How Lucrative Is the Rejuvenating Soap Business?

Friday, September 27, 2024


I started writing this post last July, but I didn't feel like posting it. I did not know where exactly I was going with it and honestly I was partially terrified that this might be misunderstood. So let's start this off with a disclaimer.


Being the chronically online in Youtube, I was simply surprised to learn that people how rich other people are getting just from selling rejuvenating skincare products. I heard about multiple brands coming out with similar products but I don't use it nor do I know anyone who do, so this was still very shocking for me. Curiousity got the best of me so I did some digging just because I wanted to know just how lucrative this industry is.


Disclaimer. This post does not imply any false accusation towards the brands and/or its owners. This is simply an estimated answer to a personal curiousity that I also wanted to share. No harm or negativity is directed towards anyone.



All About Rejuvenation


It is not a secret that many people in the Philippines have the mindset that fairer skin looks better or looks more wealthy. This way of thinking also shows the generalisation that if your skin is fair, you don't do much work "under the sun" or you have the means to maintain that skin. 

 

From what I have seen, the common theme among rejuvenation is bleaching, whitening, brightening, clarifying, etc. The common target market is those with dark skin, acne-prone skin, or irritated skin. The promised results are usually very clear and glowy, with fair skin. In the years prior, it was usually dermatologists creating their own rejuvenating lines with the most popular products, usually bleaching creams and kojic soaps. However, in recent years, there has also been an obvious rise of fair-skinned non-medical professionals who are "creating" their own lines.

 

As for the "created" part, it has always intrigued me because in surface level, there are almost no differentiating factors among these soaps other than the print on their packaging. They have always looked like white-label products to me.

 


The Numbers


The next thing I wondered about was how profitable these products are. I mean, just off the top of my head I asked the question: 


How much whitening soap does the Philippine market consume for individuals to earn millions or even billions?


Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive market study and the companies do not disclose their financial statements (rightfully so because most of them are private) that I could refer to so I had to think of my own ways to answer that question.


At first, I thought of approaching resellers and distributors with the hopes of knowing what the sales are like. Then I looked into it further and saw that there's some kind of network, though not always MLM, that would still affect how honest they would be with their sales. So I considered for me is the next best thing, which is to check their online sales.

 

In this sample size, I used the online shopping platform, Lazada. For full disclosure, I have not shopped for whitening or bleaching products ever, but my algorithm may still be different from others. I used the keywords rejuvenating soap to narrow it down to a single product and combed through the search results. 

 

I based the sales for each listing on this number:


I also only included the name or known brands, leaving out the generics and those with very small sales number of less than 100. I will have the file with the entire sample size available for download below.


After gathering the numbers, this is the ranking for my sample size of 98 product listings from the search:


Rosmar products which includes many varities of soap like kojic, gluta, etc tops our list with Php 23,371,755 in sales and also the number of listings found which is 37. In the data I gathered, the total items sold for Rosmar products is 200,291 including individuals and sets.


Another popular brand in this list is Brilliant Skin with only Php 7,247,672 and 10 listings with 133,474 items sold, also including individuals and sets.


Even with those very high numbers, that is still far from Php 1,000,000,000. For example, if we have the 1/10 of the sales coming at Php 23,371,755, we still lack the Php 976,628,245. If each soap is around Php 50 the most, that's 19,532,565 pieces of soap needed to be sold.


If the other sources are other online shopping platforms and dealers, each of those would need roughly $450m in sales of all of their products to make up the entire billion. However, if it's figures in millions only, it is possible. In my search, there were plenty of stores hitting and surpassing the million-peso mark.


Considering the saturation of this market, the limited number of people using and the limited frequency that each consumer uses the soap, I believe they would need to move mountains to reach those numbers. 



Ingredients 


Important: I am not a dermatologist nor a chemist and the information below are sourced from personally researching reliable sources.


If you are already using the products and they work for you, then feel free to continue doing so. I decided not to try any rejuvenating sets on my own face because of my personal preference and fear of damaging my skin. I usually just have some brands and ingredients I like to stick with. Still, I wanted to see what the ingredients were. For this post's purposes, I looked at four products and compared their ingredients to see how similar they are to each other.

 

The numbers stand for the order in which the ingredient appears on the product's ingredient list.


What I found was that except for product D which is available in Watsons, the others are not so upfront with their ingredient lists. The ingredients are not readily visible on their websites or their Lazada listings. I had to look for them on other resellers' websites or in their Amazon listings.
 
Just like the usual whitening, rejuvenating, and kojic soap products in the Philippine market, their common promises are skin lightening, preventing skin darkening, removing blemishes, glowing skin, anti-ageing, etc. 

In the table, products A and B are two very popular kojic soaps and have very similar ingredients, with differences only in the absence or presence of propylene glycol (moisturiser/humectant, solvent), cocamide DEA (surfactant/cleansing, viscosity controlling, emulsifying, emulsion stabilising), and butylated hydroxytoluene (additive antioxidant, preservative).

As for the whitening claim, they do both contain kojic dipalmitate which is more advanced than the old kojic and has research studies (see references/sources) linking it to treatment of hyperpigmentation. Although mostly anecdotal, there are also many users of kojic over the years who claim for it to have helped their skin.


What I can't wrap my head around is the claims are too big for a soap. Tehcnically, it does not even stay on the skin for so long so I personally would not entrust a soap with that. Science has gone far in terms of developing ingredients that are proven to work on the skin and ingredients that are safe to use for the long term. 


Furthermore, I am not the right person to discuss what skin lightening or skin bleaching ingredients have the research and the science to back up the claims. In case you are interested, below is a video of Dr Dray, a board-certified dermatologist discussing the differences between skin brightening and skin lightening.



Here is also another video by Dr. Shareene Idriss talking about Kojic Acid.



According to Dr. Shareene, 

It (kojic) is not going to lighten your main skin tone as it is. And don't think that you are going to "bleach" yourself with kojic acid. It is not going to happen.


The good thing to know is that the two big kojic soaps on the list are not the exact same product and just white-labelled. Well, they are known rivals, and if their rivalry is actually real, then I think the last thing on their minds would be to share a factory for their popular products.


If you are a regular user of these products or you are looking into trying them, I would highly encourage you to check for the ingredients and their side effects.

There are also scientifically proven ingredients such as retinol, niacinamide, and ceramides that have better results with the least irritation and are available in serums and moisturizers. If they are made with careful research and proper laboratories, they can do wonders for your skin.



How lucrative is the rejuvenating soap business?

From the numbers that I saw just for one shopping platform alone, I did find that it is a pretty good business venture IF you can find a steady and regular customer base. There are brands that did reach millions of pesos in sales, but I think even with all the shopping platforms it would still not reach a billion peso or more. As profitable as the rejuvenating soaps are, it is a no-brainer that they are not used by the majority of the population unlike popular brands like Safeguard, etc. Perhaps the additional number came from other business ventures. 




References/Sources:

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