Cosmetic Marketing Tricks – Episode 220

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and this is The Beauty Brains.

Hello, and welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty product questions and give you an insider's look at the cosmetic industry. This is episode 220 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and today is a solo show. Valerie is off troubleshooting production challenges, the exciting life of a cosmetic chemist. It involves a lot more than just mixing up chemicals in the lab. Now, since it's a solo show, I thought I'd experiment with something a little different. So instead of just answering random questions, which, of course, we very much appreciate getting. In fact, if you would like to get your question answered on a future show, you can do that by recording a voice memo on your smartphone and then emailing it to us at thebeautybrains.gmail.com. Anyway, instead of going through and just answering questions, I want to try to use today's show as a way to educate you as a beauty shopper. And I want to arm you with what I'm calling the Beauty Brains BS Detector. Whenever you're out there making beauty product choices, I want you to consider these things before you make that purchase. The beauty product marketers are savvy, and they really have very specific ways of tricking you into spending your hard-earned money on what they're selling. That's not to say that the products aren't helpful or even fun to use, but more often than not, they are really trying to trick you into spending more money for a product that is only equal to or maybe even inferior to one that costs a lot less money.

So here are just seven tricks that you can look for that cosmetic marketers use to get you to spend more money for products that over promise and under deliver.

They should all set off alarm bells in your brain whenever you see or hear them about a product that you're interested in.

All right.

These are cosmetic bargaining tricks that are costing you money. Number one, natural nonsense. Companies that claim their products are natural are being dishonest. Now, I'm not claiming that they are lying directly. They actually might believe that they are producing natural products, but they're just wrong. Cosmetic products are not natural. There are no body wash bushes or lipstick trees.

You can't walk into a field of moisturizer stocks and pick off a ripe, anti-aging elixir. It just doesn't exist. And the notion of natural cosmetics is just a fallacy. All cosmetic products are processed in some way. They are not natural. Now, you see, the whole notion of natural came to the cosmetic industry from the food industry. Actually, a lot of trends that happen in the food industry get adapted into the cosmetic industry, sometimes successfully, sometimes not successfully. Anyway, in the food industry, natural actually makes a lot of sense. There are natural foods, and there are processed synthetic foods. You can pull an apple from a tree and eat it. It's actual food that grows out in nature. But you can't pull a Twinkie from a bush and eat it. You can't dig up a Twinkie or a candy bar. These things are processed synthetic foods that are made in laboratories, in production facilities. So natural food, that makes a lot of sense. Synthetic food, that also makes sense. These make sense as categories, as ways to categorize the different products. This one is right from nature. This one is synthetic. It all makes sense. In food, but in cosmetics, this makes no sense at all. You see, all cosmetics are processed. So companies who tell you their products are natural, they're misleading you. They are trying to trick you. They want you to buy their product because they know a lot of people just believe that natural things are safer and more effective, while synthetic things are cheaper or more dangerous.

This belief about natural being better is just wrong, but it's even more dubious when cosmetic companies try to apply it to their products. The fact that a company claims their product is natural should never be a reason why you buy their product. Their products are not natural and they're not safer. They are misleading you, and so you have to consider why you are buying a product. You should never buy a product because it claims it's natural. Look for a claim that inspires you beyond it being natural. That makes you want the product. That does lead us in to our number two thing to look out for. This is the Clean Beauty Con. Now this one actually is related to the first one. Clean Beauty really started because if you were trying to follow a natural and no synthetic ingredients formulation strategy, it's really hard to make products that actually work as well as the synthetic. Synthetic cosmetic products, look, the reality is they just work better. So since natural products weren't working as well, companies figured they'd come up with this clean beauty. So you get all the benefits of natural, but you get the functional benefits of synthetic.