Seven signs you are paying for the packaging
Expensive skincare is not automatically worse value, and it is very often paying for something other than what is inside. These are the signs, and this page is written knowing you can hold it up against our own product page.
A heavy glass jar
Weight reads as quality and costs a fortune to make and to freight. A jar is also the worst container for anything that degrades in light or air, so the packaging that signals the most is often the packaging that protects the least.
The ingredient on the front is near the bottom of the list
Lists run from most to least. If the hero ingredient is printed in large type on the box and sits after the fragrance on the back, it is present at trace amounts and it is there for the front of the box.
Thirty ingredients where five would do
Length signals sophistication and mostly signals a long tail of extracts at trace amounts. A short list is easier to evaluate, which is exactly why it is less common.
A story about a place
Glacier water, volcanic mineral, a valley in somewhere photogenic. Water is water once it is in the bottle. The story is doing the work, and it is doing it on the price.
You cannot find the full ingredient list
If a full list is not published where you can read it before buying, that is a decision somebody made. It is one of the fastest checks there is and it eliminates a lot of products in about ten seconds.
Every claim is a number
A percentage, a span of years, a count of days. Numbers about the product are checkable facts. Numbers about your face are claims needing evidence, and the money that went into producing that evidence, or into avoiding needing it, did not go into the formula.
The refill costs almost as much as the first one
A refill that saves a few percent is not a refill, it is a second purchase with an environmental story attached. Refillable should be noticeably cheaper or it is packaging language doing packaging work.