Apparently Nobody Has Ever Made This Before

There is a sentence in beauty that is beginning to make my eye twitch.

“I've never seen anything like this on the market.”

Or its slightly safer cousin:

“I don't know a single product that does this.”

Really?

None?

Have you looked?

Because sometimes I listen to beauty launches and wonder whether the founder has been playing Sleeping Beauty for the past decade or whether the marketing agency simply forgot to Google.

A recent Instagram Reel stopped me in my tracks.

Dr Emi Arpa is discussing her GlazedSkin product and says:

“Ich kenne kein einziges Highlighter-Produkt, das so tolle Inhaltsstoffe hat.”

“I don't know a single highlighter product that has such great ingredients.”

That's quite a statement.

And perhaps she genuinely doesn't know one.

But here's the problem.

Not knowing something exists is not the same thing as it not existing.

WELCOME TO THE SKINCARE OSCARS

Because apparently we're in awards season now.

And tonight's award for Best Original Screenplay goes to...

A skincare-makeup hybrid.

Again.

Pai launched The Impossible Glow in 2021. Pai itself described it as its first “skincare-meets-make-up” hybrid. Hyaluronic acid. Sea kelp. Illuminating pigment. It could be mixed into moisturiser, worn alone or dabbed onto cheekbones as a hydrating highlighter.

Before and around that, smaller indie brands such as NINI Organics were already playing in the territory between facial oils, illumination, bronzing, highlighting and skincare.

Then Rhode arrived in 2022 and turned glazing into one of the most recognisable aesthetics in modern beauty. Peptide Glazing Fluid. Glazed skin. Dewy skin. Minimal packaging. The whole world glazed within approximately eleven minutes.

And now here we are.

Skincare. Makeup. Glow. Glazed.

Groundbreaking.

Apparently beauty history resets every time somebody with a large Instagram following launches a product.

AND THE AWARD FOR BEST SUPPORTING ACTIVE GOES TO...

Hyaluronic acid.

Again.

Please come and collect your 847th award.

Dr Emi's GlazedSkin formula contains perfectly legitimate cosmetic ingredients: humectants, a black-tea ferment, another ferment, sodium hyaluronate, tocopherol and emollients.

It also contains mica, synthetic fluorphlogopite, titanium dioxide and iron oxide.

In other words, ingredients that contribute to the immediate optical effect.

Which is fine.

It's a glow product.

I like glow products.

Makeup is wonderful.

If you put something reflective on your cheekbones and they immediately look more luminous, the product has done exactly what you bought it to do.

But can we stop behaving as though putting skincare ingredients into a highlighter is the cosmetic equivalent of discovering penicillin?

Pai's 2021 formula also combined hyaluronic acid and sea kelp with mica and pigment. Pai explicitly called it skincare-meets-makeup.

This concept is not waiting to be discovered.

It has a Boots Advantage Card.

PERHAPS EVERYONE WAS ASLEEP

Maybe this is what bothers me.

Not the product.

The mythology.

Because apparently nobody can simply say:

“We made our version of something that already exists, and we think ours is really good.”

Why not?

That's an entirely respectable reason to make a product.

BMW did not invent the car.

Apple did not invent the telephone.

And your local Italian restaurant did not invent pasta.

They are nevertheless allowed to make excellent versions of all three.

Beauty, however, appears to operate under different rules.

Every moisturiser must have been reimagined.

Every serum must be revolutionary.

Every texture must be next generation.

Every founder searched the entire planet and tragically discovered that NOTHING WORKED FOR ME.

And then, thank God, they arrived.

THE INDIE BRANDS MUST FIND THIS PARTICULARLY ENTERTAINING

Because beauty has another interesting habit.

Small brands experiment.

They make weird little products.

They combine categories.

They don't necessarily have millions for celebrity partnerships, enormous PR campaigns or a founder whose face is already the media strategy.

Sometimes hardly anybody notices.

Then the idea migrates.

It becomes bigger.

Cleaner.

Better packaged.

More commercial.

A celebrity wears it.

A founder with millions of followers explains it.

And suddenly:

INNOVATION.

The original indie founder is presumably sitting somewhere surrounded by 600 units of the thing they made six years ago thinking:

Are you fucking kidding me?

And no, that doesn't mean every later product is a copy.

Ideas evolve. Categories evolve. Brands influence each other. Products improve. That's how industries work.

But perhaps we could occasionally acknowledge that beauty existed before the latest launch campaign.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

This award is considerably easier.

It goes to:

Mica.

Congratulations.

Your skin has undergone a profound transformation in approximately eleven seconds.

Either cosmetic science has achieved the impossible or somebody added something that reflects light.

Again: there is nothing wrong with this.

The strange part is our inability to distinguish between:

my skin looks better because I've treated it

and

my skin looks better because I've put something visually flattering on top of it.

Both have value.

They're simply not the same thing.

We used to understand this.

We called one skincare.

And the other one makeup.

Then somebody put hyaluronic acid in the makeup and apparently the border control collapsed.

AND THE AWARD FOR BEST COSTUME DESIGN...

...goes to the serum bottle.

Because packaging has become part of the argument.

Put a luminous cosmetic in something that looks like makeup and it's makeup.

Put it in a minimal serum bottle, talk about ferments and hyaluronic acid, and suddenly it has a LinkedIn profile and works in dermatology.

The formula hasn't necessarily become more sophisticated.

The context has.

And context sells.

THIS ISN'T REALLY ABOUT DR EMI

She's simply provided an unusually good example of something the entire industry does.

And I'm in this industry too.

NAYA talks about ingredients.

We talk about biotechnology.

We explain formulations.

We launch products.

I appear in videos and tell you why we made them.

Obviously I want NAYA to grow.

I'm not sitting in a forest hand-grinding calendula while morally transcending capitalism.

But there has to be a line somewhere between explaining why you believe your version is good and behaving as though everything preceding your version has been wiped from the historical record.

“Ours is better because...”

Great. Tell me why.

“We approached it differently because...”

Excellent. I'm listening.

“We couldn't find anything exactly meeting these particular criteria...”

Fair enough.

But:

“I don't know a single product...”

That's when I start opening browser tabs.

PERHAPS GOOGLE SHOULD WIN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Because before announcing that nobody has ever made something, there is a revolutionary technology available to founders everywhere.

It's free.

It takes approximately six seconds.

It's called searching the internet.

You might discover a multinational did it.

You might discover an indie brand did it.

You might discover six Korean brands did it before breakfast.

You might even discover that the revolutionary new category you're about to introduce to civilisation has existed since 2019.

This doesn't mean you can't launch yours.

Launch it.

Make it brilliant. Make it prettier. Make it perform better. Improve the texture. Use better ingredients. Give customers another choice.

Competition is good.

Just don't erase everybody who got there before you because acknowledging them makes the launch deck slightly less exciting.

AND FINALLY: BEST PICTURE

Of course.

Because perhaps that's where beauty has ended up.

The picture. The founder. The celebrity. The collaboration. The launch. The lighting. The authority. The story.

The product sitting perfectly between two manicured fingers.

And somewhere underneath all of it is a perfectly pleasant glow product thinking:

I genuinely never asked to be revolutionary.

Neither did your skin.

Maybe we could stop demanding that every cosmetic product reinvent civilisation.

Sometimes somebody has simply made another good highlighter.

And that is absolutely fine.

Just please don't tell me nobody has ever seen one before.

Some of us were awake.

— Sarah Zimmer
Founder, NAYA
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