About VEREKET
Our approach
Finding quality skincare that matters
We believe skincare products should first and foremost begin with the skin, not a marketing claim. Every product we carry at VEREKET demonstrates its own value in ingredient quality and thoughtfully formulated functionality for your skin—all made with care by the same people who designed them
We focus on quality products made right
We believe in quality, functional skincare made with intention
Our skin is the largest organ on our bodies, and it serves as both a protective barrier and a doorway for what we put on it. Because our skin is capable of absorbing what we apply to it, we believe quality is essential. It’s the difference between a product that simply sounds good and one that actually does right by your skin.
The industry is full of labels focusing on what’s left out rather than why you should introduce something to your routine. Here at VEREKET, we do the opposite and highlight skincare products worth choosing based on our quality standards.
We look carefully at how products were formulated, what ingredients they hold and how they were made to bring you a vetted collection of quality products we believe in.
Why we don’t use an ingredient ban list
We choose to focus on what is actually in the product, as opposed to what isn’t
“Free from” claims and ingredient ban lists have become familiar retail practices in the cosmetics industry. However, we believe adopting ban lists as a standard falls short.
Is a ban list meaningful if it includes chemicals that aren’t used in skincare at all, or ones phased out of production decades ago? A list could just as easily include pixie dust and unicorn blood, and anyone could still claim to avoid “everything on the list.”
The reverse problem is just as real. A ban list only covers what someone chose to put on it. A brand or retailer can skip one flagged chemical and include a potentially worse substitute, simply because the substitute isn’t listed.
Avoiding items on a ban list isn’t the same as choosing well, so we instead evaluate products by what is actually in them.
That said, you’ll notice the products we offer are free from many of the same categories those lists tend to flag. However, this is because we simply do not consider those types of ingredients as quality-based to begin with.
Transparency over trends
We believe you deserve to know exactly what you’re putting on your skin
The skincare industry is notorious for chasing the next trendy or viral thing. Celebrity endorsements, influencer marketing and algorithm-driven recommendations dominate how products are sold, yet say little about a product’s actual quality.
We take a different approach: transparency about what you’re actually buying for your skin, from the ingredients to how something was made.
From our product pages to our criteria to explaining who we are, we share everything we think a consumer should know to support genuine, informed choices.
Our founder
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Hi, I'm Joy, the founder of VEREKET
I have always been an extremely picky consumer (I can’t even buy socks without understanding where and how they were made). So when it comes to skincare, something much more consequential than socks, I am highly invested in knowing every detail about products I will eventually put on my skin.
I think there is so much bs in this industry asking people to pay crazy prices for products that are more advertising fluff than functional substance. I couldn’t find a place to shop that met my standards, so I started VEREKET as the place I wanted to shop for myself: every formula analyzed, every product built on functional, quality ingredients, and everything produced with care by people who know their products inside out.
The full story
Growing up, my mother had a big influence on how I chose my skincare products. Her mantra was "if you are going to put something on your skin, make sure you get the 'good' stuff." Back in the day, I had no idea what "good stuff" meant and blindly assumed that if it's expensive and sold at a big-name store then it must be "good". Right? Over time, I realized that was not necessarily true and started diving deeper into how the industry worked.
The more I looked, the clearer the pattern became: brands built near-exclusively on advertising, with very little to say about how their products are made and what’s actually in them—either because they didn’t know or weren’t proud to admit. It made little sense to me how products mostly filled with cheap petrochemicals were sporting $100 price tags simply because a celebrity’s face was attached to them or social media made the bottles look nice.
I went searching for products I wanted to use for myself, products I felt like actually made sense. In the process, I discovered a community of dedicated individuals and independent brands making (in my view) truly amazing products. These brands doing it right were smaller and easy to miss, so I built VEREKET as a place for others to easily discover the incredible things that took me months and years to find myself.
Every product I use on my own skin comes from VEREKET, and I personally review and sign off on everything offered here. Our goal is to provide a simple, transparent platform where every product demonstrates true value and justifies every dollar you put towards it.
Thanks for checking us out and I hope you enjoy everything as much as we do!
Joy
Founder, VEREKET
What’s behind the price
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What do you see
Pick a product you use today, and take a look at its ingredients list
Do you see a long list of chemicals with names that take a minute to pronounce? Now take a look at what the product is saying about itself. If you research the ingredients behind those complicated names:
Does the reality of what they are match up with what the product is saying about itself and its price?
What do you see
If your answer leans towards no, we feel the same way
A product is usually advertised around one to three “hero” ingredients: the things happily emphasized in the name, on the packaging and in the ads.
Yet, in our view, many formulas are mostly a base of inexpensive, commodity ingredients and textural substances (some with questionable origins) that the ads conveniently seem to leave out.
To put it in food terms, it’s like garnishing fast food with gold leaf, calling it fine dining, and advertising only the gold leaf while ignoring the fast food underneath.
