Why are more expensive products popular? Episode 298

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and you're listening to 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 298 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and today is a solo show. Valerie is off in Paris at the annual In Cosmetics show, so we weren't able to connect for recording, but she'll be back next week. Anyway, on today's show, I'm just going to answer a couple of questions that were of interest to me. It'll probably be a little shorter than usual, but I'll go a little deeper dive than usual, and maybe I'll rant about something. So I'm going to answer questions about why brands might change a formula, whether professional skincare is better than the stuff that you can buy in stores, and if expensive products don't work better, why are they so popular?

Now, normally, there'd be a little, I don't know, chit chat or whatever. Let's just get to the questions.

All right, our first question comes to us from Sarah. She says, Sarah says, do brands change formulas over time? I guess it's referring to whether an old product is the same as something you use now. Well, it seems a common belief with some people that beauty brands change their formulas every so often.

And in truth, brands, they don't really want to change their formulas that much.

And actually, they only do it when they have to. This is especially true for a product that is selling well. So the idea is that something is selling well. You don't want to change anything. Each change that you do creates the potential that is gonna disrupt or disturb a current customer. And you might turn off people who like the product and they'll start looking for something else. And this is likely one reason why it took, I know Johnson & Johnson had their baby shampoo. It took them a long time to remove an ingredient called quaternium-15, which is a formaldehyde-releasing preservative from their formula. Thing is, your Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, that's an iconic formula, iconic product, has been used since the 1960s. They certainly didn't want to change it if they didn't have to. And since that preservative was perfectly safe to use, it's safe in the United States from a regulatory standpoint, from a safety standpoint. They didn't have any real reason to change. They had the formula, it was a little different in places like Japan or even the EU, where some of these preservatives have been reduced. In Japan, you actually can't use formaldehyde leasers as preservatives unless you have a special permission from the government, but mostly they don't use formaldehyde donors. So when J&J wanted to go, say, into Japan or something, then they would have needed to change their preservative system. But the bottom line is, even a change like a preservative, it might have negative consumer perceptible differences, and that's never good for business. So that's the reason brands don't usually want to change their formulas. However, you might notice that sometimes brands do change their formulas, and there are a few reasons why that happens. And if you're a savvy consumer, you might notice these. One issue is primarily because of sales.

You might, as a marketer of products, you might want to change your formula if you have a product that isn't the best seller on the market. Now, making a change can sometimes improve your product performance, but it can also give you new news to talk about for the brand. So, if sales are a little flat and they want to boost them, they might make a change with a great new scent or more powerful cleansing or something like that. Just some new claim they can make about it. New news about a formula is always something that cosmetic marketers really want to have with their formulas, even though they want it to be different, but the same because they don't want to disenfranchise any current users.

Now, another reason for a formula change might be due to regulatory problems. The rules and regulations about cosmetics are always changing, and this means that companies have to change formulas to adjust the levels or remove certain ingredients from a formula. The changes are supposed to be done in a way that it will not be noticeable by consumers, but that can be incredibly difficult, and people can sometimes pick up on very small changes. It takes a lot of prototyping, a lot of doing a lot of testing.

And in fact, if you look at this latest kerfuffle with Olaplex and the chemical that they were using that was supposedly linked to fertility issues, this is just one example. We talked about that whole issue on episode 295 Don't worry, Olaplex is not causing infertility, but if you want more, just check out 295 But that's a reason that a company might change their formula, they removing ingredients that were regulated out.