Before The Ordinary, most skincare consumers didn’t shop for a serum by asking how much niacinamide it contained.
They didn’t necessarily know whether their vitamin C was L-ascorbic acid, what percentage of glycolic acid was in a toner, or why one retinoid might behave differently from another.
Skincare ingredients existed, of course. Cosmetic chemists, dermatologists and serious skincare enthusiasts understood them. But the mainstream beauty industry usually sold something else first: the finished product, the promise and the story surrounding it.
Then The Ordinary put the ingredient on the bottle.
Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1%. Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5. Glycolic Acid 7% Exfoliating Toner.
The names looked less like traditional beauty products and more like formulas from a laboratory shelf.
That was the point.
When The Ordinary launched in 2016 under parent company DECIEM, it challenged several assumptions about how skincare needed to be packaged, marketed and priced.
Its greatest innovation wasn’t discovering a new ingredient. It was making familiar ingredients unusually visible.
The story begins with DECIEM
DECIEM was founded in Toronto in 2013, led by the late Brandon Truaxe alongside founder Pasquale Cusano and co-founder Nicola Kilner.
The company positioned itself as “The Abnormal Beauty Company”, an unconventional umbrella for beauty brands that approached formulation, pricing and marketing differently from much of the established industry.
Three years later, The Ordinary launched. And its proposition was almost provocatively simple.
What was so radical about The Ordinary?
Many of the ingredients The Ordinary launched with weren’t new.
Retinoids weren’t new. Vitamin C wasn’t new. Hyaluronic acid wasn’t new. Niacinamide wasn’t new. Alpha hydroxy acids weren’t new.
What was different was the way the company presented them.
Instead of wrapping an established active ingredient inside a proprietary-sounding complex and building an elaborate luxury story around it, The Ordinary frequently told the customer exactly what she was buying, often directly in the product name.
The packaging reinforced the idea. Small glass bottles. Droppers. White labels. Minimal typography. Almost clinical presentation.
And then there was the price.
The Ordinary offered many ingredient-focused formulas at prices dramatically below those of prestige skincare brands selling products built around some of the same familiar actives.
That combination was disruptive. Transparency became part of the product.
“Clinical Formulations with Integrity”
The phrase closely associated with The Ordinary from the beginning was “Clinical Formulations with Integrity”.
It captured the brand’s central argument: familiar and established skincare technologies shouldn’t automatically command extraordinary prices simply because they’re presented as luxury.
That doesn’t mean formulation is simple.
Two products containing the same headline ingredient can perform very differently. Concentration, pH, delivery system, supporting ingredients, stability, packaging and the overall formula all matter.
But The Ordinary helped consumers begin asking those questions.
Instead of “which anti-aging serum should I buy?”, the conversation increasingly became “which retinoid am I using?”. Instead of “which brightening product?”, consumers began talking about vitamin C, alpha arbutin, niacinamide and acids.
The vocabulary of cosmetic chemistry moved closer to the consumer.
That is arguably The Ordinary’s most important legacy.
The price was part of the message
The Ordinary’s low prices weren’t simply a promotional strategy. They were part of the critique.
Beauty has always contained an unusual relationship between price, efficacy and desire.
A beautiful jar can be expensive to manufacture. A sophisticated delivery system can cost money. Research costs money. Packaging, texture, fragrance, testing and the pleasure of using a product all have value.
But none of that means a $150 serum contains an active ingredient that is inherently fifteen times “better” than one found in a $10 formula.
The Ordinary made that contradiction unusually visible. A customer could suddenly buy recognizable skincare actives for the price of lunch.
It forced a useful question onto the rest of the industry: what exactly are we paying for?
That’s still one of the questions we think beauty journalism should ask.
Brandon Truaxe and the founder behind the disruption
The history of The Ordinary is inseparable from Brandon Truaxe.
Truaxe was an unconventional and highly visible founder whose ideas around transparency, pricing and beauty helped shape DECIEM’s identity.
His leadership was also marked by a turbulent period in 2018, when concerns surrounding his behavior and the management of the company culminated in legal proceedings and his removal from his leadership role.
Truaxe died in January 2019 at the age of 40.
The company continued under the leadership of Nicola Kilner, but Truaxe’s influence remains embedded in the business he helped create, particularly in The Ordinary’s willingness to question how skincare had traditionally been marketed and priced.
From disruptive startup to Estee Lauder
The success of DECIEM attracted the attention of one of the world’s largest beauty companies.
The Estee Lauder Companies first invested in DECIEM in 2017, became its majority owner in 2021, and completed its acquisition of the company in 2024.
The trajectory is striking.
What began as an outsider challenging some of the conventions of the beauty industry is now fully owned by one of its largest established players.
But The Ordinary’s original proposition hasn’t simply disappeared with the acquisition. Instead, it raises an interesting question: can a brand built as a disruptor remain disruptive once it becomes part of the establishment?
The products that defined The Ordinary
The range has expanded considerably since 2016, but several products are particularly important to understanding the brand.
Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1%
Few products represent The Ordinary better. It helped turn niacinamide from an ingredient many consumers barely noticed on an INCI list into one of skincare’s most recognizable actives.
The serum became especially associated with oily and blemish-prone skin and remains one of the brand’s current bestsellers.
Its success also illustrates both the strength and the limitation of The Ordinary model. Knowing the active and concentration gives you useful information. It doesn’t automatically tell you whether the formula will suit your skin.
Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5
Now formulated with ceramides, it became another gateway product into the brand and remains a current bestseller.
Hyaluronic acid was already widely used in skincare, but The Ordinary helped turn the ingredient itself into something consumers actively searched for. The appeal was easy to understand: hydration, a straightforward name and an accessible price.
The broader lesson is more nuanced. Hyaluronic acid isn’t a brand philosophy, and seeing it on the front of a bottle doesn’t automatically make one hydrating serum superior to another. The whole formula still matters.
Glycolic Acid 7% Exfoliating Toner
One of The Ordinary’s most recognizable exfoliating products, and still among its current bestsellers.
It is also a perfect example of what happens when ingredient literacy meets social media. Once consumers understand that glycolic acid exfoliates, it’s tempting to start finding increasingly creative places and reasons to use it.
But knowing what an ingredient can do isn’t the same thing as knowing when your skin needs it. More isn’t automatically more sophisticated.
AHA 30% + BHA 2% Peeling Solution
The unmistakable deep-red peel became one of the most visually recognizable products associated with the brand. It was almost made for the social-media era.
But it also illustrates an important limitation of democratizing powerful skincare ingredients: accessibility needs to be accompanied by understanding. The brand itself positions the peel for experienced users of acid exfoliation and warns against using it on sensitive, peeling or compromised skin.
A high concentration and dramatic appearance may make a product interesting. They don’t make it appropriate for every skin.
The retinoid family
The Ordinary also became known for offering several approaches to retinoids rather than presenting “retinol” as one interchangeable category.
For consumers willing to learn, that can be empowering. For beginners, it can also be confusing.
And that tension runs through the entire brand.
The Ordinary made skincare easier, and more complicated
The Ordinary is often described as a simple skincare brand. Visually, it is. Conceptually, it isn’t always.
Enter the range without understanding skincare and you’re confronted with percentages, acids, peptides, retinoids, suspensions and ingredient names that can make an ordinary skincare routine feel like chemistry homework.
The brand removed one kind of complexity, marketing language, and replaced it with another: the responsibility to understand what you’re buying.
For some consumers, that’s liberating. For others, a well-formulated finished product designed around a skin concern may actually be easier and more useful than assembling a routine one active at a time.
Transparency is valuable. So is formulation expertise. The two shouldn’t be confused.
More active doesn’t mean more effective
The ingredient-first skincare movement also helped create a misconception worth challenging: that a higher percentage is automatically better.
It isn’t.
The appropriate concentration depends on the ingredient, formulation, delivery system, skin concern and individual tolerance. A 10% formula isn’t automatically twice as effective as a 5% formula.
And combining several “effective” active ingredients doesn’t necessarily produce a more effective routine. Sometimes it produces irritation.
The Ordinary gave consumers access to extraordinary amounts of information. Using that information intelligently is the next step.
The Ordinary and the democratization of skincare
For all the caveats, The Ordinary changed beauty in a meaningful way.
It helped normalize checking active ingredients. It made consumers more comfortable with scientific terminology. It challenged the assumption that effective skincare needed luxury pricing. And it put pressure on other brands to explain what was actually inside their formulas.
Today, ingredient percentages on packaging barely seem unusual. That itself shows how much the market changed.
The Ordinary didn’t create ingredient-conscious skincare. But it helped make it mainstream.
Cheap skincare isn’t automatically better value
There’s also a trap in treating The Ordinary as proof that expensive skincare is unnecessary.
Sometimes it is unnecessary. Sometimes it isn’t.
Value isn’t simply the lowest cost per milliliter or the highest percentage printed on a label. A more expensive formula may offer a more sophisticated delivery system, better stability, a more elegant texture, multiple complementary ingredients or simply an experience that makes someone use it consistently.
Conversely, an inexpensive formula that performs exactly the job you need can make paying five times more very difficult to justify.
The useful comparison isn’t cheap versus expensive. It’s: what am I getting for the difference?
The Ordinary made that question harder for the beauty industry to avoid.
The Ordinary on LOREN STANDARD
Below you’ll find our The Ordinary guides, ingredient explainers, comparisons and product coverage.
We’ll look beyond the percentages on the bottle to ask the questions that matter once ingredient transparency has done its job: is the concentration meaningful? Is the formula well designed? Does your skin actually need this active? How does it fit with the rest of your routine? And is the inexpensive option genuinely the smarter buy, or simply the cheaper one?
“Because The Ordinary helped teach a generation to read the front of the bottle. Our job is to look at everything behind it.”
We love products. Not logos.
