing tricks that beauty brands use to get you to spend more money on products that you could either get away for spending less money on or ones that actually don't work, or at least they don't work in the way that they want you to think they work.

So I've boiled it down to these six main marketing tricks that marketers use to essentially fool you into spending more money than you actually need to.

The first I call exclusive technology.

This is a way that beauty brands will try to trick you by talking about their exclusive or advanced technology. Now, this often involves coming up with a new name for some old technology, like micellar water, which actually has been around for years, or maybe this involves using a special blend that they got from a raw material supplier to put together. I mean, it's easy enough to tweak a molecule or a blend in a special way that doesn't really have much impact on the finished product, but it does give marketers something to talk about. Marketers need to use stories to help to sell their products. Now, here's what you have to know about beauty product technology.

There really isn't much new. For the most part, the products that you are using today aren't using technologies that are different from the ones that they were using 20 years ago. I mean, heck, probably even 30 years ago. You know, I was doing a presentation last year where I had the opportunity to look at the ingredient list of products from 20 years ago, and you know what? They really weren't much different. The top-selling shampoo at the time was still using all but two of the same ingredients that they are using today, and they are still a top-selling shampoo.

In fact, companies don't really want to change formulas. Once you get a formula that is working and a lot of consumers like it, they want to stick with that same formula for as long as possible.

But even so, the ingredients that this company switched out, you know, they were not ingredients that didn't exist 20 years ago. These same ingredients were there. So they are not even using new ingredients. And this is true of pretty much all things. You know, hot ingredients like hyaluronic acid, niacinamide, retinols, vitamins. These things have been around for decades. And in most cases, products today just don't work better than the things that they were selling years ago. And in fact, a lot of products today don't work as well. This movement towards naturally derived ingredients away from petrochemicals, petrochemically derived stuff, that is not an even exchange there. Now you might be getting things that maybe they are more sustainable or perhaps not. Certainly they are described that way. But the problem with switching out of synthetic ingredients is that the natural versions just don't work as well. And I like to think of the analogy of transportation.

You know, horses are natural, and we used to ride around in horses, and we still do in some cases. But as far as transportation goes, they were replaced by the totally synthetic cars, because cars just work better. Now, they probably have a bad impact on the planet, but if you're looking to switch from something synthetic to something natural, it's almost always the case that the synthetic thing was working better than the natural thing. Because if the naturally occurring thing was working better, the synthetic molecule wouldn't have been developed. That's why we developed synthetic options. We take something in nature. For example, you take soap, and soap can be found naturally occurring. It's a chemical reaction, no doubt, but it can be found when you cook fat over a fire. The fat oil gets into the ashes, and that can create soap. That's probably how soap was discovered anyway. So it's discovered naturally. But soap just does not work.