Why Every Formula Has a Budget

Published: June 2026  ·  Reading time: approx. 6 minutes  ·  Written by Sarah, Founder of NAYA Skincare

Every formula has a budget

The most useful thing I learned formulating skincare is also the least glamorous: a product is a finite economic system. There is a fixed amount of money inside the price you pay, and every part of the product - not just the ingredients - has to come out of it. The formula does not get the whole budget. It gets whatever is left after everything else has taken its share.

This is not a complaint or an accusation. It is simply how physical products are made, and it applies to my products exactly as much as to anyone else's. But once you see a formula this way, a great deal of skincare marketing starts to look different - not dishonest, necessarily, but constrained by a reality the marketing rarely mentions.

Where the money actually goes

Think about everything the price of a finished skincare product has to cover before the brand keeps anything at all. The exact split varies by market, channel and brand, but the categories are always there:

None of this is controversial. It is just the anatomy of a product. But laid out plainly, it makes something obvious that marketing prefers to leave unsaid: by the time you reach the formula, you are dividing what remains of an already much-divided sum.

The formula gets what is left - and the ingredients share that

Here is where it becomes interesting. The portion left for the formula is itself a budget, and every ingredient competes for space within it. A premium active at a meaningful concentration is expensive. A genuine delivery system that gets that active where it needs to go is expensive. Doing this for one ingredient, properly, uses a real share of the formula budget.

Now imagine doing it for eight ingredients at once, in a product at drugstore prices. The arithmetic does not forbid it - all the ingredients can technically be present. But something has to give, and what usually gives is dosage. Each active appears on the label, satisfying the claim, while present at a level closer to decorative than functional. This is why a single product claiming to do everything so often does each thing faintly.

It also reframes a habit the industry rarely questions: the assumption that more ingredients make a better product. A formula is not improved by adding ingredients indefinitely. Beyond a certain point, every additional ingredient competes with everything already there - for budget, for formulation space, for stability, texture and attention. Often the most effective formula is not the one with the longest list, but the one that has made the clearest decisions.

Why this matters most for trend ingredients

The ingredients where this matters most are precisely the ones marketing loves most: the expensive, frontier technologies. An exosome ingredient, a credible longevity active, a sophisticated peptide system - these are not cheap raw materials, and they are not cheap to formulate well. They are exactly the ingredients least able to survive being crammed, at meaningful levels, into a very low-priced product alongside a dozen others.

So when a low-cost product leads with a long list of advanced claims, the economics invite a closer look:

The question is not whether any of these ingredients work. Many of them genuinely do. The question is whether there is enough room - in the formula, and in the economics of the product - for all of them to exist at levels that actually do something. We have looked at two of these claims in detail: why an exosome claim may not appear on the INCI list at all, and why a NAD+ booster claim can rest on biology a topical formula may not deliver.

This is not an argument against affordable skincare

I want to be very clear, because this is the point most easily misread. I am not bothered by inexpensive skincare. I am bothered by impossible promises - and those are not the same thing.

A product that contains glycerin, panthenol, a little oat extract and a good base, sold honestly for ten euros, is a genuinely good product. There is nothing to criticise. Its claims match its contents and its price. The economics make complete sense. I would happily recommend it.

The frustration is never the price. It is the gap between what a price can realistically deliver and what the marketing says it delivers. Affordable and honest is admirable. Cheap and impossible is just arithmetic that does not close.

The question every consumer should ask

For years, the standard advice has been to ask whether an ingredient works. That is the wrong question now, because the answer is almost always "yes, in principle" - and that "yes" is exactly what the marketing relies on. The more useful question, the one that protects you, is different:

You do not need a cost sheet to ask it. You only need to remember that a formula is a finite budget, that every ingredient and every part of the product competes for it, and that the most advanced claims are the most expensive to keep. Hold that in mind, and a long list of frontier technologies at a very low price stops being exciting and starts being a question. That instinct is worth more than any single ingredient.

At NAYA, this understanding shapes every decision we make. Not because trend ingredients are bad, and not because innovation is something to fear. Quite the opposite. Some of the most exciting advances in skincare deserve the attention they receive.

But after years of sitting with formulation briefs, supplier presentations, cost sheets and ingredient lists, I have become less interested in how many claims fit on the front of a box and more interested in whether the mathematics behind them closes - and whether the formula actually solves a real skin need.

Every formula is an exercise in trade-offs. Every ingredient competes for the same finite budget. Every percentage point allocated to one active is a percentage point that cannot be allocated somewhere else. Every delivery system, every stabiliser, every texture modifier and every packaging decision draws from the same pool of resources.

That reality is not negative. It is simply the physics, chemistry and economics of making products.

But there is another constraint that matters just as much: biology. Skin does not respond to marketing claims. It does not care how many trending ingredients appear on a product page. Skin responds to ingredients that are present at meaningful levels, delivered in forms it can use, and chosen to address a genuine biological need.

For us, the goal has never been to fit as many claims as possible into a bottle. It is to understand what the skin is actually asking for and formulate accordingly. Sometimes that means supporting the barrier. Sometimes it means reducing irritation, improving hydration, addressing pigmentation, or helping skin recover from stress. The answer is not always another ingredient. Often it is a better understanding of the problem. A long list of claims means very little if the formula does not address a genuine biological need - or if the ingredients are present in forms and concentrations the skin cannot meaningfully use.

The reason we formulate the way we do is not because we believe more ingredients are better, or because we want to follow every trend that passes through the industry. It is because we would rather build formulas around a small number of ingredients we believe can genuinely make a difference than assemble a long list whose primary job is to support a marketing story.

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© NAYA Skincare. All information is for educational purposes and does not constitute medical advice.