Lip Service — Issue No. 79

Today

Today: Ami Colé is quietly discontinuing its cult Skin-Enhancing Tint and calling it an "evolution" while the real story involves a reformulation standoff, the arbutin glucoside that depigmentation researchers wish you'd stop confusing with hydroquinone, Loewe's AW26 show where every model looked like they'd just surfaced from a warm bath in the underworld, and the nonprofit delivering free skincare to Native women on reservations with no pharmacy for 100 miles. Let's get into it.

Opening Statement

I found a gray hair in my left eyebrow.
It was the most honest thing that happened all week.

I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror on Monday morning, doing that terrible thing where you lean so close your breath fogs the glass, when I saw it. A single silver wire, jutting straight out of my left brow like a tiny antenna tuned to a frequency only my mortality could receive. I did not pluck it. I stared at it. I tilted my head. I named it Gerald.

There is something quietly radical about refusing to remove the evidence. Not in a "silver fox warrior" way. Not in a way that requires a caption or a hashtag. Just in the sense that my face is doing something I did not ask it to do, and for the first time in a long time, I found that more interesting than alarming.

Beauty culture sells us the idea that aging is a series of small emergencies. A fine line here. A shift in texture there. But some mornings, the emergency is actually just a weather report. Things are changing. The forecast is gray. That doesn't mean a storm is coming.

Gerald and I welcome you to today's issue.

— ✦ —

Did You Hear?

The group chat
is buzzing.

Brand Drama

Ami Colé is phasing out the product that made it famous, and the reason isn't what they're saying

The Brooklyn-based brand confirmed this week it is discontinuing its Skin-Enhancing Tint, the sheer-coverage darling that landed on every "best of" list in 2023. Ami Colé is calling it "a natural evolution of our complexion philosophy," but two former employees say the brand hit a wall with its contract manufacturer over a reformulation dispute involving a key emollient supplier. The replacement product is expected later this year, but no timeline has been confirmed.

Industry Moves

Shiseido just poached a high-ranking L'Oréal research director, and the timing is suspicious

Dr. Hélène Marchand, who spent nine years leading L'Oréal's advanced pigmentation research division, quietly started at Shiseido's Yokohama Innovation Center this month. The move comes weeks before Shiseido is expected to announce a new brightening platform at its investor day in April. L'Oréal declined to comment, which in corporate terms is a comment.

Trend Alert

"Skin flooding" is already over, and the replacement has a worse name

If you spent all winter layering four hydrating serums in the name of skin flooding, congratulations, TikTok has moved on. The new thing is called "barrier stacking," which involves alternating ceramide and fatty acid layers to mimic the skin's own lipid matrix. The science is actually more sound than the name suggests, but the 47-step tutorials are already insufferable.

Did You Know?

Alpha-arbutin is not
what you think it is.

If you have ever Googled "natural alternative to hydroquinone," you have almost certainly encountered arbutin. But most of what the skincare internet tells you about this molecule is either oversimplified or flatly wrong, and the distinction between its forms matters more than almost any brand will admit.

The Science, Briefly

Alpha-arbutin is a biosynthetic glycoside that inhibits tyrosinase activity, the enzyme responsible for melanin production, at a rate roughly ten times more effective than its beta counterpart. Unlike hydroquinone, it does not accumulate in melanocytes and carries virtually no risk of ochronosis at standard cosmetic concentrations.

The confusion starts with the name. "Arbutin" on an ingredient list can refer to alpha-arbutin, beta-arbutin, or deoxyarbutin, and these are not interchangeable compounds. Beta-arbutin, which is cheaper and derived from bearberry leaf, has modest efficacy in studies. Alpha-arbutin, the synthesized version, is the one with serious clinical data behind it. Brands like The Ordinary and Naturium use alpha-arbutin at 2%, which is the concentration most frequently validated in peer-reviewed trials. But a surprising number of "brightening" serums on the market use the beta form or fail to specify, which is a red flag dressed in a very pretty bottle. The uncomfortable truth is that alpha-arbutin works best when paired with an acid, typically ascorbic acid or glycolic, which means the standalone "arbutin serum" many brands sell as a hero product is doing less than it could. Dermatologists who specialize in hyperpigmentation tend to recommend it as a supporting player, not a lead. That's a harder marketing story to tell, which is why almost nobody tells it.

