“Brands are just reusing the same old ingredients and just changing the marketing language, which is not sitting well with the consumer,” Britton says. “There’s been no innovation in beauty since Vitamin C. It’s ridiculous, especially with all this innate understanding of what the consumer needs.”
Debut acts as a high-tech contract manufacturer for beauty brands, partnering with them to develop novel patented ingredients backed by the latest scientific innovations. This year, Image Skincare released its first product formulated with EDL, a patented bioactive skin-tightening ingredient developed in-house. Debut leveraged the latest breakthroughs in AI-powered genomic mapping to develop EDL, which delivered a 100% fine-line improvement rate in a 12-week clinical study.
While it’s much easier for a big company to spend money on R&D than a bootstrapped startup, smaller companies do have other advantages.
“They move quickly. They pick up cultural shifts faster. They’re often closer to the community and less afraid to respond to a behavior before they have five years of data proving it exists,” says Cheow.
Palermino says that some of the most innovative brands on the market today are indies led by professional makeup artists, such as Lisa Eldridge Beauty, Violette, and Kjh.brand.
“It’s because they’re relentless about solving a problem they had while they were working,” she says, citing a new tubing mascara from makeup artist Katie Jane Hughes’s Kjh.brand as an example. Tubing mascaras aren’t necessarily new, but the specific product was born out of Hughes’s frustration with other formulas.
“At the end of the day, even if that tubing technology can be duped — like, my Forever Eye Masks were duped over and over — she’s still going to be first to market with it, and she’s going to market it the best,” Hughes says. “She’s going to capture more market share.”
