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Skin, K-beauty, Korea trips and the beauty industry — ask and share
'Medical grade', 'professional', 'clean': which label words mean anything?
An esthetician on r/Esthetics shared a long explainer, first written for a heated Facebook group, on which skincare terms carry weight and which are marketing. The core argument: outside prescription products, brands dra
0 1How do you explain "biotech" ingredients to shoppers?
Fermentation, recombinant proteins, cell-culture extracts: supplier catalogs are full of ingredients labeled "biotech" these days. But brand teams say explaining them on a product page is where things get stuck. Why it i
0 0K-beauty lookalikes: how to tell a Korean brand from a 'Korean-style' one
A post on r/AsianBeauty asking whether a set of toner pads was an 'AB marketing scam' drew more than 140 comments. The poster had noticed near-identical rave reviews across TikTok, including promo videos featuring AI-gen
0 0Planning next year's launches: which ingredient family is R&D watching most?
Put together what gets discussed at supplier meetings and trade shows and a few trends stand out. So for anyone planning next year's launches: which family are you betting on most? Families that come up often DNA and nuc
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0 0How far do you trust beauty YouTubers' recommendations?
A post titled "Stop watching cosmetics YouTubers" went up on DC Inside's perfume and cosmetics gallery. Dermatologist YouTubers are better, it argued, because cosmetics YouTubers are ultimately in it to launch their own
0 0Retinol at 500 ppb on the front of the pack: marketing or meaningful?
On r/AsianBeauty, someone looked up the ingredient list of viral 'retinol collagen' toner pads and was let down. Water, glycols and glycerin led the list, hydrolysed collagen was declared at 50 ppm (0.005%) and retinol a
0 1Salmon PDRN, plant "PDRN": how much do you disclose about the source?
With PDRN now a hot skincare keyword, one question reportedly keeps coming up in supplier meetings: "Is this from salmon or from plants?" Common concerns in the field More sources than before: besides DNA from salmon mil
0 0Sunscreen labels no longer show filter percentages? What changed in Taiwan
On Taiwan's PTT forum (BeautySalon board), someone noticed in a drugstore that the new version of Mentholatum's ACNES sunscreen primer lists its UV filters but not their concentrations, and newer batches of Biore sunscre
0 1Writing a product brief for the lab: don't leave these out
Work with an OEM/ODM lab or in-house R&D team and you will often hear "if only the brief were more specific." Samples bouncing back several times is often less about formulation skill and more about gaps in the brief. He
0 0In an Olive Young haul, the item everyone argued about was a setting spray
On Taiwan's PTT forum (MakeUp board), someone shared an April haul from Olive Young in Korea: Espoir's glow foundation, Clio's snowflake highlighter, So Natural's setting spray, a Too Cool For School aegyo-sal pencil, Ba
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