The Skincare Industrial Machine Is a Problem
Introduction
Part 1: Meet the Machine
Part 1: Meet the Machine — What's Wrong With It, and Why
There is a machine that wants the shelves in your bathroom to stay full.
The machine spends billions of dollars a year making sure that when you feel tired, dull, dry, blotchy, or just not quite right, the answer is a product. The machine does not care about you. It’s there to move product and make a profit doing so.Before we talk about the machine, it helps to know that the machine is new.
People have cared for their skin for as long as there have been people. Galen, the Roman physician, gets the credit for cold cream, around 150 AD: rosewater, beeswax, and olive oil, whipped together. But he was writing down something women had been making at their own hearths for centuries before him, and would go on making for eighteen hundred years after, almost unchanged.
For most of human history, skincare was something you made at home, from what you had, with knowledge passed hand to hand, mother to daughter, neighbor to neighbor. It lived in the same handwritten recipe books as the bread and the cough syrup. It was domestic, it was skilled, and it belonged to women.
It was not always safe. The past had its lead and its mercury and plenty of arsenic and I don’t want to romanticize it, but it was a craft, and it was a commons. Nobody owned it.
Then came oil.John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870, and as the petroleum industry expanded to meet demand for kerosene lamps, entrepreneurs found uses for its byproducts. One of those was petroleum jelly. Robert Chesebrough patented his process for refining it in 1872 and sold it as Vaseline.1
It had real advantages over the almond oil that many cold creams had always been made with. Petroleum jelly and mineral oil, another petroleum-derived ingredient, do not go rancid, so they could be shipped farther and stay on store shelves longer. They were also cheaper than plant oils.As the industry grew, formulators started replacing plant oils with mineral oil in more and more products. Introduced in the first decade of the 1900s, Pond’s Extract Cold Cream became one of the best-known examples of this shift. Made with mineral oil in a beeswax-and-borax emulsion, Pond’s gradually became nearly synonymous with everyday cold cream through heavy national advertising.1
That is the real beginning of the modern mass-market system. Instead of being made at home or by the pharmacist in town, skincare became a branded product, made in a factory and advertised nationally.
The skincare aisle, with its zillions of products, frosted jars, and dermatologists in advertisements, is barely a century old. It is not the natural order of things, and there are plenty of reasons to change it.
Let me show you a little of what I learned, both about the industry and about how we can change skincare for the better.
Some Real Numbers
You are probably using more than you think. The average American woman uses about 13 personal care products every day, containing roughly 114 unique ingredients.2 About one adult in ten uses more than 25.3
You are probably spending more than you think. American women average around $600 a year on skincare alone, before makeup, hair, or nails.4 The average skincare routine takes about 22 minutes a day.5 That comes to roughly 136 hours a year, more than three full work weeks spent at the bathroom mirror.
You are probably exposed to more than you think. By the Environmental Working Group’s count, the average adult’s daily routine includes two ingredients linked to cancer and two more linked to reproductive or developmental harm.6 EWG is an advocacy group, and its methods have critics.
But the FDA’s own numbers point the same direction: about 1,700 cosmetic products list PFAS, the “forever chemicals,” among their ingredients.7
You are probably:
The average American woman uses about 13 personal care products every single day. Those products contain roughly 114 unique ingredients, according to a 2023 survey.1
- About 1 in 10 adults uses more than 25 products a day.2
- Nearly ¾ of women use 3+ products in the morning alone.2
American women average around $600 a year on skincare — before makeup, hair, or nails.3
- Lifetime beauty spending runs to a quarter of a million dollars.4
- Over 20 minutes a day at the mirror translates to more than 120 hours a year, or three full work weeks.5
Every day, personal care products expose the average adult to two ingredients linked to cancer and another two linked to reproductive or developmental harm.6
- ~1,700 cosmetic products list PFAS "forever chemicals"7
- PFAS accumulate — they don't break down, and can't be flushed out
Footnote sources included at the end of "The Skincare Industrial Machine Is a Problem: Part 1" (Fraga Farm 2026).
PFAS break down extremely slowly, and some linger in the human body for years. That FDA count only includes the PFAS that companies chose to add and then disclosed.
When scientists at Notre Dame tested 231 cosmetics for fluorine, a reliable marker for PFAS, more than half showed high levels. The products with the highest readings each turned out to contain four or more PFAS compounds, and very few of them listed PFAS on the label.8
The rest arrived incidentally, through impurities in raw materials, fluorinated plastic containers, and processing aids nobody has to declare.
