Hello, Theorist. Have you been looking in the mirror and liking what you see? Have you found yourself saying, I look pretty neat, or maybe even thinking, I don't feel the need to fix myself at all. Wait, hold on, you have? Oh, jeez, that's a style industry emergency! Don't, don't panic! We can fix this! I have just the thing that'll solve the problem. Skincare. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Style Theory, the fresh-faced addition to the Theorist family that's creating new wrinkles in your brain. Today, we're talking about skincare. In an episode that I've wanted to tackle since before the channel was even a little twinkle in my eye, skincare from washes, toners, creams, and serums is a huge piece of the style pie, and so I'm grabbing a heap and helping of it before my time as channel host ends. Also, let's face it, I should probably be looking into skincare for myself at this point. I've lived the last ten years on lots of fast food and very little sleep. Not really the best recipe for a glowing, wrinkle-free complexion. But I'm sure that if I just look at a few brands and see what they have to offer, I'll be able to fix myself up in a jiff. Hold on, why are there so many options? This one apparently prevents dark spots. This one defends against pollution? This one apparently has something called banana powder-inspired pigments. Apparently that just means I'm gonna turn yellow. This one protects against oxidative damage, but also has oxygenating ginseng. Should my face be hydrated, oxygenated, glowing, brightened, protected against the city streets, or just have itself some fewer wrinkles? Maybe I just forego it all, put this mask on, and become apparently what looks to be an android. How am I supposed to navigate all this? How is anyone supposed to navigate all this? Well, that's the thing, friends. We aren't really supposed to know. If there's one thing that the skincare market is great at, it's sell and don't tell. This is a $181 billion industry, and it's expected to reach $210 billion by 2028, with the vast majority of that money coming from thousands of face and body products ready to be incorporated into your next 14-step skincare routine. You'll be moisturizing, plumping, brightening, smoothing, toning, rejuvenating, and tightening, all because an ad, influencer, or maybe even just your mom told you that that's what you should be doing. My mother tells me there is never too much moisturizer. Moisturize, moisturize, moisturize. Yes, you have to take care of yourself. We believe that skincare products are gonna help us stay young forever, but at the end of the day, most of those nice-looking little bottles are full of nothing but empty promises. This skincare industry is able to stay so massive and so successful not because it's making everyone's face perfect, but because of its incredibly strategic marketing tactics that use our hopes, dreams, and fears against us every time we look in the mirror. How are they doing this? How do they make these products feel so personal, so convincing, and so necessary for all of us? I mean, this industry has us doing 20-step skincare routines, rubbing chemicals that we can't pronounce all over our faces, and pushing youthful skin on people who aren't even old enough to vote. To make it through the literal gauntlet of skincare marketing that they're throwing at you every day, you're gonna need to slather on a heapin' helpin' of knowledge. But don't worry, when this episode ends, you'll be armed with every advertising secret so you can emerge a warrior for your wallet. To start, if you feel like you've bought into the skincare industry at the moment, the first thing to do is to cut yourself some slack. Skincare hype is far from a new problem. The beginning of people's obsession with skincare goes way back. Heh, before that. Ho-ho, way before that one, too. Actually, to 3000 BC, to the original influencers, the ancient Egyptians. That's right, according to the records that we have, the pharaohs were the first official beauty creators. Slatherin' on skin cream to preserve their baby soft skin. They used natural moisturizers like olive oil and herbs. They mixed together sand and honey to make exfoliating scrubs. Cleopatra was even known for bathing in sour milk, which apparently acts as a natural chemical peel. Honestly, if any one of those methods showed up on TikTok here in 2024, we'd all be like, OMG, that is so genius! And then everyone would be leavin' their milk out in the sun so they could pour it on their faces a couple hours later. Full props to Cleopatra, she definitely started a trend, but it begs a pretty important question, why? Any idea why the ancient Egyptians were tryin' so hard to look Instagram-ready 5000 years before Instagram? Where the heck did we collectively get this idea that younger skin is a must-have? And while we're at it, you ever think it's weird that we don't even define what young skin actually is? I mean, there's a lot of talk about your skin looking youthful, takin' years off your face, turnin' back the clock, but you ever notice how no one ever mentions the actual age that you're shootin' for there? How young are you supposed to be looking here? What is the ideal? From where I'm sitting, 25? That's pretty young. When I'm 50, 35 is gonna be young. For some of you, you're probably like 26, and so 18 is young. What defines youthful skin, and why have people been tryin' to keep it for the past 5000 years? Well, it turns out that, historically speaking, the definition of youthful skin is like, real uncomfortably young. It's certainly too young