In this next part, I want to describe the strategies used by skin care companies to convince you to buy their products. Skin care companies effectively have a dual mandate: attract new customers and retain existing customers. They can do this by providing a product that achieves what it claims to, with no negative side effects, or they can employ various forms of manipulation to get you to buy a product you don’t need. Here are some of the tactics used to attract and/or retain customers:

• Appeal to hope or vanity. Without a doubt, appealing to the customers sense of hope or vanity has been the go-to marketing ploy for skin care companies (often assisted by advertisements setting unrealistic beauty standards to make us feel inferior by comparison). Products might claim to make you appear younger or age slower with the goal of getting you to think “maybe this is the answer I’ve been looking for.” Let’s admit it, we are professionals at convincing ourselves the answer to our perceived ailments is as simple as buying something off the shelves (and yet we never stop to think “if these products work, why does the issue persist?”).
• Sensationalize. Just as media outlets sensationalize headlines to get you to pay attention to them, skin care companies will sensationalize their products. This trick relies on a cognitive error called saliency bias, where one tends to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking. Why buy the regular face serum when you can buy the Magic Diamond Essence Serum? Even though these words mean literally nothing, people still choose to buy them.
• Appeal to morality. This tactic relies on several cognitive biases and heuristics in which people use simple rules regarding decision making, often based on emotional associations and labels. Many people have been conditioned to associate phrases such as “vegan”, “cruelty free”, and “all-natural” with “healthy for you” and “good for the planet.” Truthfully, there is almost no regulation of these labels and companies are relatively free to use them however they want. Some of the most toxic products I’ve come across use “vegan” or “cruelty free” on their label.
• Gift the product. The average profit margin on beauty products is around 5-6 times cost. With such large margins, companies are free to donate products, especially to influencers, knowing full well the psychology of reciprocity. Reciprocity indicates that when someone is given something for free, they feel compelled to return the favor. In the influencer world, this means posting a story regarding the gifted product, thus generating nearly free advertising for the company.
• Claim synergy. This tactic is simple. Include somewhere on the instructions that the product works best when combined with several other products provided by the company (even though it doesn’t).
• Rebrand. How is it that these companies constantly find new ways to improve their product? They don’t. The reality is that if their product worked, they wouldn’t need to reformulate and rebrand. This is just a cheap trick to generate novelty when product sales begin to falter. Beware the “new and improved formula” rebrand.
• Trigger the rebound effect. Have you ever used ChapStick to fix dry lips, only to discover your lips are even drier the next day? Or used nasal spray to alleviate some stuffiness, only to end up with a complete blockage when it wore off? This is due to the rebound effect, where products provide short-term relief followed by a dramatic worsening of initial symptoms. Soon you find yourself reaching for more of that same product, caught in an endless loop of treating what would have been temporary symptoms.
• Placebo effect. Remember all those times you bought a new product and it totally worked at first, but then it suddenly didn’t? This is likely due to the placebo effect. The user believes the product will work and thus the momentarily relief of stress allows symptoms to disappear, only to reappear when new stressors emerge (which they always do).
• Build a habit. A critical tool of marketers, the idea is to generate a habit either using a combination of the tricks previously stated or other devious methods. Before long, you aren’t using the product because of its efficacy, but because you get a little dopamine hit from the ritual.

It’s worth mentioning that just because a company employs some of these tactics, doesn’t mean their product is no good. We live in a hyper competitive world and sometimes it helps to get an edge by using these strategies. That said, it’s an immediate red flag when I notice any of the previously mentioned tactics being used. Always check the ingredients (all of them) for safety and be honest with yourself when deciding if it works.