And you are probably feeling a little disappointed. Almost three-quarters of women buy some kind of product to fight wrinkles and fine lines, but only about 15% believe the products show visible results.9 Only one in five women say they fully know what is in the products they use, even though most rank ingredients as the thing they care about most.10
So we pay a lot for products, spend real time, absorb things we did not choose, and many of us still don’t think they are working.
As a dairy farmer, if my veterinarian tried to sell me that package for my herd — high cost, high time investment, low results, and a side of questionable compounds — I would be looking for a new vet.
Why We Keep Buying
So why do we keep buying? Because the machine has two levers.
The first lever is shame. Nearly three-quarters of American women say they worry about their appearance, and more than half of Americans believe the beauty standards they are worrying against are unattainable.11 Read those two numbers together: the majority is chasing a standard they know they cannot reach.
This translates into a market that manufactures demand and then sells relief. Social media is relatively new, but beauty advertising has been used to sell products for as long as the industry has been selling mass-market products.
But it is the slotting fee that should bother you most, because it is not really a cost. It is an admission fee.
The second lever is a lab coat, and we know exactly where it came from.
In 1950, about a third of American women worked outside the home. By 1980, more than half did.12 You would expect a beauty boom to follow all those new paychecks. Instead the industry nearly foundered. Through the 1970s, cosmetics sales lagged behind ordinary consumer spending, and by 1979 the trade press said the business had “lost its glamour.” 13
The counterculture had made makeup suspect, and a generation of newly working women had looked at the lipstick counter and decided it was a little embarrassing. The industry had a problem precisely when its customer base was exploding.
It solved that problem brilliantly, by changing the subject.
You could not easily sell a serious professional woman a frivolous lipstick. But you could sell her skincare, because skincare was not vanity. It was maintenance, health, discipline, and science in a white coat. It asked for the same twenty minutes and the same money makeup always had, but it asked in a language she could say yes to.
Not look prettier, but take proper care of yourself.
Clinique launched in 1968, at the exact hinge of that shift, and it built the costume deliberately. The story is on Clinique’s own website. A 1967 Vogue article, “Can Great Skin Be Created?”, introduced a respected dermatologist, Dr. Norman Orentreich. Evelyn Lauder brought the idea to the family and chose the name after the “Clinique Esthétiques” signs she had seen in Paris; she liked that it sounded clinical, with a hint of French glamour. The brand launched at Saks with 117 products. The consultants wore white lab coats.14
On every counter sat the Clinique Computer.
In 1968, a computer was a room-sized machine that governments owned, and Clinique put one on the makeup counter. It was a box of sliding levers. Nothing inside it measured anything. You answered eight questions about your own skin, and where the levers landed told you which of four “skin types” you were.
Every scrap of information in that machine came out of your own mouth. The questions were fine; they were the ones a good dermatologist would ask. But a card with eight questions is not a computer, and it does not need a woman in a lab coat to operate it. The costume was the product. It has been ever since.
And it worked. Before 1968, beauty meant makeup, and skincare was an afterthought. Today skincare is the largest category in all of beauty, around 40% of the global market and heading for $220 billion a year, while makeup has shrunk to about 17%.15
There is even a trade word now, “skinification,” for folding skincare claims into everything else, from shampoo to foundation to body wash, until no product is left that cannot be sold to you as a treatment.
"Each time the culture produced a real objection to the product, the industry did not fix the product. It rebranded the objection, raised the price, and sold it back."
I know how the coat is worn, because I get the ads. As someone who makes skincare, I am regularly offered the chance to buy a dermatologist’s endorsement. Testing labs handle it end to end, and one lab’s materials note that physician signatures are available on request: dermatologist, pediatrician, and, if those do not suit, plastic surgery, ophthalmology, or gynecology.16
“Dermatologist tested” means someone tested it; the phrase has no standard definition. “Dermatologist approved” can mean one dermatologist approved it, possibly the company’s own paid consultant.17 None of these terms are defined or regulated by the FDA.
Meanwhile, sixty percent of shoppers say a dermatologist’s recommendation matters to what they buy.18 Where there is a market, there is a supplier. I have never bought a signature.
Together, the two levers move the market. The first makes buying feel necessary. The second makes it feel responsible. You are not indulging; you are treating a condition.
The condition is called having skin.
The Clean Aisle
Fifty years after the lab coat, the machine needed a new costume.