to be used in a commercial here in 2024. Lookin' back to Cleopatra's time, people had an average lifespan of 33 for men, and as young as 29 for women. How about that? You're finally old enough to rent a car, and you just keel right on over. Ancient civilizations were focused on two things, and two things only: surviving and having kids. Typically, they didn't do that first one long enough to even get wrinkly skin. But because of short lifespans, they actually considered people adults at incredibly early ages. About 16 for boys, and as young as 13 for girls. Which was the age that they typically got married and had babies. That meant that the people who made it in the world were teen moms. So what, then, does the ideal woman look like in these olden days? Well, for one thing, she is certainly too young to drive. For some concrete examples of this in history, look at Persephone. Considered to be one of the most beautiful Greek goddesses. Described in the Odyssey as young. 15 when she meets Hades. Helen of Troy, who's known as the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Also 15 at the time of the Greek myth that she's in. The Virgin Mary. She's got herself some great skin. And also roughly 16 at the birth of Jesus. Then again, look at her. She's literally glowing. This kind of art showing goddesses and virtuous saints with great skin, also set the historic idea that smooth skin reflects your morality as a person. There's a long history going back hundreds of years around the myth that good person inside equals good skin outside. For hundreds of years in the Middle Ages, afflictions like rashes and acne were associated with being immoral. Appearing on people who were sinners or maybe even witches. One type of evidence used during the Salem Witch Trials to convict women of witchcraft was to find a devil's mark on her skin. Which could be any kind of rash, pimple, or scar. If your face was splotchy, well, then so was your soul. So from the very beginning of history, the standard of female beauty hasn't revolved around women. It's basically revolved around extremely virtuous little girls. That is not hashtag life goals there, fam. Fast forward to today. By leaving the idea of youthful skin as this nebulous floating target that's not really defined, the skincare industry leaves us to imagine whatever youthful means to us personally. And so we're always left wondering if our skin is going to be good enough. When historically, youthful was actually referring to children. Coming into the modern day, you can see that this leaves skincare in this bizarre headspace. The idea of having great skin ties back to our morality, our economic status, our literal survival as a human race. So hey, if you feel sensitive about the topic, it's not you. It is literally an evolutionary battle that you're fighting inside your own body. But hey, you don't have to lose that battle in your hard-earned cash every time you see a commercial. Let's look at how skincare marketing is designed to trigger your insecurities about these areas on purpose using these thousands of years of societal pressure. Won't that be fun? It will be. The commercials are really cringe and funny. Today's skincare companies rely on marketing principles to make you want to buy every cream, lotion, and serum on the shelves. Mass-produced skincare has been around for over a hundred years or so. So they've had a while to perfect all these strategies. Whereas you're just walking in totally unsuspecting. Skincare marketing started out relatively mild with Vaseline. First marketed in 1870 in print ads. It could be used as a makeup remover, rash guard, oil for your baseball glove, hair cream, furniture polish, and lip balm all in one. Through the 1940s, it was marketed for both men and women as a practical staple to have around the house. Who needs fancy creams? Baby skin, lips, hands too. Vaseline petroleum jelly. He's doing it all! Because who doesn't want to take care of their face using the same goop that they use to oil their rusty wagon wheel? But then things started to heat up when a new wave of products hit the market. The skincare juggernaut of the 50s, cold cream. Cold cream used major marketing tactic number one, problem agitation solution marketing. Now a well-known advertising tactic. Step number one, tell the customer that she has a problem that she didn't know existed. Step number two, make that problem seem really annoying. Something that's gonna just bother her throughout the entire day. Step number three, tell her how your product's gonna fix the problem and improve her whole life in the process. If you've seen any made-for-TV ads, this is probably the single most extreme version of this sort of tactic. Do you struggle and strain to reach high places behind the couch or in small tight spaces? Well, not anymore. Back in the day, cold cream sold themselves by telling women, one, that their face is much dirtier than they think. Two, that having dirty skin was bad and that soap wasn't able to fix the problem. And three, that cold cream can fix your skin and improve your life. Here's one of the first early takes of this from the 50s. Busy you. Think how much dust and dirt settle on your skin. That's why your face needs a thorough cleansing each day. Once skincare companies started using the tactic, they saw that it worked well to scare women into buying cold cream. So they kept doing it. Let's see how the setup goes in the 1960s. If you're a soap and water girl, remember soap removes natural oils and soap doesn't reach deep set dirt. A couple decades later, well into the 80s. This