The Secret Life Of Private Label Skin Care

What you should know before you buy

When you buy a skin care product, you are buying more than a brand. You’re buying ingredients, expertise and proven results. A lot goes into the bottle. But when you buy private label skin care, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going into the bottle.

 

That’s because private label brands don’t typically do their own research and development. They don’t do their own formulation. They don’t source their own ingredients. And they don’t oversee their own production. They contract with a third-party vendor who handles the whole operation, turnkey, and delivers a finished product with the retailer’s name on it. (You didn’t really think your favorite neighborhood spa developed a whole line of groundbreaking skin care products, did you?)

 

Spas and salons often decide to attach their name to a product to sell in their own establishment and through their website. It’s a way to build brand awareness, capture more of the retail profits, and enhance their image of expertise. They’ve developed their name value and they want to maximize it. It’s good business. But it’s not always good for the consumer.

 

Because the private label brand isn’t intimately involved in the production of their products, it makes it easy for unscrupulous suppliers to cut corners. Sometimes they use ingredients that are lower quality or past their expiration date.

 

Sometimes a bigger brand will license their products for private label and they may license to more than one company. So you could end up paying more for the same product that is in another bottle with a different label.

 

Other times, the supplier is just a generic manufacturer using formulators with limited experience, so the products may have little to no real impact on your skin.

 

This is not to say that all private label brands are inferior quality, or overpriced, or ineffective. Many are not. But neither are they innovative. Good skin care is based on science. It takes years of study, research and development to formulate products that deliver real results. It’s not part-time pursuit.

 

To be sure you’re getting the best quality and most current advances in skin care, buy reputable brands that have put time, effort, and expertise into developing the best possible products to deliver the best possible results.