The numbers above are frightening, and a reasonable person could end up afraid of “chemicals” in general. In one large European survey, about 40% of people said they would prefer to live in a world without chemical substances at all.19 That world cannot exist, since everything, water included, is made of chemicals. But the fear is real, and the machine noticed.
“Clean beauty” is now a $10-billion-a-year business, growing three times faster than beauty overall.20 Its leading players include Estée Lauder, L’Oréal, Procter & Gamble, Shiseido, and Clorox, the company that now owns Burt’s Bees.
It is the 1968 move, run again. Back then, feminism made vanity embarrassing, so the industry stopped selling pretty and started selling healthy. This time, the internet made people afraid of ingredients, so the industry stopped selling safe-looking and started selling safe: clean, non-toxic, free-from.
Each time the culture produced a real objection to the product, the industry did not fix the product. It rebranded the objection, raised the price, and sold it back.
That is why so many of the biggest names in “clean” belong to the same companies that stock the drugstore aisle and the department store counter. It is one industry with three costumes, and it changes into whichever one the decade requires.
And “clean” means nothing. The FDA does not define it, any more than it defines “natural.” Private retailers define it instead: Clean at Sephora, Conscious Beauty at Ulta.
The word is so empty that market researchers cannot agree on the size of the industry built from it. Estimates for 2025 range from $9.5 billion to $163 billion, because nobody can say what counts.21 Victoria Fu and Gloria Lu, cosmetic chemists who formulate these products for a living, put it plainly: because every brand defines “clean” for itself, every brand also prices it for itself, and paying more for a cleaner product does not mean you are getting a safer one.22
Safety has become an upscale product. A single clean-brand serum can cost a third of a week’s pay at the federal minimum wage.23
Why We Keep Buying
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying chemicals are bad.
I make soap for a living. You cannot make cold process soap without lye. Sodium hydroxide is a caustic chemical that will burn your skin, and I handle it with gloves, goggles, and enormous respect. Yet there is no lye in my soap. Not a trace.
In saponification, the sodium hydroxide is consumed. It splits the fats into the fatty-acid salts that soap actually is, and it releases glycerin, which is what makes a handmade bar feel the way it does. The caustic thing and the fats go into the pot; soap and glycerin come out. The lye is gone, because it has become the soap.
Water is a chemical. Goat milk is a gorgeous mix of chemicals. We are all made of chemicals. “Chemical-free” is not a thing. It is a sales pitch.
What I am saying is more specific. There are particular compounds we have particular evidence against. You are exposed to them daily without knowing it, and you cannot make an informed decision about a label that may not even list them.
We Could Wait
We could just wait for regulation to catch up. While progress is being made, so much more can be done.
In 2022, Congress passed the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act, the first major update to U.S. cosmetics law since 1938 and the reason the FDA produced that PFAS report.24 But Europe still restricts or bans far more substances in cosmetics than we do,25 and the American rules are still being written.
We may be waiting a long time.
Or we can do something about it ourselves, in three moderately hard steps. For ”Part 2: How to Emancipate Yourself”, you will need a notebook, a pen, a few sticky notes, and a few minutes a day for one week.
First, though, it is worth understanding where the money goes, as seen by someone who works in the same industry, from the outside.
Where the Money Goes
So how does a machine with results like that get so big, and so profitable?
In industry pricing guides, the standard markup on a skincare product is 8 to 10 times the cost of ingredients and packaging. A product that costs about $5 to make routinely retails around $55.26 The other $50 buys marketing, influencer campaigns, retail fees, and a heavy frosted-glass jar designed to feel expensive in your hand.
The beauty aisle is engineered so that the companies with the biggest budgets get your eyes at shelf level. An endcap placement costs a manufacturer $350 to $500 per store, for a promotional cycle of about four weeks.27
That is what I pay in booth fees for an entire summer season: every Saturday, Memorial Day through Labor Day, for a 10x10 booth full of everything I make. My booth fee runs about 5 to 8% of what I sell in a day, unless it is a rain day or a smoky-air day. The rest lets me make a good product, and maybe even pay myself a little.
A chain retailer takes 40 to 50% off the top. Trade spend takes another 5 to 15%. Then come distribution, shrinkage, and free fills.
But it is the slotting fee that should bother you most, because it is not really a cost. It is an admission fee.
My booth costs the same whether I am a vegetable farmer or a cheesemaker. The market charges every farmer the same, so long as they meet the criteria and pass the jury: quality, uniqueness, local ownership, and growing your own product. Some markets even send third-party auditors to verify that farmers grow what they say they grow.
