Marketing in microdoses

An ingredient can sit in a formula at 0.001% and still appear on the label. There’s no minimum concentration to disclose it. So there’s no minimum to make a claim about it.

That’s how you get a vitamin C serum where vitamin C is the eleventh ingredient. A retinol cream where retinol lands after the preservatives. The ingredient is there. It’s doing almost nothing. But it’s there, and that’s enough for a campaign.

Effective concentrations are no secret. Vitamin C generally needs to be well above trace levels to affect appearance; niacinamide is typically studied around 2–5%.

Brands know the numbers.

Formulating at effective levels costs more -- actives are expensive, and higher concentrations are harder to keep stable. So many brands use the minimum needed to make the claim, not the minimum needed to do the job.

An ingredient list tells you order, not percentage. Some brands now publish concentrations as a transparency measure. Worth noticing when they do.

If an ingredient is on the front of the box, it shouldn’t be at the bottom of the list. If it is, it’s marketing.