mirror reveals the whole truth. This woman just washed with soap. See the makeup and dirt soap leaves? I don't see that, actually. But now I'm gonna constantly be wondering if my invisible dirt is ruining my life. Let's jump forward again to the 90s, when women are empowered members of the workplace and shouldn't be fooled by a few scare tactics. Have you been ignoring your skin, Pat? Well, look at the dirt your soap missed. Eww. In each and every case, cold cream is the magic fix for that horrible problem of invisible dirt on your skin, apparently. That's why Salon Cold Cream is especially recommended for a young complexion. Ha, there's that thing about being young again. Once a day, really cleanse with Pond's Cold Cream. Now your skin looks radiantly clear. That's why as a skin consultant, I recommend Pond's Cold Cream, lifting away makeup and dirt that soap left behind, see? Hold up, what's a skin consultant? Pond's cleans deep down into your pores. Mmm, looks great. So soft. Same tactic, same messaging for almost 50 years. It works because it makes you think that there's something wrong with what you're doing, when what you're doing is probably totally fine for your skin. To make matters worse, this problem agitation solution marketing dovetails perfectly into marketing tactic number two, FOMO. See, if you're presented with a problem, and then an ad tells you that it's gonna solve your problem, suddenly, if you don't buy the product, well, then you're missing out. To add to all that pressure, we live in an age where there are thousands of beauty influencers online who are constantly getting products, just hundreds of new products shipped to them in the mail. Many of them swear by these products when they're showing them to you in a video, even though they might have just gotten them for free in a PR package. They might have been sponsored by the brand, or, you know, they might have just tried them the one time. Just like problem agitation solution marketing, FOMO preys on the most powerful emotion you got, fear. Instead of inspiring you to buy something, it makes you feel bad that you don't buy something. So, how do you spot these tactics? Well, it is literally every skincare video on TikTok. Love, love, love this, absolutely get it. Okay, y'all, this is how you're gonna get glass skin for 2024. Use a gauze towel to dry your face. If you use a regular towel, I swear to God, it's gonna break you out. Use panoxyl once a week. I freaking swear by panoxyl. And lastly, you can never have enough hyaluronic acid in your skincare. Personally, I love this TikTok, where it's literally just labeled, Skincare Tips That'll Save Your Life. And here people accuse me of clickbaiting. SkinTok trends like glass skin, bubble cleanser, that weird green stick mask from a couple years ago, all of them driven by FOMO. The smartest thing that you can do in the face of all this fear-based marketing is to just walk away. Think about what you really need. Unfortunately, the skincare industry is plenty well-equipped to make you feel stupid and blur the lines. One of skincare's favorite tactics to continue to blur that line is to tell you you're buying something because science. A quick reality check here, friendos. Skincare products fall into the category of cosmetics, not medicine. So they don't have any testing or approval requirements from agencies like the FDA. The best they can do is unofficial testing. Like here in this 1950s commercial where they made people's faces radioactive to test cold cream. Probably the craziest thing I've ever seen. Cleansing tests were made by an independent testing laboratory. This same kind of dirt was made just radioactive enough to register on a Geiger counter. Despite not being actual medical products and not having any scientific requirements, isn't it funny how a lot of them are still using these big, science-y words? A hygienic jar containing two derm-recommended ingredients. Retinol plus niacinamide pressed into a deep, moisturizing night cream. This is genius. If you have sensitive skin and are looking for an AHA, Mendelic Acid's for you. Microepidermic Hyaluronic Acid. 50 times smaller to penetrate deeper. Microepidermic Mendelic Acid, the diagram of the literal jar that looks like a spaceship, these are all classic examples of scientism, which is a term that's started to show up a lot more in health and wellness blogs lately. Scientism is the tactic of infusing scientific and technical language into products to make them seem more effective, even when there's no actual science involved. Big watch-out words for this tactic being used are when skincare brands say that their product's been clinically tested or clinically proven to do something. If they're also really emphasizing that this uses ingredients that you can't pronounce or that you don't understand, know that they know that you don't understand. You're not supposed to understand those words, you're just meant to think, science cream work good and fork over that credit card information. It sounds great and sciency to say that something's been clinically tested, but unfortunately, that doesn't really tell you much of anything. Remember, there are no regulations here. No one's checking in to see who any of these creams and serums are being tested on. How many people were in the test? What was their age group? What ethnic backgrounds do they represent? Do we literally know anything about this test at all? As soon as you start asking questions about a lot of these sciency tests, they crumble faster than a Girl Scout cookie. For instance, take one of the trendiest products to put on your face right now, vitamin C-based serums. You cannot go into a skincare aisle right now without tripping over 10 of these things, all in beautiful little bottles, ready to likely do nothing to your face. I was honestly a big fan of the idea of vitamin C on your face until I bothered to look at the evidence, or should I say the decided lack of evidence. Here's the claim for pretty much all of these serums. Brightens like a serum, moisturizes like a cream, for even bright glowing skin. Even bright glowing skin? Amazing! In just one hour, skin is replumped. This one bottle also does like four things, all of which sound amazing and involve this droplet of serum whizzing through another dimension. But again, where's the data to back it up? 