Most skincare brands do not publish their active concentrations. This is not an oversight. It is a deliberate strategy that serves two purposes: protecting the formula from competitors and allowing the brand to use trace amounts of expensive ingredients for marketing while filling the bottle with inexpensive base ingredients.
We publish every concentration. This is not generosity. It is a design constraint that forces us to formulate differently than brands that hide their numbers.
What Transparency Requires
If a brand publishes '10% Niacinamide,' they cannot use 2% and call it a day. If they publish '5% GHK-Cu,' the formula must actually contain 5% active GHK-Cu — not a proprietary blend where GHK-Cu occupies 0.01% alongside water and glycerin.
This constraint has consequences: the formula becomes more expensive, the supply chain must be reliable, and every batch must be tested to verify the published concentration. It also means the formula cannot hide behind proprietary blends, trade secret formulations, or marketing language that sounds precise but isn't.
The Hidden Cost of Opacity
Proprietary blends are the most common form of opacity in skincare. A brand lists a blend of peptides as a single ingredient with a combined percentage, making it impossible for the consumer to know how much of each peptide is present. The blend could be 99% water and 1% active — and the label would still read 'Peptide Complex (10%).' This is legal. It is also meaningless.
Opacity gives the formulator an easy path: include trace amounts of expensive actives for the label claim, and fill the rest with budget ingredients. The consumer sees the ingredient they searched for. What they cannot see is how much is actually there.
What Changes When You Commit to Full Disclosure
Transparency eliminates the easy path. Every ingredient must justify its inclusion at its stated concentration. If the formula claims 0.1% GHK-Cu, that peptide must be present at every stage — manufacture, fill, shipping, storage, and use. Stability testing must confirm that the stated concentration is still present at month 12.
This is harder and more expensive. It also produces a fundamentally better product because the formulation was designed under the constraint of being verifiable. A formula that can survive full disclosure is a formula that was built to work — not to appear to work.