I Watched the Women in My Life Stop Trusting Beauty Influencers. Here’s What They Trust Instead.

My daughter texted me at 11 PM: “Dad, quick question—do you think this serum is worth it?”

Attached was a screenshot. Some influencer in perfect lighting, holding a bottle, caption reading “This CHANGED MY LIFE you guys!!!” The link in bio promised 40% off if she used code GLOWUP.

I looked at our last five text threads. Four of them were screenshots just like this. Different influencers. Different serums. Same desperate energy.

“How much?” I asked.

“$68. But with the code it’s only $41.”

“What’s in it?”

Three dots. Then: “…I don’t know. Why does that matter? Everyone says it works.”

Here’s my daughter—22, graduated with honors, sharp enough to fact-check political headlines and call out logical fallacies in casual conversation—about to spend $41 on something she couldn’t even name the ingredients for because a stranger on the internet told her to.

And she’s not alone.

The $24 Billion Industry Built on “Just Trust Me”

Here’s the data that should make everyone uncomfortable: The influencer marketing industry is worth $24 billion. But only 5% of people completely trust influencer content about beauty products.

Read that again. Five percent trust them. Yet 58% of people have bought something because an influencer recommended it.

We’re buying from people we don’t trust, knowing we don’t trust them, and doing it anyway.

That’s not consumer behavior. That’s a psychological phenomenon.

The Moment I Realized This Was Bigger Than Skincare

My wife came home from Target last month with a bag full of skincare. Seven products. $340.

“All from that one girl’s routine,” she said. “The one with the glass skin.”

“Did you look up the ingredients?” I asked.

She paused. Actually stopped mid-unboxing. “Why would I need to? She showed the results.”

“Did she show what else she uses? What treatments she gets? Her genetics? What she gets paid to promote versus what she actually uses daily?”

The look on her face. Like I’d just pointed out that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were the same person.

“Oh my God,” she said. “I’m smarter than this. What am I doing?”

That’s the question that started everything. Because my wife isn’t gullible. My daughter isn’t naive. These are intelligent, educated, normally-skeptical women who somehow developed a blind spot the size of a Ring Light when it comes to skincare.

What Nobody Tells You About the Authenticity Crisis

The word “authenticity” in influencer marketing has been focus-grouped into meaninglessness. Research shows that 88% of consumers want authenticity from influencers, yet nearly half are perceived as inauthentic.

We want something they literally can’t provide. Not because they’re bad people—most aren’t. But because the business model doesn’t allow for it. An influencer who tells you not to buy things doesn’t pay their rent.

It’s like asking a car salesman for unbiased advice on whether you need a car.

The 2025 data is even more damning: 37% of consumers feel actively deceived when influencers don’t disclose partnerships. But here’s the kicker—even when they do disclose, even when they follow FTC guidelines and put “#ad” in the caption, the trust is already broken.

Because deep down, everyone knows: You’re not watching a review. You’re watching a commercial that’s really good at pretending it isn’t.

The Night I Conducted an Experiment

After my conversation with my wife, I got curious. I opened Instagram and started saving every skincare product recommendation I saw from influencers in my feed. Twenty products in two hours. Everything from $12 drugstore finds to $280 luxury serums.

Then I looked up the ingredient lists for all of them.

Seventeen of them had nearly identical first five ingredients: water, glycerin, some form of hyaluronic acid, a silicone, a preservative. The price range? $12 to $195.

I’m not a chemist. I’m not a dermatologist. But I can read. And what I read was this: The $12 product and the $195 product were essentially the same formula with different marketing budgets.

The influencers weren’t lying. They probably did like these products. But they were being paid to like some of them significantly more than physics and chemistry would suggest they should.

What I Started Telling the Women in My Life

“Read the back of the bottle before you read the reviews.”

That’s it. That’s the entire philosophy.

Not because ingredient lists are exciting. They’re not. They’re boring as hell. But boring beats manipulated every single time.

I started sending my daughter screenshots. Not of products, but of ingredient databases. Websites like INCIDecoder. Paula’s Choice ingredient dictionary. The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database.

“The first five ingredients make up about 80-90% of the formula,” I told her. “If those are good, the product is probably fine. If the ingredient the product is named after shows up after the preservatives, it’s there for marketing, not efficacy.”

She started reading labels. Then she got angry.

“I’ve been buying water and glycerin for $75,” she texted me. “WATER AND GLYCERIN.”

Welcome to clarity. It’s expensive when you realize how much you’ve already spent.

The Brands That Pass the Read-the-Label Test

Here’s what I’ve noticed helping the women I care about navigate this: Some brands make it easy to evaluate them yourself. Others make it nearly impossible.

The ones that make it easy? They list full ingredient panels on their websites. They explain what things do without resorting to “proprietary blend” or “ancient secret.” They’re available in physical stores where you can flip the bottle over and actually read it before buying.

Target. CVS. Ulta. These aren’t glamorous shopping experiences, but they have one massive advantage: You can stand there and Google every ingredient on your phone before spending a dime.

