One complaint defines the whole category Ask a brand partner what they want from a matte bullet and the answer has been the same for years: classic pigment payoff, without the dryness reviews. Trend cycles move around that request. The request itself doesn’t move. It’s a genuinely hard ask, because the two things are the same thing. Matte finish comes from a high pigment and filler load with the emollient fraction pulled back — that’s what stops light bouncing off the surface. The emollient fraction is also what keeps lips comfortable. Push the finish and you lose the comfort. Every…
Author: SPS.TREND
Blue light protection has become a standard line on sun care packaging, and mineral formulas carry most of the claim volume. There is real physics underneath it. There is also a sizeable gap between what the physics supports and what the front of the box implies, and anyone building a launch around this positioning should know exactly where that gap sits. The short version: zinc oxide and titanium dioxide do scatter some light at the low end of the visible spectrum, roughly the 400–450nm band that gets labelled high-energy visible. How much depends heavily on the formulation. And the ingredient…
In October 2025, Indonesia’s National Agency of Drug and Food Control (BPOM) issued PerBPOM No. 25 of 2025, revising the country’s permitted ingredient annexes. The headline arithmetic: 102 substances added, usage conditions revised for 6, and 1 removed from the approved list. The additions are the easy part — more permitted substances means a wider formulation palette, and nobody has to do anything. The six revisions and the single deletion are where existing products break, because a formula that was notified under the old conditions is not automatically valid under the new ones. “Revised usage conditions” is doing a lot…
Widely cited forecasts put the under-eye serum market at around $4.83 billion in 2025, growing past $11 billion by 2032. What’s interesting about that curve is where the volume is coming from: not the $90 department-store jar, but the sub-$20 tier that a decade ago would have been dismissed as a filler SKU. That shift says more about how the category is manufactured now than about how it’s marketed. Ten years of ingredient drift The actives that anchored this category in the mid-2010s — peptides, retinol, hyaluronic acid, vitamin C, niacinamide — are all still in it. What changed is…
Search for a silicone cleanser and you’ll get three unrelated products back. That isn’t a quirk of search engines. It’s a genuine naming collision that has been left to sort itself out, and it costs brands in this space real conversion every day, because a shopper who lands on the wrong one bounces immediately. Sorting out which product is which is the useful first step — for buyers, and for anyone thinking about developing in the category. Three products, one search term The tool cleaner A liquid or solid formula for washing silicone beauty tools: makeup sponges, blenders, silicone applicators,…
Korea Kolmar has launched Kolmarpkg.com, a global packaging sourcing platform that uses AI to analyse container design, materials and functionality, and to match a brand’s requirements against thousands of pre-verified options. The company’s headline claim is that it compresses packaging selection from a process that routinely runs several months into one that can close inside a month. For a manufacturer to build this rather than a packaging supplier is the detail worth noting. Kolmar sits on the ODM side, which means it has watched the same sourcing bottleneck delay client launches for years and has a direct commercial interest in…
The finish that sells in this category is no longer flat matte. It’s semi-matte — shine controlled, texture still visible, skin still reading as skin. That sounds like a marketing distinction. It’s actually a formulation change, and it happened because the old approach was losing customers. What changed inside the formula Traditional oil control was built on absorbent powders: talc, silica, and similar mineral fillers that soak up sebum and kill reflectance. They work. They also dehydrate the surface over a wear day, which is what produces the tight, flat, slightly grey look that people learned to associate with a…
The FDA now publishes cosmetic adverse event reports through a public dashboard, updated daily. Anyone — a competitor, a journalist, a customer mid-purchase — can filter reports by product type, date and severity and see what has been submitted about a category. For scalp care, that changes the accountability picture in a concrete way. Complaints about irritation from an anti-dandruff product used to sit in a company’s internal complaints log. A portion of them are now visible to the public as they arrive. What’s in it, and what isn’t The dashboard aggregates reports submitted under the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation…
A hydrating primer used to be sold as makeup prep. It is increasingly sold as a skincare step — barrier support, moisture delivery, sometimes SPF — and priced accordingly. Dr.Jart+ and Fenty Beauty’s Grip Trip both sit in that repositioned space, and plenty of others have followed. The repositioning is commercially sound. It is also outrunning what the format can physically do, and the gap between those two facts is where a lot of disappointed reviews come from. What the format can actually do A primer sits on the skin for a few seconds before foundation goes over it, and…
India’s revised IS 4707 sets the numbers plainly: 20 ppm for lead, 2 ppm for arsenic, 100 ppm for total heavy metals in cosmetic raw materials. Parts 2 and 3 of the standard were reworked to carry those limits alongside a certification and audit framework, and to bring ingredient naming into line with the INCI system used internationally. India is not alone in tightening here — Macao has banned mercury-added cosmetics outright from 2026. For anyone supplying into or manufacturing for the Indian market, the limits are the headline but the labelling change is the one that will consume more…