Philosophy

In the late 1990s, a Phoenix-based esthetician named Christina Carlino decided to label every product she made with a little prose poem on the front of the bottle. Most skincare copywriters would have fired her. Cody bought the brand for around $1 billion a decade later. Christina Carlino founded Philosophy in 1996 after selling her previous skincare brand Biomedic to L'Oreal. She positioned the new house as part cosmetics, part gift shop, writing a short paragraph of casual inspirational prose on every product label instead of the standard ingredient marketing copy. The hero product, Purity Made Simple, was a one-step facial cleanser with a label that read like a handwritten card. The tone was friendly and sincere rather than clinical, which was almost the opposite of how prestige skincare packaging was conventionally written.