Podcast 328: The beauty industry keeps renaming the same problem. And you’re paying for it.

Your skin is overwhelmed. Or maybe it’s overstimulated. Or possibly you’ve been skin fasting wrong, which is why your barrier is struggling.

Or perhaps the real issue is ingredient redundancy — too many signals, not enough silence. Or ingredient dusting: where the hero ingredient on the label is present in such tiny amounts it might as well not be there at all. Or perhaps what your skin actually needs is flooding.

If none of those terms mean anything to you, or if you’re not sure which of these problems you actually have, that’s by design. The beauty industry has always been fluent in invention — and in this week’s episode of Green Beauty Conversations, Lorraine Dallmeier argues that what it likes to vent new names for the latest skincare trends, which are actually old phenomena.

“The beauty industry’s vocabulary is weaponised precisely because it’s difficult to interrogate.” — Lorraine Dallmeier

Key takeaways:

• The beauty industry has always invented consumer problems, but social media has made it faster and more profitable. The pattern is consistent: take a legitimate dermatological observation, give it a catchy name, package it as a discovery, and sell it as a solution. What’s changed in the last decade is the speed. You can now invent a term, post a video, and launch a product in a very short space of time. The beauty shopper on the receiving end ends up bewildered, increasingly convinced their skin is uniquely broken, and reaching for their wallet.
• Most of these trending terms describe things dermatologists have understood for decades. Skin cycling — rotating active ingredients across nights of the week to avoid irritation — is a legitimate idea. Dermatologists have been recommending exactly this since long before TikTok existed. What was new was the name, the schedule, and the product category that appeared around it. The same applies to skin fasting, which borrows the moral framing of intermittent fasting to imply that your skincare products are an indulgence your skin needs rescuing from. And for the record, as Lorraine points out, our skin does not breathe.
• Not every term on the list is pure marketing. Lorraine gives genuine credit to skinimalism — the idea that using fewer products, being more consistent, and slowing down is better for most people’s skin most of the time. That has real dermatological backing. It reduces the number of variables in a routine and makes it easier to identify what’s actually working. It is, in her words, common sense with clinical support. The problem is that even skinimalism can be commercialised, and the beauty industry is very good at turning “buy less” into a reason to buy something new.
• Overstimulated skin is the newest term on the list, and the one that requires the most careful unpicking. The claim is that skin reacts badly not because of specific problematic ingredients, but because of the sheer number of simultaneous signals it receives from a complex routine. There is something in this: complicated routines with too many actives at too-high concentrations can cause barrier disruption, contact sensitisation, and microbiome disruption. But the number of ingredients in a routine is not, in itself, the most important variable. What matters is which ingredients, at what concentrations, and in what combinations — and working that out requires actual formulation knowledge.
• The most practical defence against the naming game is formulation literacy. The ability to read an ingredient list, understand what each ingredient does, at what concentration it becomes effective, and whether the claims on the front of a product are supported by the formula on the back. Lorraine is honest that this is hard to achieve and hard to maintain when the industry generates new terminology faster than most people can keep up with. Her challenge this week is a starting point: the next time you encounter a new skincare term, ask yourself two questions. Does this describe something that already has a clinical name? And who benefits from you believing this is a new problem that requires a new solution?

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Formula Botanica Green Beauty Conversations podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please share, subscribe and review this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Youtube so that more people can enjoy the show. Don’t forget to follow and connect with us on Facebook and Instagram.

Lorraine Dallmeier

Lorraine Dallmeier is a Biologist, Chartered Environmentalist and the CEO of Formula Botanica, the award-winning online organic cosmetic science school. Read more about Lorraine and the Formula Botanica Team.