What do you see
We believe this inconsistency results from legacy practices that prioritize: speed-to-market, scale, “cost efficiencies” and, most importantly, what advertises well.
The status quo
Common legacy practices
At both “indie” and mega-brands, products often begin with a pre-set message that a formula is then backed into
A brand decides to create a product like, let's say, a niacinamide serum, because it's already trending and shoppers search for it
It creates a brief to fix the hero ingredient ("niacinamide"), the marketing claim ("visibly minimizes pores"), target audience, and the pricing structure up front
The brief is then passed on to a formulator or third-party manufacturer to work backward within the product definition and pre-defined cost limits
Advertising then covers the rest: influencers, glamorous lifestyle imagery and hero-ingredient claims emphasize messaging and story which tends to gloss over how the product was developed and how it was made
Put plainly, the industry runs backward:
Marketability decides what gets made
Some science recruited afterward to support a predetermined message
Advertising is layered on to make it all sound amazing
Methods that prioritize speed, scale and lower costs or rely on production middlemen
Mass Production
Products are made in large, standardized batches so a formula can be produced consistently, cheaply and quickly enough to supply wide retail distribution. The process prioritizes cost per unit, uniformity and shelf stability. As a result, mass production tends to favor enormous quantities of inexpensive, readily available inputs over ingredients that are more time-intensive, variable or delicate to work with.
Outsourced Manufacturing
“New” and “indie” brands commonly employ this practice where they hire an outside lab or factory (aka contract manufacturer) to produce and, at times, fully formulate their products (usually from briefs like those mentioned in “Fit-the-Pitch” Development).
The practice prioritizes meeting the brief at ideally the lowest cost and highest speed. It introduces a middleman making many, if not all, of the ingredient and process decisions that the brand itself may not fully understand, verify or control.
Enormous budgets and resources dedicated to selling lifestyle aspirations, viral trends, and feelings of luxury
Celebrity endorsements, viral trends and algorithm-driven recommendations shape what people buy, often with little connection to whether a product is well made or right for their skin. Large companies dedicate billions to advertising every year and these budgets often are magnitudes larger than product R&D.
In the case of contract-manufactured brands, their true core “product”, in our view, is the advertising and branding layer around the bottles and formulas that someone else produces for them.
| Company | Revenue | Adv. Spend | R&D Spend | Adv. % revenue | R&D % revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| L’OréalFY2025 | €44.1 B | €14.2 B | €1.4 B | 32.2% | 3.1% |
| Estée LauderFY Jun 2026 | $15.0 B | $3.7 B | $0.3 B | 24.8% | 1.8% |
| BeiersdorfFY2025 | €9.9 B | €2.2 B | €0.4 B | 22.4% | 3.7% |
| ShiseidoFY2025 | ¥970.0 B | ¥284.0 B | ¥37.1 B | 29.3% | 3.8% |
| CotyFY Jun 2026 | $5.8 B | $1.6 B | $0.1 B | 27.7% | 2.1% |
Figure 1.0 Beauty Corporation Financial Metrics
It’s worth wondering: why aren’t more resources dedicated to R&D compared to advertising?
NOTE: Values rounded to nearest hundred million. % Revenue values calculated on unrounded figures. Companies have individual category variations on how to report “revenue” / “net revenue”, “advertising”, and “R&D” so values are general comparisons, not exact parallels.
Sources: L’Oréal 2025 annual results; Estée Lauder FY2026 Form 10-K; Shiseido 2025 results presentation; Beiersdorf Annual Report 2025, Results of Operations; Coty FY2026 Form 10-K; Coty Q4 FY2026 earnings release
Prices are pre-determined to align with the original marketing pitch
A product’s price is usually set in the original pitch, alongside the claim and the hero ingredient(s), with the margin already in mind. Advertising is then built to justify it, so what you pay tends to reflect the product marketing more than the value of its ingredients or how it was made.
The status quo
What you’re most likely paying for
- Marketing + brand messaging
- Packaging aesthetics
- Traditional retail margins and prestige placement
- Formulas incentivized towards inexpensive, commodity ingredients and textural substances
- Products designed and optimized for mass production systems
What we want instead
Skincare that matters
In contrast to the status quo, we think skincare should be based on
- Creating thoughtful, functional products
- Intentionally-selected, high-quality ingredients
- Independent craftsmanship and made with care
- Prices that reflect the value of ingredients and how products are made
What we want instead
At VEREKET
We are a place to discover quality skincare built on high-performance, transparent ingredients and independent craftsmanship
Where VEREKET comes from
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Pronounced VAIR-ket
VEREKET
Our name is derived from the original Swedish word, verket, which roughly translates to
“the manufactory”
“During our early stages as nothing more than an idea, I was living in Stockholm, Sweden because my husband is Swedish. Stockholm has always been a second home for me and I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from its Scandinavian minimalist, “quality over quantity” mentality. Our name is a play on a Swedish word representing ‘manufacturing’ which struck me as a great reflection of the independent makers we work with.”
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