Something has shifted in the way people buy skincare.
Ingredient lists get picked apart on TikTok. Cosmetic chemists have built large followings explaining what actives do and, just as often, what they don’t. A consumer who has never set foot in a lab can now tell you the difference between L-ascorbic acid and a vitamin C derivative, and will happily explain why they think one of them is a waste of money. The industry calls the most engaged of these consumers “skintellectuals”: people who approach skincare with an interest in ingredients, mechanisms and evidence rather than brand promises alone.
Not everyone is reading study protocols before buying a moisturiser, and it would be a mistake to assume they are. But claims are being looked at more closely than they were, by more people, in public. We’ve taken a look at what the data actually says about this shift, what it means for how products get assessed, and where the gap tends to open up between what a claim says and what the evidence behind it can carry.
Proof has become part of the appeal
Euromonitor’s 2025 Voice of the Consumer research found that 45% of luxury beauty shoppers said medical professionals influenced their purchasing decisions, up from 40% the year before. Proven efficacy came out as a leading characteristic associated with premium beauty [3].
That’s a notable shift in what “premium” signals. Not packaging, not heritage, not the counter it’s sold from. Whether it works, and whether someone credible will say so.
Research from Attest offers a useful counterweight here: a lot of Gen Z ingredient awareness is less about deep investigation and more about scanning for signals that a product is safe and sensible [2]. The behaviour isn’t universal, and it isn’t always as forensic as the term “skintellectual” suggests. But the direction is consistent.
The same instinct is spreading into other categories. “Skinification”, meaning skincare ingredients, language and routines migrating into haircare, body care and scalp care, is moving into the mass market [4]. Shampoo now has actives. Body lotion has a mechanism. The scientific vocabulary is going everywhere, which raises the bar for using it accurately.
Familiarity isn’t the same as trust
Here’s the awkward part for brands. A consumer recognising niacinamide on your INCI list is not the same as that consumer believing your product does what the front of the pack says.
The questions have moved on. It’s no longer just whether a product contains a fashionable active. It’s whether there’s enough of it, whether it survives in the formulation, and whether anyone has actually tested the finished product rather than the raw material.
That last distinction is the one that trips products up most often. Supplier data showing what an ingredient does in isolation is genuinely useful during development. It doesn’t automatically transfer to a finished formulation where the active sits at a different concentration, alongside other materials, in a different format. Sometimes it holds up. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes ingredients interfere with each other in ways nobody predicted.
The rules haven’t changed, the audience has
None of this is new from a regulatory standpoint. In the EU, cosmetic claims have to be supported by adequate and verifiable evidence, with the strength of that evidence matching the claim being made [5,6]. UK advertising guidance says much the same: hold appropriate evidence, don’t exaggerate what it shows [7].
What’s changed is that a product’s claims now get a second audit, informally, in public, by people who didn’t used to be paying attention. A claim that technically satisfies the regulation can still get taken apart in a comments section if the evidence behind it looks thin.
Where testing fits
The useful question during development isn’t “do we have data”, it’s “does the data support the words we want to use”.
Those are different things. A screening assay showing antioxidant activity is a real result, but it isn’t the same as demonstrating that a finished serum visibly reduces signs of ageing. Evidence about collagen synthesis in a cell model doesn’t automatically become a wrinkle claim.
Getting testing into the development process early tends to make that alignment easier. It also tends to be more useful than testing at the end, because the results can still influence the formulation while there’s time to act on them. Testing actives in combination rather than one at a time, for instance, will sometimes show a synergy worth building around, and sometimes show that two ingredients you were excited about cancel each other out.
Either way, you’d rather know before the pack copy is signed off.
At XCellR8 we work with brands and ingredient suppliers on claims support across mildness, barrier function, collagen and antioxidant activity, using animal-product-free human tissue models. If you’re working out what evidence a particular claim would need, we’re happy to talk it through.
Email info@x-cellr8.com or call +44 (0)1925 607 134.
References
[1] Istituto Marangoni. Ding! The Blooming Trend: Meet the Skintellectual Wave, 16 July 2025.
[2] Attest (2026). Gen Z Beauty Trends 2026.
[3] Euromonitor International (2025). Beauty Consumer Trends: Key Insights from the Voice of the Consumer Survey, 11 November 2025.
[4] Modern Retail (2026). Expect Skinification to Hit Mass Retail Aisles in 2026, 5 January 2026.
[5] Commission Regulation (EU) No 655/2013 laying down common criteria for the justification of claims used in relation to cosmetic products.
[6] European Commission. Technical Document on Cosmetic Claims.
[7] Advertising Standards Authority / Committee of Advertising Practice. Beauty and Cosmetics: General.
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