Marcus Feld
Categories and policy
Categories and products · Policy and claims · Culture desk
About
Follows how categories form and dissolve, how ingredient and efficacy claims hold up under regulation, and the people and gatherings the industry watches when no single company is the story. Marketing copy and a compliant claim are treated as two different things worth checking separately.
Reads regulatory filings and ingredient dossiers alongside launch materials, and won't repeat an efficacy claim without checking the underlying study or disclosure. Draws a careful line between category-shaping news and adjacent industry chatter, keeping people and events out unless a verifiable link to the business exists.
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Published work 38 articles since 2026
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Ouai's Slasher Comedy Signals a Beauty Industry Bet on Long-Form Video
Ouai bet a year of production on a three-part slasher comedy starring Victoria Pedretti, part of a wider shift toward long-form branded video as Meta tests 90-minute Reels.
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What 730 Exhibitors at in-cosmetics Asia 2026 Say About Where Beauty Formulation Is Heading
A record 20% of exhibitors are new at November's Bangkok trade show, and the products on display point to where ingredient suppliers are placing their bets.
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Shark Beauty's Kevin Hart Colorway Reveals a Celebrity Playbook, Not a New Device
Shark Beauty's new Kevin Hart colorway for its $349.99 CryoGlow LED mask is the second product tie-in from a yearlong SharkNinja ambassador deal, not a new device.
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Jana Craig's Lash Brand Bets on Friendship, Not Just Fame
Jana Craig's 'Love Island USA' fame is becoming a $15-a-pack lash brand, Aura by Jana, launching DTC Nov. 6 with sets named after her castmate friends.
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The Salon Rates Relief 'Thousands Could Save' Hinges on a Number Treasury Hasn't Picked
Reports of salons getting business rates wiped out in the Autumn Budget depend on a Small Business Rates Relief threshold Treasury has not confirmed. A firmer, already-decided story: salons were pointedly excluded from a new pub rates discount.
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UK's New Cosmetic Procedures Consultation Revives a Three-Year-Old Promise
The UK government has opened a consultation on draft rules for high risk cosmetic procedures like liquid BBLs, using a red/amber risk model three years after its first attempt stalled.
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SCCS Sets Conditional Limits for Heliotropin and Acetophenone in Cosmetics
The SCCS finalized safety limits for heliotropin (up to 1.8% in adult fine fragrances) and acetophenone (0.01% for adults and children 3+), with heliotropin's compliance timeline tied to EU rulemaking sequencing.
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ORBIS Bets a Limited-Run Carbonated Mask on Scarcity, Not Shelf Space
ORBIS's October 20 foam mask, a 3,410-yen carbonated mask sold with no restock and no preorder, is less a skincare innovation than a test of scarcity-driven, higher-margin selling inside a crowded foam-serum category.
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The Teen Survey Everyone's Citing for Rhode's "Stock" Isn't Measuring What Moved It
Piper Sandler's teen beauty survey put Rhode on the leaderboard for the first time, but the growth driving E.l.f. Beauty's results is coming from Sephora shelves in 19 new European markets, not teenage wallets.
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Why Beauty Brands Are Turning Lip Gloss Into Jewelry
Rhode's 2024 lip gloss phone case and Sarah Burton's new Givenchy runway, where compacts became belt buckles, show beauty brands racing to build a wearable-accessory category.
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Cosmetic 360 puts regeneration claims and industry politics on the Paris stage
Cosmetic 360 will test whether beauty’s regeneration rhetoric can stand up to tighter EU claims scrutiny, as export pressure brings politics to Paris. The fair opens October 14.
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Milan Beauty Week Becomes Italy’s Global Beauty Pitch
Italy is using Milan Beauty Week to turn manufacturing muscle into a consumer-facing beauty identity, with fragrance at the centre. The harder task is making origin visible.
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Lipoid's "New" Depigmentation Active Is the Same Platform, Repackaged for a Regulatory Moment
Lipoid Kosmetik's new bearberry active is the fourth liposomal pigmentation product from the same company, launched as EU regulators tighten scrutiny on kojic acid and arbutin, the very ingredient family bearberry belongs to.
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Sol de Janeiro gives body mist a premium middle tier
Sol de Janeiro’s Intense Perfume Mists turn demand for longer wear into a price tier between body spray and fine fragrance. The UK launch tests that proposition across four retailers.
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Canada Moves to Define Which Chemicals Count as Carcinogenic Under Federal Law
Ottawa is accepting comments until December 2 on new criteria for flagging substances as carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction under CEPA, a threshold that triggers prohibition-focused rules.
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Rochelle Humes moves from baby skincare to adult faces with Eulah
Eulah, Rochelle Humes' new 12-product face and body line priced £8 to £12, pushes her beyond My Little Coco's baby category into crowded, budget-conscious UK adult skincare.
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YSL Turns a Hand Cream Into a Bag Charm, Chasing a Trend Dior Started First
YSL Beauty's heart-shaped hand cream comes with a detachable keychain case, joining Dior and Chanel in turning skincare into bag charms as the category heats up in 2026.
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Lubrizol's Data Finds a Gap Between What Women Want From Supplements and What's on Shelf
New Lubrizol consumer research finds 87% of Chinese women want supplements tailored to their life stage, yet 66% feel current products underserve them, a gap the company is positioning its ingredient platform to fill.
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Pinterest's Men's Trend Data Is a Category Signal, Not a Trend Story
Pinterest's Men's Trend Report shows rising male search interest in skincare, nails and wellness. For beauty businesses, that search behavior is demand evidence worth building a product line around.
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A Sake Brewery's Byproduct Becomes a Luxury Skincare Line in Niigata
KOSHINO KIRAMEKI has launched aelu WA, a skincare brand built on sake lees from Koshi no Kanbai, betting that fermentation heritage can command premium prices.
