One more thing about my trip to Los Angeles to meet with some of the labs that help us formulate our products, almost without exception the most common comment I get is how different it is when my team and I meet with them. Why different? Because we talk ingredients, we ask for studies, we want products with no fragrance and no coloring agents, we provide air tight containers, we ask for plant extracts and vitamins with proven benefits, we only want “natural” or “organic” ingredients that can make a difference for skin, we want effective exfoliants, effective anti-bacterial agents for acne, effective antioxidants, cell communicating ingredients, and skin identical ingredients, and we want an honest discussion about how to make a product stable. Primarily what we don’t want is the hype. It usually takes awhile to wade through all but eventually we do get to the other side.

Eternally perplexing to the cosmetic chemists we work with is the need to see in an ingredients deck (the proposed formula as it would appear on the ingredient label) before we see the product. I’ve been formulating products for more then 15 years and it is the rare lab that does this. Their system is to send the product because no one is all that curious about what the product contains (they only want the “special” ingredient they can showcase to the consumer); they want to know how it feels and smell. Feel and smell is important but if the ingredients aren’t healthy for skin why bother. From my perspective it is a waste of time and money, show me the ingredients.

At some point I’m always expecting this to change, that at some point there will be a learning curve and our account representative and chemist will cut back on the salespitch but that has yet to happen. They see dozens of companies a month and we appear to be the only one asking for formulation details. I shouldn’t be that shocked, that’s my learning curve, I never get used to the way my industry works.