If your favourite moisturiser felt perfect in London but suddenly feels ineffective in the UAE, trust me, you are not imagining it!  

(On a personal note, I had forgotten the specific emotions attached to doing what you love.  Penning this blog, which I hope will be one of many definitely lowered the cortisol levels in my body (and by default) is skin-friendly!!  

How big brands operate 

One of the underlying factors of product development is TAM (total addressable market) – how big is your market.  The logic is simple:  build products where people spend the most.  The per capita spend on beauty & wellness in the USA is astronomical compared to the ROW. 

If you were building a product, it makes business sense to formulate that product in California and test it there.

I might have missed that memo.  I am kidding.  As a Founder its so important to build products in this region and test them here

Why?  Because this isn’t California

The first reason is lessons from FMCG giants like Unilever (and business school case studies).  Many household name consumer products maybe loss-making, until companies started to observe how people actually use the product in the environment they live in.  (So air freshener was designed to get rid of cigarette smoke!)  

Beauty products are put through extreme conditions during stability testing. But that’s not the whole story.

For example, I love making lipsticks but will I was testing them out, my testers were doing what women do:  they were leaving their lipsticks in their handbags in the Dubai summer heat.  The lipsticks were melting and were then being put in fridges or freezers. 

One of the consequences was that you started to see “blooms” of white on the surface of lipsticks. That’s essentially the butters in the product – shea, cocoa, mango – solidifying at a different temperature to the oils

So while product stability testing is vital, its not enough.  Products need to be tested in real circumstances too.

The supply chain is its own climate experiment

The second reason was a simpler one:  I would buy a bunch of expensive products and get them shipped to Dubai.  And along that journey (warehouses, flights, vans, last-mile delivery), the product is often exposed to multiple temperature shocks.  The result was I’d bought foundations where the oil seeps out of the product and it smells terrible.  Similarly moisturisers have split showing a layer of liquid separate from product.  

Why is this a problem?

When an emulsion separates into an oil phase and a water phase, it’s a signal that the formula is unstable.

And when the system is unstable, the experience changes—and so can the way ingredients are delivered across the skin. In other words: the product may not operate the way the original producer intended

This is why testing in the UAE is MANDATORY

Therefore, testing yearlong in extreme climates with people who live here is 101 product development.

We call this client adaptive skincare, because we are bringing product development to where you live (and not expecting you to move to California!)