My wife picked up a Derma E cleanser a few weeks ago. Not because I told her to—I know nothing about skincare, I’m a bar soap guy—but because she was standing in Target, flipped it over, and could actually read what was in it.

She pulled up INCIDecoder on her phone right there in the aisle. Vitamin C Foaming Oil Cleanser. $16.95. Sunflower oil, almond oil, stable vitamin C. All ingredients she recognized and wanted. No parabens, no sulfates, vegan, cruelty-free.

“It’s not sexy,” she told me later. “Nobody’s going to make a viral video about finding this at Target. But it works, I know what’s in it, and I didn’t need a discount code from someone I’ll never meet.”

That’s the whole point. Derma E isn’t special because it’s revolutionary. It’s notable because it’s transparent. Because it’s been around since 1984, which means it survived by making decent products, not by going viral.

Could you find “better” products? Maybe. Depends on your definition of better. But you can definitely find worse products that cost three times as much and come with a prettier story.

My daughter tried their vitamin C serum after watching my wife’s approach. Same process: read the label first, Google the ingredients, make an informed decision. She likes it. Not because an influencer told her to, but because she evaluated it herself and it does what it claims to do without costing a week’s grocery budget.

The Three Questions I Now Tell People to Ask

1. Can you read the full ingredient list before you have to commit to buying?

If a brand hides their ingredients until after purchase, that tells you everything you need to know about whether they want educated customers or just customers.

2. Are the first five ingredients actually the ones you want on your face?

If the “hero ingredient” shows up after the preservatives, it’s there in trace amounts. It’s marketing, not medicine.

3. Would you buy this if nobody else knew you owned it?

This is the nuclear question. If you’re buying something for the story you can tell about buying it—for the Instagram post, for the status, for the feeling that you’re doing what the cool kids are doing—then you’re not buying skincare. You’re buying social currency.

And social currency is expensive as hell.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Why We Outsource Judgment

I’ve watched this pattern repeat with the women in my life, and here’s what I think is really happening: It’s not that they can’t figure out skincare. It’s that their lives are so overwhelming that letting someone else make decisions feels like relief.

Watching a 60-second video is easier than researching ingredients for twenty minutes. Following what everyone else is doing is less lonely than making an independent choice. Believing that someone prettier, younger, more successful has figured it out means you can stop trying to figure it out yourself.

But outsourcing judgment doesn’t make life easier. It makes it more expensive, more cluttered, and less yours.

Every time you buy something because someone told you to instead of because you evaluated it yourself, you practice not trusting yourself. You build a habit of deferring to external authority. You teach your brain that you’re not capable of figuring this out.

And you are. I’ve watched my wife navigate complex legal documents and my daughter ace organic chemistry—they can absolutely figure out if a moisturizer is worth $35.

What Changed When They Started Deciding for Themselves

My wife’s bathroom cabinet went from seventeen products to six. She knows what every ingredient in each one does. Nobody can sell her on something “better” because she’s no longer outsourcing the definition of better.

My daughter spent $180 less on skincare in three months. Not because she’s buying cheaper products—some are actually more expensive—but because she’s not buying seven versions of the same thing because seven different influencers made her feel like she needed all of them.

They don’t feel FOMO when they see new launches anymore. They don’t watch influencer videos with that low-level anxiety that they’re doing it wrong. They don’t screenshot products at 11 PM and text me asking if they’re worth it.

They just read the labels and make informed choices like the adults they are.

And their skin? Looks basically the same as it did before. Which tells you everything about how much of this was ever about skincare to begin with.

The Broader Pattern I Started Noticing

Once I saw this dynamic with beauty products, I started seeing it everywhere. The same psychological mechanism that makes smart people defer to beauty influencers is the one that makes them defer to financial influencers, fitness influencers, parenting influencers, productivity influencers.

We’ve outsourced our judgment to people whose entire business model depends on us continuing to outsource our judgment.

And the crazy thing? The information to make our own decisions has never been more accessible. Ingredient databases are free. Academic research is often publicly available. Consumer protection agencies publish testing results. The tools for informed decision-making are right there.

We just have to use them.

If You Take Nothing Else From This

Before you click that link in bio, before you use that discount code, before you trust that transformation story, do one thing:

Find the ingredient list. Read it. All of it.

Google the words you don’t recognize. Look up what the effective concentration should be for whatever active ingredient the product is advertising. Check if that ingredient is present in meaningful amounts or just there for marketing.

Then ask yourself: Would I still want this if nobody on the internet had ever mentioned it?

If yes, buy it. If no, you just saved yourself money and drawer space.

You don’t need an influencer. You don’t need me. You don’t need permission from anyone to make an informed decision about what goes on your face.

The labels have been there the whole time. You just have to read them.

My wife summed it up best last week: “I spent ten years trusting strangers with perfect lighting. Turns out I should have been trusting the boring list of ingredients on the back of the bottle.”

She’s right. And she’s not buying anything she can’t explain anymore.

Neither should you.

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“The most expensive thing you’ll ever buy is someone else’s version of your life.”

— The Seasoned Sage