A $75,000 slotting fee is a different animal.28 It does not select for the quality of a product, its effectiveness, or the integrity of its ingredients. It selects for the deepest pocket.
What Actually Matters
Three things about a skincare product are real, and matter.
Ingredients Matter
Your skin is a good barrier, not a perfect one. Some of what you put on it gets through, and you put it on every day for decades.
A short, honest ingredient list beats a thirty-ingredient formula where the “active” is present at a fraction of a percent and the rest is filler, preservative, emulsifier, and fragrance. Reading that list is a learnable skill, and in Part 2 I will show you how.
“Plant-derived” means very little. Cocamide DEA is derived from coconut oil, and California lists it as a carcinogen.29 Sodium laureth sulfate starts as coconut or palm and then gets ethoxylated, the very process that makes it gentler on skin and that can leave behind 1,4-dioxane, a probable human carcinogen.30 Palm oil is entirely plant-derived, and it is also the reason for a great deal of burned rainforest.
A plant is a starting point, not a destination.
The encouraging part is that change shows up fast. When a group of teenage girls switched to products free of phthalates, parabens, triclosan, and oxybenzone, the levels of those chemicals in their bodies dropped by roughly a quarter to nearly half in three days. The study, called HERMOSA, was designed and led by the teenagers themselves.31
Sourcing Matters
Where an ingredient comes from (who grew it, who was paid what, what land it took) is part of the product whether the label mentions it or not.
Shea butter is made from shea nuts gathered by hand, most often by women, across West Africa. Mica comes out of mines, many of them illegal or “artisanal,” and many of them employing children, who are valued for their size because they fit into smaller holes in the ground.32
A company that knows its supply chain will tell you about it, usually at length, because it is proud of it. A company that tells you nothing and holds no third-party fair trade or organic certification probably isn’t sourcing its ingredients in a way you’d feel good about if you knew the details.
Some companies genuinely do not know, because they are not the ones making the product. The industry runs on contract manufacturers, labs that offer formulations off a menu. A brand needs a new eyeliner for fall, so it picks one, puts its name on it, and sets a price.
Packaging Matters
That heavy jar, the pump that never reaches the last quarter of the product, the box inside the box inside the cellophane: it is all designed to extract value.
And you do not pay for it once. You pay at the register, and then someone else pays again, in places you will never see, where the garbage goes.
What infuriates me is that the alternatives exist. Cardboard push-up tubes for lip balm hold up well, look good, and are compostable. But they cost more, and because you generally can’t twist a cardboard tube, it has to be filled higher so there’s enough room to get your finger in and push up from the bottom.
Here are my actual numbers: in a lot of 100, a cardboard tube costs me $0.65, against $0.17 for plastic, and the fill goes from 4 grams to 7.
Now consider the company standing at that endcap. That company has paid to be allowed onto the shelf, paid again for four weeks of display, and free-filled the shelf out of its own pocket. It has no room to triple its packaging costs. So it pinches pennies at the only place left to pinch: the product.
Take Burt’s Bees, for example. In 2007, the Clorox Company, the bleach people, bought it for about $925 million. Burt’s Bees had roughly $170 million in sales that year, so Clorox paid about five and a half times annual revenue for a lip balm company.33
Barely five years later, Clorox recorded a roughly $250 million goodwill impairment charge related to Burt’s Bees. In plain English, the company had reduced the accounting value it placed on the business. Clorox attributed the change to the recession and slower growth in international sales, but in the same announcement, its CFO also called Burt’s Bees the fastest-growing business in the company, with above-average margins.34
To me, it sounds like they may have overpaid for the business and been a little too optimistic about what it would ultimately be worth, even as it remained one of their strongest performers. The growth projected for Burt’s Bees no longer seemed to justify the price Clorox had paid.
That $250 million is not the constraint. It is the receipt.
A company that pays nearly a billion dollars for a business with $170 million in sales has made a promise to its board and shareholders about what that business will return. When the growth does not arrive, the promise does not go away. And the levers are limited. You cannot un-pay the shelf fees, and the shelf is the whole reason you bought the brand. What is left is the tube, the fill, and what goes in it.
I cannot prove that any of those financial pressures explain why particular Burt’s Bees products have changed over time. Reformulations have been acknowledged, but I have not found evidence tying specific changes to these financial pressures. I am not going to claim something I cannot show you. That is rather the point of this whole piece. What I can tell you is what things look like from the other side.
On this end, I have no acquisition to justify against sales and no shareholders whose returns depend on shaving three cents off a tube. That is not virtue on my part. It is structure.