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Thanks again to NordVPN for sponsoring this episode, and hey, happy birthday, guys. Now then, back to the episode. Well, some products that just have no data. A lot of drugstore or smaller brands are kind of like this, so if you use them, you're just taking them at their word. For some higher-end brands, though, they do claim to have tested their products, and they might even list the results on their website, like this vitamin C serum from Estee Lauder. They say that 86% of unknown testers, I guess, said that their skin tone looked more even. 88% said that their skin felt firmer. That sounds pretty darn great, right? That's numbers. That's data. Well, it's certainly not nothing, but dig a bit deeper, and I'll let you decide if the numbers are still convincing. The fine print on the website lets us know that they had less than 100 people in their clinical trial. Already not great. Fewer people than you had at your bat mitzvah. No information about what age they were, their ethnicity or skin type, if they were able to use other products, what the overall parameters of this entire thing were. You get the idea. There is a lot that actually goes into scientific experiments that is nowhere to be found here. And remember, we're talking about a 3.4 ounce bottle of cream that is less than a travel size for a hundred bucks. But okay, back to what they do have. This data is based on them using the cream for six weeks straight. The instructions say to use it two times per day, so that's 84 applications, and it's ideal, their words, after using yet another product. But we don't know if that was related to the experiment. On top of all of that, some of the bigger claims, like the fact that it'll reduce your acne scars and dark spots, minimize your pores, those don't have any evidence. Not even a footnote in here. I don't know about you, but looking at this, didn't feel like enough. Is there anything else we can do as customers to try and get more information? Well, I tried. I did an internet search for the Estee Lauder studies that would be published if they were public, and I found nothing. I'm not blaming the company for this. It could be that I just missed them. It could be that they haven't publicly published the data. I'm not trying to shame them or anything, but I wish that they had linked to the actual study somewhere on the site. The message this sends to me is that they want me to feel like I have the scientific data I need to shell out $100 for a tiny vial of serum, but they don't actually want me having access to the full slate of numbers, lest I find something that doesn't quite live up to the promises that they're so keen on promoting. Since I couldn't find information on this specific Estee Lauder study, I decided to broaden out my search to look for any clinical studies done on vitamin C serum, to see what is available out there in the public. For such a well-known product, there was a lot less than I expected. While there were a couple, and I do mean two or three studies in middle-aged patients that showed vitamin C reducing sun damage, the broader results were underwhelming, and often nothing at all. The most comprehensive clinical review I found from September of 2023 listed seven clinical studies that have been done with topical vitamin C since 2010. Most studies involved less than 60 people total, a few had less than 30. The average patient age was 48, and 77% of the studies didn't even record a skin type for the patients that were participating. Most of the studies required patients to use the product for 12 weeks to see a result. Some of them were totally subjective in the data that they were gathering, and a lot of them used multiple products, or even gave the patients laser face treatments with the vitamin C. This all left me feeling pretty unconvinced that a random bottle of vitamin C serum is gonna make a big difference to my face, and I'm not the only one, my friends. The results of actual clinical testing on these serums has been so bad that the New York Times published an article specifically calling out the fact that this is not a proven ingredient to fix the problems with your face. But the thing is, that research right there, that took me almost an hour to get, and I'm good at finding and reading scientific papers. Skin care companies know most people can't or don't want to do that sort of thing, so instead they just show a model with great skin who happens to be dabbing on some cream and hope that you'll believe that it's the science. The takeaway here, science isn't science when it comes to skin care products. All those science-y words, they're there to help you justify enormous price tags, and no one's regulating whether or not they're gonna do anything to your face. Speaking of enormous price