Most Skincare Brands Do Not Make Their Own Formulas

Across the beauty industry, most small and mid sized skincare brands do not develop their own products. They choose a ready made formula from a contract manufacturer's catalogue, add a fragrance or a headline ingredient, put their own label on the bottle and launch it as a new product. Insiders sometimes call this the industry's open secret, because it is completely legal, very common, and rarely mentioned on the product page.

There is nothing dishonest about that model on its own. It gets a brand to market fast and keeps costs down. It also means the same base formula, sometimes with only a scent or a single ingredient changed, can end up sold by several unrelated brands at once.

What Formulating In House Actually Means

Saaren Taika takes the slower route for many of our products, including our clinically tested skincare line. Instead of starting from a supplier's ready made base, we start from a specific skin concern, such as rosacea prone skin, psoriasis prone scalp or acne prone skin, and build the formula around it, ingredient by ingredient, in our own laboratory in Finland.

That means choosing each active for what it does for that particular concern, at a level and in a delivery system that has actually been tested, then testing the finished product itself, not only the raw ingredient, under dermatological supervision. Six of our products have their own clinical study through Eurofins, not a supplier's general ingredient data sheet borrowed for marketing.

Why the Difference Is Hard to See on a Label

An INCI list only tells you which ingredients are present, not why they were chosen, in what amount, or whether the finished product was ever tested at all. A ready made base and a purpose built formula can list similar sounding ingredients and still perform very differently, because the difference lives in the reasoning behind the recipe, not in the ingredient names themselves.

One question can help when you are comparing products. Ask whether the exact product in your hand, not just one of its ingredients, has its own study behind it. Very few brands can answer yes.

Why We Take the Slower Route

Formulating from scratch is slower, more expensive and harder to scale than buying a ready made base. We choose it anyway, because sensitive and reactive skin rarely has just one problem. It can be dry, easily flushed and prone to blemishes at the same time, and a formula that was not built for that specific combination is unlikely to solve it.

Not every product we sell is developed this way, and we do not claim otherwise. Where we say a product is our own formulation, developed and made in Finland, it is.

PS. Investing in clinical studies is not required by law, and few brands choose to do it. We do it so the effect of a product does not stay a marketing sentence.