Clorox owed its shareholders. I owe you: the person who will actually use the thing and whom I will see again next Saturday at the market.
When I find a better tube for our lip balm, I simply buy it. It may cost me more, but I do it anyway, and nobody calls a meeting about it.
"When you are not paying for permission to exist on a shelf, you can put that money into the jar instead of around it: exceptional oils, real essential oils instead of synthetic fragrance, packaging that will not outlive you in a landfill. "
Put the Money in the Jar, Not Around It
There is another way to do this, and you are looking at it.
Small makers like me, the ones you meet face to face at the market, have opted out of the most expensive part of the machine. No slotting fees, no endcaps, no trade spend, no acquisition to earn back. We sell directly to you, across a folding table, and that changes where the money can go.
When you are not paying for permission to exist on a shelf, you can put that money into the jar instead of around it: exceptional oils, real essential oils instead of synthetic fragrance, packaging that will not outlive you in a landfill. The good version of every choice, because the good version is what we are actually selling.
Not the shelf space, not the campaign, not the story. The thing itself.
That is the whole model: make something outstanding, hand it to the person who will use it, and let the quality be the marketing.
The Quiet Consensus Nobody Advertises
The science of skincare is moving away from ten-step routines, and dermatologists, the actual skin doctors, agree on what a healthy routine needs. It takes three steps: wash, moisturize, sunscreen.35
Complicated routines do not produce better skin; they produce abandoned routines and irritated faces. A few well-made products, used consistently, do the job. Three steps, not thirteen products. Done without hurry, they take about five minutes.
What you do with the other fifteen is up to you. I have some ideas, and most of them involve a library card.
Some brave writers are making this case from inside beauty journalism. Jessica DeFino, in her newsletter FLESH WORLD, argues that the “science of skincare” is mostly marketing in a lab coat, and that “science-backed” is just the new “clean,” which was the new “natural.”36
She is more radical than I am: she thinks your skin, left alone, does most of the work itself. Yet when DeFino, who has spent years dismantling this industry, tells you what she actually uses on her own face, the list is short and almost entirely edible: manuka honey to cleanse, jojoba oil to moisturize, and a mineral sunscreen to protect.37 She writes about animal milks with the same affection.
That is not a compromise. That is a farm stand.
We came at this from opposite ends. She tore the whole thing down to the studs; I built up from the barn. And we landed in nearly the same small, sane place: honey, oil, milk, and shade.
So Now What?
If you are happy with what you spend, what is in your products, and how your routine makes you feel, wonderful. Close this tab and enjoy your day. Emancipation is not mandatory.
But if these numbers made you a little angry, the way out is not another purchase. To change anything, you first have to take stock.
In ”Part 2: How to Emancipate Yourself”, I'll walk you through a few simple steps to take inventory of the things you have at home. It doesn't take much but a pen, a notebook, and stack of sticky notes. You'll conduct a one-week audit on products at home, exploring each of their ingredients, sourcing, and packaging.
I will tell you honestly: I am excited about this. Not resigned, not angry. Excited.
What is happening with skincare feels like what happened with cheese. There was a time when Americans thought cheese just meant Kraft singles—those little orange, plastic-wrapped rectangles. Then, people started traveling to discover real camembert in France, or a proper cheddar in Somerset. They came home thinking: "Wait, why don’t we make this?"
And they did.
That's why there is a cheese stand at the farmers market at all. Not because anyone was told to want it, but because once you have tasted the real thing, the plastic-wrapped version stops making sense. A great deal of what is sold as skincare is the Kraft single of skincare: engineered, shelf-stable, cheap to make, expensive to buy, and technically food.
People are starting to notice. The share of shoppers buying four or more beauty products a month has been falling, and more are reaching for simpler, cheaper options.38 Some of that is a tight economy. But some of it is the same quiet realization that emptied the Kraft-single aisle.
That is the movement. It is not a brand or a campaign. It is a lot of people, on farms and in small kitchens, making the real thing and handing it to each other directly.
You have alternatives. You always did.
I know that excellent milk from happy goats makes very good cheese when it is handled with care and skill on a small farmstead, no factory required. Skincare is the same. Excellent ingredients make excellent skincare in skilled hands, and it can be done in your own kitchen. No industrial lab required.
That is what Part 3 is for. It's an invitation to join us in the movement and make something of your own. With just two dollars, ten minutes, and three ingredients you can easily pronounce, it will prove the whole argument better than I can.
>> Continue Reading: "Part 2: How to Emancipate Yourself"
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