What is more important: The skincare formulation or the branding?
Fast facts (and perhaps some unpopular opinions)
- Luxury packaging is often more expensive than the actual formula.
- Brands create heavier bottles and jars to make the product seem more luxurious and that you feel you are getting value for your money.
- Discarding the artful packaging and empty jars adds to the 120 billion units of beauty packaging waste per year!
Ok, now that is out of the way here is the big question, and be honest with your answer.
Question: If your favourite expensive skincare brand went label-less and changed their packaging to a lightweight plain white bottle or jar, would you still buy it?
Could you be romanticising your skincare purchases purely from what the branding looks like and the experience you feel it creates. (As well as achieving that all important vanity shelf aesthetic.)
What price are you really paying for your skincare?
I mean the whole shebang, from the packaging to the actual formulation. With more expensive products come better ingredients, more-sophisticated technology, and more research, right?
Nope.
This is just clever marketing targeted at consumers. In the US the cosmetic space is not regulated by the FDA, which means no one is really checking to ensure that all those fancy shh-mancy ingredients and advanced formulas in a luxury skincare product are really doing the most for your skin.
Giant skincare brands will often take a formula from another brand that is doing well and on ‘trend’, redecorate it and repackage it and BOOM, it is their own. So, with every new product launch and new packaging design that lures you in, it keeps you in a skincare consumer chokehold.
They want you to keep repurchasing from them as they are always reinventing the wheel and bringing you the newest and greatest in skincare.
But in case you haven’t already heard this, expensive does not always mean better. Nor does heavier prettier packing.
If you had to blind sample a $300 serum to a $30 serum what truly deciphers what serum is better for your skin? And how would you know which was the more expensive serum to the less expensive product? Skincare brands know exactly how to convince you that you are getting the best skincare through the experience their clever packaging provides.
Generally when you hand over your hard-earned money for an expensive skincare brand you are also paying for:
- The brand name
- Company internal costs
- Luxury (and more importantly) ‘excessive’ packaging
- Advertising
- Celebrity/Influencer collabs
- Beauty industry markups
And although you as an individual may feel special about having this luxurious feeling product in your hands remember these big skincare brands are ordering and producing packaging in bulk. So the more volume they have to order of materials the less it costs for them to make.
The Ugly Price of Packaging
First impressions matter, so of course packaging is very important for a skincare brand. It firstly protects the product from degrading and contamination and should provide ease of use and appropriate storage for the consumer.
There are many popular packages in the skincare industry, such as
- pumps
- sprayers
- airless bottles
- droppers
- tubes
- jars
And these come in a variety of finishes from plastic to glass to even metal. Skincare packaging not only convey beauty but also helps to set brand awareness.
Since the packaging is what consumers initially see, it greatly influences how they view the product and that is why the appearance is very important. However, there is a fine line between appropriate sustainable packaging verses excessive and over the top.
Also having appropriate packaging to preserve the integrity of the ingredients instead of compromising this and opting for an Instagram-worthy aesthetic. For example, jars tend to be less expensive and easier to fill, but they leave the product exposed to oxygen and light, both of which degrade the quality of the product. Plastic pumps are an effective way to prevent degradation while also making it easier for users to dispense the exact amount of product they need.
Big beauty brands go all out and often the more expensive or luxurious a product is, the more nonessential packaging you find. About 70% of the beauty industry’s waste comes from packaging, including plastic, paper, glass, and metals. A lot of which end up in landfills year after year, which contributes to the loss of 18 million acres of forest annually.
Recycling is not always straightforward with skincare packaging either because brands make most boxes, bags, and containers with mixed materials. Even when the components are separable, it is usually a waste of time for recycling workers.
This is where AMPERNA® cuts through the B.S.
- First and foremost AMPERNA®'s formulas were created to work hard for you.
- AMPERNA® skips the overpriced packaging so more money is spent on the actual formula, as the formulas are the star of the show.
- AMPERNA® provides sustainably priced packaging by blowing our black bottles (we use black to protect the ingredients) from 100% recycled PET.
- AMPERNA® is proudly certified plastic negative, which means for every one kilogram of plastic used we remove two kilograms of plastic from the environment.
We also offer a flexible spatula in the range to enable you to scrape every single last drop of product out of the packaging.
@ampernaskin #stitch with @Brandefy #OneSliceChallenge Product Packaging VS Price of product. A lot of the time you are buying products in “Fancy” packaging but how much of the product are you actually paying for compared to the packaging 🤔 At Amperna our focus is creating high end formulas at a fair price. What are your thoughts ? Is high end packaging becoming less important as the focus on sustainability is on the rise ? #products #packaging #packagingdesign #productpackaging #skincareproducts #sustainability #sustainable #sustainableliving #sustainablepackaging #highendproducts #skincareproducts #skincaretiktok #skincarecheck ♬ Ain't Sayin' No (Instrumental) - The Young Ebenezers
In Closing
You do not have to spend a lot of money on your skincare. You do not have to be swayed by pretty branding. Expensive and excessive packaging is not what makes a formula great. And most importantly it is bad on the environment.