"Alpha-arbutin is one of the most elegant tyrosinase inhibitors we have, but its efficacy profile changes significantly depending on formulation pH and what else is in the bottle. The molecule alone is not the whole story." — Dr. Meena Singh, Board-Certified Dermatologist, Kansas City Skin and Cancer Center

Did You See?

At Loewe AW26,
every face looked like it had
just been pulled from a dream.

AW26 · Bare Skin as Provocation at Loewe

Jonathan Anderson's AW26 collection for Loewe, which showed in Paris this past weekend, was full of the surreal object-as-garment provocations the designer is known for. But the beauty direction, led by makeup artist Thomas de Kluyver, was the real jolt. Models walked with skin that looked almost too hydrated, as though they had been sleeping underwater. Lips were left colorless. Brows were brushed upward and then seemingly forgotten. The effect was something between a fever and a baptism, and it refused to be pretty in any conventional sense. What made it land was how unfinished it felt. There were no graphic lines, no statement pigments, no "moments" in the way fashion beauty usually manufactures them. Just skin that looked alive and slightly unsettling, like a face caught between states. De Kluyver reportedly used only three products on each model, none of which have been disclosed. In a season of maximalist beauty spectacle, Loewe made the argument that the most disorienting thing a face can do is simply look real. That's the kind of argument Lip Service was built to notice.

Did You Help?

Beauty as an act
of returning.

Partnership With Native Americans (PWNA) has been delivering health and personal care supplies to reservation communities since 1990, but its beauty and skincare initiative, launched in 2022, specifically addresses the fact that many Native women live hours from the nearest pharmacy or drugstore.

250K+

personal care items delivered to reservation communities in 2025

On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the nearest retailer stocking SPF is roughly 90 miles away. PWNA's quarterly care packages include sunscreen, gentle cleansers, and moisturizers selected with input from Indigenous health workers who understand both the climate and the cultural context. One recipient, a 34-year-old mother of three, told program coordinators that the last time she owned a bottle of face lotion was over two years ago. PWNA is currently seeking donations and product partnerships to expand its skincare deliveries to 12 additional reservations by fall.

Donate to Partnership With Native Americans →

Healthy Tears

She was sixty years old.
She had spent her career
arguing for people the law
had chosen to overlook.
Then a president called.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been a federal appellate judge for thirteen years when the call came in 1993. She was not the first choice. She was not, by most accounts, the second. She was a sixty-year-old woman on the D.C. Circuit who had spent the previous three decades doing the kind of legal work that changes everything and impresses almost nobody at cocktail parties. She had argued six cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of gender equality and won five. She had built, brief by brief, the constitutional scaffolding that would make it illegal to treat women as a lesser category of citizen. And then she waited.

President Clinton, by his own admission, was looking for someone with "a big heart." His shortlist was full of politicians. Ginsburg was not a politician. She was a litigator who had once compared gender discrimination to a cage built so slowly the bird doesn't notice until it can't fly. She got a fifteen-minute meeting with Clinton. It lasted over an hour. He nominated her the next day.

At her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she sat for two days and answered questions with a calm so total it seemed to alter the room's oxygen levels. She declined to preview her positions on future cases, establishing what would come to be known as the "Ginsburg precedent" for judicial nominees. She was neither charming nor confrontational. She was simply precise. The committee, which had prepared for a fight, found itself disarmed by someone who treated every question as though it deserved a better version of itself.

She was confirmed 96 to 3. She served for twenty-seven years, until she was eighty-seven, writing dissents that became rallying cries and majority opinions that became law. Near the end, when asked about her legacy, she said something that was not really about the court at all. "I would like to be remembered," she said, "as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability." She did not say it was enough. She simply said it was hers.