tags, there's one more big marketing category that we gotta talk about here, and it's one that you'll know well if you've spent time on YouTube. Aspirational advertising. The idea of aspirational advertising is to show you some awesome, better version of you that seems just out of reach. But you know what could bring it within your grasp? Buying this product! This started as early as the 1950s, when using skin care promoted the aspirational dream of getting a husband. I'm marrying Mervin! Creaming twice each night with Pond's Cold Cream. Once to get off makeup and grime. Then again, that's the secret. Mervin! I never dreamed you'd want to marry me! And she's not the only one creaming her face to fulfill her dreams. I've been creaming my face twice every day for seven days. Wow, Pond's Seven Day Beauty Plan really works! Then of course there are those people who aspire to seduce the boss while on the job. What's wrong with me? My skin's so drab. Creamed my face twice with Pond's Cold Cream. Pond's Seven Day Beauty Plan really works! Yes, it's a lovely day. Eventually, beauty brands caught on to the idea that women aspire to do more than just date. So aspirational beauty content centered around doing it all. I live with the time. I've discovered Plenitude Advanced Wrinkle Defense Cream from L'Oreal. Nowadays, aspirational beauty content centers around influencers online. You know, exactly what I'm talking about. The 'Grammers and 'Tokers who have perfect skin, always do their 47-step skin care routine, and always dress well, eat well, live in a beautiful home. Everything you want to be, if only you knew their secret. Celebrity skin care routines from Paris Hilton, Ariana Grande, Kendall Jenner. All of them are great examples of these aspirational skin care moments that make us believe that we too can look like Kendall as long as we shell out 300 bucks for her night cream. We might recognize in our little thinky brains that these people have had professional procedures. Plastic surgery, camera magic applied to them. But there's still part of us that wants to be closer to the beautiful club by buying the same products that they have. This marketing also does a great job of applying a dollar value to how much we care about ourselves. How much is it worth for you to look like Kim Kardashian? Is it worth a $50 retinol cream? A $200 face mask? A skin care regimen that'll cost you $600 across 12 products at Sephora? This kind of marketing is constantly forcing you to ask, am I worth that much? Oh wait, that sounds like a familiar phrase. Because we're worth it. There you have your answer, right? If you're questioning whether you're worth it, you have skin care companies right there to tell you, yeah, yeah you are. As a marketing phrase L'Oreal started using because I'm worth it during the women's liberation movement. In the 70s, the women's rights movement descended into the streets, but advertising had not yet given women a voice. Their husbands did the talking for them. A 23-year-old advertiser came up with this slogan, because I'm worth it, and revolutionized the rules of advertising for an entire era. There's no doubt that empowering women to speak for themselves and demand what they want is a good thing. But as a marketing idea, well, it starts to cut both ways. You're worth it both serves the purpose of telling women that their health, beauty, and self-esteem are worth investing in, a good message by itself from friends. But it's a very different story when you recognize that it's coming from a money-hungry company saying those words to help you swallow the bill of $100 snake oil. Oh, it's a hundred bucks for a really small bottle? Yeah, I'm worth it. And if I don't buy it, well, I'm not valuing myself enough. I'm not worth $100. So after all that marketing that makes you feel sad, jealous, stupid, old, and not glamorous enough, they're finally here to tell you, you know what, customer? Go ahead, buy another face cream. You are just so worth it. When it comes to skincare, there's a reason why it makes a lot of us feel so confused. It's because it's designed to. That's the way it's supposed to work. So then what do you do about all this? How do you fight back? Well, first of all, you look for these tactics. The next time a beauty influencer pops up on TikTok, identify the emotions that you feel when they're telling you to try the trend right now or that you have to get a product that they use. The truth is you don't have to do anything. Really, you don't. You don't have to buy anything. Buying or not buying face cream will absolutely not change your life. The only thing it is gonna change is your credit card bill at the end of the month. Does that mean that you shouldn't own any skincare products at all? No, of course not. If there's something that you choose, not because of some scare tactic, but because you enjoy using it for whatever reason, that's awesome. Do that. You don't have to feel guilty because you don't own 20 skincare products. You are free to just slap on some sunscreen and get on your way. Because SPF, sun protection factor, yep, that is like the only thing in any of these lotions that is universally proven with hard actual science to be great for your skin. Protect your face from the sun, folks. That's all you need to know. And with that information, you're now armed with the knowledge that you need to keep yourself, your wallet, and your skin safe from the skincare aisle. Good luck out there. And as always, remember, it's just a theory. A style theory. Keep looking sharp. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