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Chanel, YSL and Prada Are Betting Flankers Can Recruit Fragrance-Literate Gen Z
Three luxury houses are launching flanker scents this year, but the format's success now depends on execution rather than the mere existence of a new bottle.
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England's Cosmetic Injectables Complaints Pile Up While a 2022 Licensing Law Sits Unused
FOI data shows 1,700+ UK complaints over fillers, Botox and BBLs since 2021, but the detailed London-borough figures reveal patchy council enforcement and a licensing law still unused four years on.
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Arizona's L'Oréal Suit Takes a Faster Legal Route Than the Federal Cancer Litigation
Arizona's AG is suing L'Oréal under a consumer-fraud law, not personal-injury rules, a lower legal bar that could outpace the 11,800-case federal MDL and the FDA's five-times-delayed formaldehyde ban.
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Loose Setting Powder Is Back, Reengineered to Look Like Skin
Charlotte Tilbury, Dior and Too Faced are relaunching loose setting powder as a skincare-grade, blur-not-bake product, and Puig's earnings show the bet is paying off.
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MPs to examine why England's cosmetic procedure licensing scheme keeps stalling
MPs are questioning ministers over years of delay in licensing non-surgical treatments like fillers and Botox, as a second promised reform, a ban on liquid BBLs, also misses its deadline.
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LYMA Wants Its P.O.W.E.R. Index to Become Wellness's Evidence Standard. It Has No Referee.
LYMA is asking the wellness industry to adopt its five-part P.O.W.E.R. Index as a shared evidence standard, but has no audit mechanism and its own ASA claim violations.
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Vanita Parti talks Blink Brow Bar's rise, just as the brand quietly renames itself
Blink Brow Bar founder Vanita Parti details two decades of growth in a new interview, but the bigger news is what it doesn't mention: her company has quietly rebranded as BBB London.
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A Body-Care Butter That Isn't for Sale Shows How Biotech Actives Move Between Categories
Core Biogenesis and distributor Faravelli unveiled a body-care demo formula built on their growth-factor actives, the third entry in a "Longevity Concepts" showcase that has already stretched from face serums into lip and eye color.
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Saanroo's 15.5% Gray-Hair Result Shows Where the Ingredient Race Is Headed
Saanroo reports a 15.5% drop in gray hair density after 12 weeks of a serum built on its ingredient platform, joining Just For Men and Chemyunion in a new race to sell pigment reversal, not just coverage.
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Beauty Forum's Skin-Type Lesson Traces to a 1910 Marketing Category, Not a Clinical One
Beauty Forum Deutschland's new training column tells licensed German estheticians that skin type is genetically fixed, using a four-category system that traces to a 1910 sales classification by Helena Rubinstein rather than clinical research. Dermatology literature as recent as 2024 and 2025 still calls precise skin-type classification poorly characterized, with at least 17 competing instruments in clinical use and none adopted as the professional standard the column presents.
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Climatic's 55% Mucus-Clearance Claim Is a Sheep Result
Climatic's 55% mucus-clearance figure comes from an induced impairment model in sheep, not a human trial. Its published human evidence is a four-athlete uncontrolled case series, while a larger randomized study is registered but has posted no results.
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JD.com Cites K-Beauty Demand, Then Signs an Eyewear Brand
JD Group's vice chairman framed his company's new Korean purchasing subsidiary as a bet on rising K-beauty demand, but the only contract disclosed from the launch event went to an eyewear brand, and Korea's cosmetics exports to China fell 5.1 percent in the same half.
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Astaxanthin Comes From a Tank. Fucoidan Still Comes From the Sea.
Marine skincare's sustainability story rests on cultivated "blue biotechnology," but that describes only one of the category's flagship actives: astaxanthin comes from closed photobioreactors, while the world's leading fucoidan supplier still wild-harvests seaweed from Tasmania, where the species is officially listed as an invasive marine pest.
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Behind FROM:CELLA's Myeongdong Listing, a Pharmacy Chain's Rapid Sprint
FROM:CELLA's addition to a fourth Optima Wellness Museum store is a minor brand footnote; the notable number is how fast the host chain itself has grown, from one Gangnam pharmacy in September 2025 to at least nine locations across Korea within eleven months.
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Quality First Calls Its New Mask Line the Brand's Highest Peak. It Said That Twice Before.
Quality First's press release for its new Derma Laser PRO masks calls the line the brand's highest peak in history, a claim its own footnote says is measured only against its earlier products. It is at least the third time since November 2023 that the company has given a new Derma Laser launch that same superlative, each one self-assessed rather than benchmarked against a rival or an outside standard.
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Hims & Hers Grew 38%. It Also Booked $62.5 Million in FTC-Linked Charges.
Hims & Hers grew Q2 revenue 38 percent to $753.2 million and raised full-year guidance, but the same release shows a swing to an $86.3 million net loss, driven mainly by $62.5 million in legal accruals its CFO tied to the FTC's late-July privacy and billing lawsuit.
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Natura's Brazil Miss Traces to an ERP Rollout, Not a Demand Slump
Natura's steep Brazil revenue decline in the second quarter of 2026 traces to a stock shortage the company caused itself during a SAP S/4 system rollout, not primarily to the weak consumer demand its own results language emphasized.
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Vital Beautie's PDRN Supplement Launches Into a Regulatory Gap
Amorepacific's Vital Beautie has launched an oral PDRN and collagen supplement, but PDRN itself carries no health-functional-food recognition from Korea's food and drug regulator, unlike the collagen it is paired with, even as regulator advertising violations tied to PDRN have climbed sharply since 2023.
