Why We Refuse to Dilute Our Microbiome Skincare Formulas

There are a lot of ways to grow a skincare brand faster.

You can make the formulas cheaper using ingredients that are easier to source, easier to manufacture with, and easier to scale. You can replace premium, raw materials with mass-market alternatives. You can water down the parts of the formula doing the heavy lifting for your skin barrier. You can choose what looks flashy on a social media ad instead of what actually makes physiological sense for your skin microbiome.

A lot of beauty companies do this quietly behind closed doors.

They don't announce that a formula has been weakened or tell their community when the priority shifts from product performance to profit margins. They never explain that the beautiful story on the front of the bottle is likely made up or share the bottom-line corporate decisions that take precedence over formulation happening behind the scenes.

They won't tell you about the conference room conversations about how to manufacture something cheaper or share about the exact moment the team decided a formula is “good enough,” simply because it can be sold at a better margin.

They don't share that part with customers because all they want customers to see is the pristine branding, clinical-sounding claims, paid influencer campaigns (dear Lord, UGC is a hell of a drug), the celebrities "using it" every day, and the sweeping promises.

Honestly, that's one of the biggest reasons ETHYST® exists.

I'm not interested in building a skincare brand that depends on people not knowing the difference.

At ETHYST®, formulating for health, safety, and results comes first.

We don't do fleeting viral trends or focus on the cheapest path to production or the easiest way to scale.

We focus on the formula.

That means we refuse to use ingredients just because they're common, cheap, "acceptable", or because they make assembly lines run faster. And we definitely don't use them just because they make a product feel more familiar, more conventional, or more profitable.

Everything has to meet the strict ETHYST® Standard.

That standard explicitly excludes more than 3,200 ingredients that we do not believe belong on human skin. That list includes entire classes of ingredients like petroleum derivatives, polyquats, and ethoxylated ingredients as well as compounds widely used throughout the prestige beauty industry because they do not align with how we think skincare should be made.

Would it be easier to formulate with them? Yes. 100% yes. When we created ETHYST®, we literally had to formulate something that had NEVER been done before. And it was not easy, but we pushed ahead because we wanted to make ETHYST® the best it could possibly be.

Would it make business growth simpler? Probably. There's an age-old saying "It's easier to fool someone than to convince them they've been fooled." Having to re-educate people about skincare instead of just jumping on the normalized bandwagon that everyone already knows is not the easy path.

Would it make production drastically cheaper? Absolutely. There's no doubt about it. When you use endocrine-disruptors and cheap filler, costs are going to decrease dramatically. Especially at scale.

But easier is not the same as better, cheaper is not the same as cleaner, and faster is not the same as right.

When you're an independent, values-driven brand, every single decision feels a lot louder. Every raw ingredient cost, packaging choice, and batch production matters. There is pressure from every direction to bend the rules and make the numbers work.

I understand that pressure because I live inside that pressure every single day.

And trust me, it would be easier to cave to the pressure, but there is a massive difference between being strategic and compromising the entire reason your brand exists in the first place.

ETHYST® wasn't created to be just another pretty bottle sitting on a shelf with a half-baked promise. It was created because people are exhausted by the status-quo. Tired of the chronic skin irritation being normalized by big brands, sick of being told that burning, peeling, stripping, and sensitizing your delicate skin barrier is "just part of the process.", and completely annoyed that the word “clean” has been hijacked as a marketing buzzword that effectively means nothing while the liquid inside the bottle still relies on endocrine disruptors and cheap fillers.

I formulate from the foundational belief that your skin microbiome deserves deep, restorative support, not the assumption that skin needs to be bullied or forced into action because actual skin biology shows us that the truth is, support is the way to healthy skin.

But in order for that to work, support has to be engineered into the actual product, not just the marketing language wrapped around it. It has to live in our raw ingredient choices, in what we include, and just as importantly, what we deliberately leave out.

That requires a lot of intention and a lot of restraint.

And guess what? Restraint isn't an exciting thing to sell in a flashy fifteen-second video clip. It's much easier to launch something trendy and chase every TikTok trend and it's way easier to make a product that sounds impressive than it is to stay fiercely faithful to a strict biological standard.

But the longer I do this, the more I realize that restraint is the most critical part of formulation. Not every ingredient belongs on your face. In fact, I believe over 3200 of them commonly found in conventional and "clean" beauty should have never been in skincare in the first place.

Every skincare fad doesn't deserve a product, but they love to give you one anyways because they need to sell you the next "miracle" solution. They have to because that's how the skincare industry makes money. A new product every quarter. But science moves a lot slower than a new revelation every three months, so there is effectively nothing, but a fiscal calendar to justify a new product so often.

What's interesting is that matter how many times people have tried another fantastical cure-all and haven't seen it work, for some reason, the masses will inevitably think, this next one has to be it. Consumer psychology works in their favor.

Recently, someone grilled me about ETHYST® and as I respectfully answered their questions for over 30 minutes and could see them glazing over from the abundance of information, they asked me "if this could be done, how come one of these big corporations with all their money hasn't done it yet?"... Well, sales.

And what's interesting to me is that even though this person clearly had no idea what I was saying, and to no fault of their own, due to the fact that I was speaking to them about pure skin biology I've studied for over a dozen years, they left the conversation with some of their last words being, "Well, you're not a phD chemist and I think I could teach you a thing or two."

Look, while they were right about the chemist part, respectfully, I am a long-time Licensed Esthetician, Clinical Herbalist, former Global Content Creator and Educator for a $2 billion cosmetics conglomerate, who's studied cosmetic chemistry and work alongside some of the greatest chemists I've ever known, and personally developed and formulated something that has never been seen before and is officially the Cleanest Skincare on the Planet®.

But guess what? That kind of stuff just doesn't matter to the internet world. It wants shortcuts. It wants to hear and confirm what they already know. It wants flash and status.

However in my opinion, no shortcut is worth taking, what we already know is biologically unsound, and you couldn't pay me enough to throw status at you over actual substance.

There are formulations we could create tomorrow that would be cheaper to make, easier to explain in ads, and they would probably help us scale faster in the short term.

But I have to live with these products long after the sale is over.

I have to stand behind them. I have to look a customer in the eye and feel completely honest when I say, “This is why we made it this way.”

So I'd much rather keep supporting the people who already understand what we've created and grow slower with formulas I believe in, than faster with products I can't justify. Because the truth is, that matters way more to me than becoming a billionaire.

Rapid growth is not proof of integrity. Usually, hyper-growth is just proof that a company got very good at cutting corners without getting caught. Or convinced 90k people to talk about a product they didn't really like in exchange for money.

That's not the kind of company I want to build.

ETHYST® isn't perfect, but our intention and our standards are completely clear.
And the refusal is absolute.

We refuse to dilute our formulas to grow faster.
We refuse to make products that betray the real people they were created for.
We refuse to use “clean” as a costume while quietly making the same compromises as everyone else.

That choice may make our path slower. It may make production more complicated. It may make the business harder to scale on a spreadsheet. But it also means that when a product bears the ETHYST® name, it's there for a real, honest reason.

And I can live with that.