What “active” really means

The word "active" has been one of the most damaging pieces of industry vocabulary since clinical skincare started to become mainstream. It sounds scientific and implies rigour. It makes you feel like you’re making the right choice when you choose a product whose hero ingredient matches your ‘problem’ exactly. And it’s a good feeling. You know what Niacinamide is. You know that you shouldn’t layer Vit C and Retinol. You understand that hydrators come before occlusives. You’re a sophisticated consumer who has done your due diligence, right? 

Well yes. And, the skincare industry has deliberately taught you only what it wants you to know. They’ve trained you to read INCI lists for their buzzwords but they stop short of explaining the implications of their claims. A customer who doesn’t understand formulation science is the most profitable kind. This intentional obfuscation is part of a larger Big Beauty strategy to keep you feeling informed and paranoid about “bad” skincare. Anything that doesn’t use grandiose language or promise the world must not be good, right? 

When MILO established the Six Fundamentals of Skin Health in our R&D journey, we adopted the concept of Ingredient Stacking. Instead of focusing on the one or two ingredients that sounded sexiest for marketing purposes, we decided to focus on the cumulative effect of our 45 carefully selected ingredients. We chose each one for the way it satisfies the Six Fundamentals, and how they engage with other ingredients in the system.

By training you to recognize ingredients, the Big Beauty industry has kept you focused on the wrong variable. Knowing that a product contains Vitamin C isn’t the same as knowing whether it’s stable or what concentration it’s at, nor its origins or quality. And it’s up to the brand to disclose it since there are very few regulations around formulation transparency. Even harder to get a handle on is whether the INCIs of two different products in a single routine are compatible. Brands tend to build entire product lines around a hero ingredient, only to include that ingredient in other product lines whose marketing never mention said hero ingredient. If it feels hard to follow, it should be. That’s the point.

The industry pretends to empower you with information. Brands suggest that Science is the final word, when the truth is that the ‘science’ they’re using to make their claims is derived from studies their own marketing departments financed. We skipped that step entirely by going back to Dermatology textbooks and the original studies which established the importance of the Six Fundamentals of Skin Health as we’ve identified them. By focusing only on how each ingredient available to us served these Fundamentals, our R&D process was quite different than most. We even had to level-set with our manufacturing partners that we are not interested in formulating from a place of ingredient marketing.

Here’s a look at the earliest brief to our R&D Partners.

Oil; great on skin and hair, cleanse and moisturize - can wash off or be left on

Water-based Spray; toner, dewy look setting spray, mixer for powder, refresher, pick me up for body face and hair)

Powder scrub/exfoliator; to add to oil - can also use this with oil as body wash (another use) and shampoo? dry or wet

There was a lot of evolution to get to the final product but the underlying goal was exactly as our partners repeated it back to us: Products to be used as multifunctional and change the behaviors of consumers in the beauty industry.

We successfully replaced most of the commonly used personal care items we set out to. We weren’t able to tackle the shower products mentioned in the brief but our Effective Replacements list organically ballooned to over 22 applications across three products. As we began to test early formulations, we experienced first hand that intention changes perception. We set out to use three products to do as much as they could instead of just creating more and it framed our thinking about formulation accordingly. Ingredients weren’t chosen for what we could say about them. We even passed on some trendy hero ingredients like bakuchiol because we wanted the formulas to serve as many people as possible in service of balance. Being able to say Nature’s Retinol on a label wasn’t a good enough reason to add an ingredient that didn’t serve the greater good of the system. That would have forced us into too narrow a box. 

The question we decided to answer is different from the one the industry wants you to ask. Forget about the right ingredients for how you want to look. The real question is: What conditions does skin need to achieve for optimal health? When you answer that question and stick with a simplified, consistent routine you’ll achieve balance that makes your skin unshakeable. No more skincare pseudoscience.