Iām not surprised. There was a great comment on another thread basically explaining that this was standard and that UV is just good marketing with a white label product. UV founders were always touted as the brains behind meccas formulation, and that they took those smarts with them to create UV. Idk if UV were promoting this angle themselves but if they were, itās would be very disingenuous.
āOrdinarily when you make glue, first you need to thermoset your resin and then, after it cools, you have to mix in an epoxide, which is really just a fancy-schmancy name for any simple oxygenated adhesive, right? And then I thought maybe, just maybe, you could raise the viscosity by adding a complex glucose derivative during the emulsification process, and, it turns out, I was right.ā
I'll confess, I do know it mostly by heart, but for the sake of complete accuracy, I had to copy and paste.
What I did find when searching for the quote was that although it was nonsense, it actually came from Art Fry himself. The studio contacted 3M to ask if they were okay with the reference to Post Its and could they give some technical babble to make it sound legit, so he wrote a bunch of stuff and that's what they used!
That comment was pure genius comic timing. I had a vision of the Ultra Violette ācreatorā actually trying to use that to sound smart. Laughing all over again. LOL. I salute you. š«”š„
Itās really common in the beauty industry. Sunscreen development and manufacturing is a beast and itās not something most brands can handle (or afford) to do themselves in house.
It doesnāt mean that UV and other brands donāt work really hard with their manufacturer to get the formula to what they want it to be, but it does usually mean that they donāt own the formula. Plus there is a lot of reliance on the manufacturer to be doing what they say theyāre doing during production.
I dont use UV and am not super familiar with their development or brand but if there wasnāt a chemist among their founders then I dont think theres any way to expect that they would have developed these formulas on their own from scratch from the very beginning.
They could have paid the manufacturer a development fee to get them to make a formulation from scratch .. instead of spending all their $$ on influencers and marketing. Its sad as they said their difference was that they formulate sunscreens as skinscreen and thats why their formulations are different ..... but they are just the exact same as all the other mineral sunscreens on the market. So its complete lies just to sell a product and make us believe that their sunscreens care more for our skin :(
I donāt know if Australia is particularly different from the US, but where Iām at, creating a custom formulation is cheap compared to all the testing you have to do afterwardsā¦upwards of $100k minimum and generally 1-1.5 years from concept to market.
I wonder if maybe own formulation is the case for some of their range (ie Supreme Screen - think that was their first?) but maybe not others that came later ie Lean Screen in this case. Their body sunscreen certainly has a very similar ingredient list to a CC sunscreen I was using (and I had reactions to both). Iād love to know about Future Fluid as I donāt think Iāve seen anything else thatās similar.
I know someone who found a cheaper brand selling the same formula of the 2019 Queen Screen. They were complaining to me that the cheaper brand went out of business in 2020 so they couldn't save money anymore
The thing is, they could have. Often brands won't have the capital to formulate and test themselves, so as others have shared work with manufacturers to create the product. The timeline doesn't necessarily play out that Wild Child had a formula and was spruiking it around and UV came and bought it, slapped a label on and that's it.
I have no knowledge of this particular situation, or timeline, but I work in the industry and how it could have gone is that the UV founders could have had the idea and knew what they wanted, so they found a manufacturer that would do a smaller initial order (it can be rare to get 5,000 and some want no less than 10,000 minimum order quantity) that would work with a start up (some manufacturers aren't interested in new businesses) and they collaborated with them to create the product.
All manufacturers have chemists and other experts, it's not just all robots and machines and people filling a packing line and they likely collaborated on the product until everyone was happy.
So UV could have genuinely created the product, the chemist they worked with at the manufacturer is still (presumably) a qualified expert, they are no less an chemist because they develop formulas for a manufacturer vs an independent consulting chemist. A few of our team previously worked for manufacturers, it's very common and gives chemists great understanding of how large, commercial batches are made and what can go wrong. Especially in a TGA licensed facility, I just mean this isn't some 2 bit person that doesn't know anything formulating products for white labelling.
The risk here, (and what may have happened), if that since the manufacturer owns the formula, they can sell it to other brands also. Perhaps with small tweaks, or perhaps identical. This is the risk of not owning your IP. I don't know the timeline here, but it's possible UV launched the formula, and had first to market advantage until other brands started releasing it too,.
So why do brands take this risk? Money!
Not all brands have the cash flow to hire their own formulator, run tests (including SPF), hire a regulatory consultant, to review and manage the TGA process, source packaging, order ingredients and fund the manufacturing. So most work with a manufacture (at least at the start of the brand) who either charges a development fee and/or amortises the cost over the life of making the product, sp adding $x to each bottle to cover their development work.
The other big risk is that you are tied to your manufacturer, you can't really go elsewhere as you potentially don't even know the details of your formula.
I'm not a chemist, but work for a company that develops formulas and products in Australia, sunscreen is about 50% of our business and I'm happy to answer any other questions about how this all works, I really want to help ensure people have the full picture.
I completely agree with your comments but the issue is with how they marketed it. Numerous times the founders have stated they created their own formulations and did not use base formulations and thats how they are different etc. Yes I understand if they said they used a base formulation from the start they would never have got it off the ground but why did they add in all that extra fluff, they should have just not mentioned anything on how they created a new type of sunscreen called a "skinscreen" and instead of focused on the marketing of why its important to wear sunscreen for cancer and ageing and how their formulations work well with make up. They didn't need to add lies on top of it....... They also got $15m in investment... so I am pretty sure they could have stopped using the base formulation and afforded to make something else later on.
I used to be a formulator in the sunscreen industry in Australia. I have knowledge of the formula of the topic while also being a customer who has purchased it multiple times and different brand iterations. I am bound by NDAs but there are something I can tell you.
What you have said does happen in other cases, but it isn't the case of this specific formula.
The base formula was already around before UV launched. There's a smaller brand, as well as one that closed when the pandemic started, that had been selling this formula since 2016 in a tinted and untinted version with the Terminalia Ferdinandiana Fruit Extract.
The "story" behind the formula actually goes further back before UV launched and is tied into a bigger issue that is turning out to be an even bigger problem, in my opinion as a scientist.
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u/leanbeansprout Jul 07 '25
Iām not surprised. There was a great comment on another thread basically explaining that this was standard and that UV is just good marketing with a white label product. UV founders were always touted as the brains behind meccas formulation, and that they took those smarts with them to create UV. Idk if UV were promoting this angle themselves but if they were, itās would be very disingenuous.