Sometimes, at cocokind, we’ll take the opportunity to revisit a formula and try to improve it in some way. These revisions are extremely rare for us - we fully believe in ALL of our formulas and would never introduce a product to our community that we weren’t 100% in love with. For this reason, the most common revision we make is when we take a particular ingredient and replace it with an organic version of the exact same one.
Occasionally, we’ll replace an ingredient for an operational reason. For example, we’ve recently replaced the preservatives in our glow essence and vitamin C serum with radish root ferment, which is made with the same lactic acid bacteria traditionally used to make Korean kimchi.
It serves the same basic purpose as the previous preservative - to prevent bacterial growth while also gently moisturizing the skin. However, our original preservatives were sourced from overseas, meaning that transporting them to the US created higher carbon emissions than we’d like. Furthermore, they were produced infrequently, and ordering them required several months advance notice.
We’ve been thrilled by the response to our glow essence and vitamin C serum, and sourcing this preservative allows us to better meet the demand for them.
Furthermore, radish root ferment is more versatile of a preservative, which means we’ll be able to use it in more formulas moving forward (new ones, too - get excited!!). This will streamline the ingredient-sourcing process and help us keep our prices as low and accessible possible.
We also want to emphasize the fact that we vet our ingredients extremely rigorously to begin with. We go above and beyond what the FDA requires us to list on an ingredient list to ensure that our ingredients are completely safe, nontoxic, AND effective.
We even take “incidentals” into account, which are essentially materials that could end up in contact with the ingredient in question if they’re produced in the same batch. For example, an earlier version of our resurfacing sleep mask formula was almost approved before our product development team discovered that there was a chance (albeit, an extremely slim one) of one of the materials having a formaldehyde incidental. And we would never ever take that chance.
We also have a 12-page “no” list of ingredients that we will absolutely never consider using in any of our formulas - ingredients that are unsafe, ingredients that are fossil fuel-derived, ingredients that don’t offer any skin benefits, etc.
Basically, the pool of ingredients and materials that we’ll accept and formulate with is extremely small, because we put the utmost care into making our formulas clean, safe, sustainable, and effective. So, if we ever change any of our ingredient lists, know that we do it only to make a formula even better.
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