In a recent poll, 9 out of 10Allureeditors agreed beauty product claims can be pretty damn confusing.
(And one person was out sick that day).
Why all the linguistic gymnastics?
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For starters, brands are incentivized to make their products sound like they work just not work too well.
“If a product claims to diagnose, cure, mitigate, treat, prevent disease.
Cosmetics, on the other hand, can only make appearance claims.
If a product says it reduces wrinkles, that’s a drug.
That’s a cosmetic.
Of course, this is just the tip of the proverbial beauty industry iceberg.
Here, what we learned.
If something says it’s clinically proven, it should have CVS-length receipts.
It may be on the brand’s site or social media.
This is the number that’s often required by retailers to make claims, he adds.
It’s also worth noting that clinicals aren’t cheap.
According to Dobos, one can run upwards of $50,000.
This means neither the clinical study subjects nor the researchers know what product they’re using.
This is why it’s important to blind subjects in placebo-controlled studies.
If we think we’re using a retinoid, we’re more likely to believe our wrinkles are vanishing.
That’s not as common for cosmetics as it is for drugs, though.
“Moisturizers are pretty much all oil-in-water emulsions,” says Weiss.
to measure what’s changed and by how much,” says Weiss.
Often a brand will tout claims from these types of studies with before and after images.
But we doubt the person from your high school who’s shilling products on Facebook followed those parameters.
This happens for a number of reasons.
It’s also done to “provide unbiased confirmation of claims,” says Dobos.
(Because beauty packaging doesn’t have much space, youll rarely find it there.)
Ah, the method of… not having a method.
A claim that is provided by a study subject (like “Sharon R.” from Connecticut!)
That Benchmarking Company survey also found that consumers respond to consumer perception claims more than clinical ones.
“As a scientist, I will always support clinical data,” says Bhanusali.
The strongest claims, Bhanusali says, have a mix of both clinical and consumer support.
