The Ordinary just called out every Beauty Lie in the Book
Forget “Transparency.” The Ordinary just took a microscope to the beauty industry’s favorite lies and published the receipts in black and white. Their latest project, The Periodic Fable™, looks like chemistry class but feels like rebellion: 49 squares, each exposing a marketing myth. From “Chemical-Free” to “Luxury,” “Pore-Erasing” to “Instant Youth,” it’s the beauty world’s fake science laid out on a lab table. Brutally simple. No filters. Just truth and shade.
The Periodic Fable/Courtesy of The Ordinary
The Lie We’ve Been Sold
For years, brands have built empires on buzzwords. “Clean beauty” “Dermatologist recommended” “Wrinkle erasing” A language engineered to sound smart, safe and scientific when in reality, it’s mostly an empty promise. The Ordinary’s message? “Nothing is chemical-free. Not even the air in an empty bottle.” It’s a poetic slap to every campaign that used pseudoscience as skincare.By turning these words into a “periodic table,” The Ordinary exposes the absurdity of how normalized nonsense has become. “Natural doesn’t always mean safer,” they remind us. “Sometimes it means scorpions and jellyfish.”
It’s a campaign and a curriculum for beauty detox that replaces luxury packaging with literacy.
Transparency as Strategy
While most brands still romanticize “rare ingredients” and “exclusive formulas,” The Ordinary is turning marketing into education. They’re teaching consumers to separate science from advertising and that’s as genius as it gets in a billion-dollar illusion. It’s a calculated move to attract new customers who may ditch their trusted brands once they spot the white lies.
Minimalism for maximal effect. Just graphics, lab fonts and facts. It’s what The Ordinary is doing from the beginning. The brand set itself apart by refusing the usual beauty-language blur. Their product names like Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5 or Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% lay it out plainly: this is what it is, this is what it does. Rather than big-budget ads with celebrities and supermodels, The Ordinary invests in education and community-driven content. Daily ingredient spotlights, user-generated reviews, chat-rooms for skincare nerds. They’ve built a base that trusts not because of hype, but because of clarity. Their social strategy keeps things minimal but meaningful, same as their products.
The Periodic Fable/Courtesy of The Ordinary