The Industry Got Cheaper. Yet We All Paid More.

There was a time when products were built to last.

Furniture was solid. Tools were repairable. Shoes were resoled, not discarded. Ingredients were recognisable.

Then came industrial acceleration.

The Industrial Turn

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a dramatic shift in production. Mechanisation increased output, lowered cost, and standardised goods across expanding markets. By the post-war period, petrochemical innovation and global supply chains had reshaped manufacturing entirely (Smil 2013; McNeill 2000).

Industrialisation did not simply scale production. It changed incentives.

Durability increasingly gave way to efficiency. Craft yielded to codification. Materials shifted from natural to synthetic, not always because they performed better in every sense, but because they were cheaper, more stable in mass production, and easier to transport at scale.

This shift birthed what economists later termed ‘planned obsolescence’: the design of products with limited useful life to encourage repeat purchasing (Bulow 1986).

The result?

Goods became more accessible, more standardised... but often less materially enduring.

A Cultural Countercurrent

Yet culture moves in cycles.

In recent years there has been a measurable resurgence in analogue formats and heritage production. Vinyl record sales have grown consistently for over a decade, with vinyl albums outselling CDs in unit terms in both 2022 and 2023, the second time since 1987 (RIAA 2024). Consumers increasingly seek tactile, slower, more intentional experiences.

The appeal is not nostalgia alone. It is trust. Permanence. Substance.

The same shift is unfolding across food, fashion, and personal care.

Skincare Before Synthetics

For most of human history, skincare came from the same places as food.

Olive oil pressed for cooking was also pressed for skin. Animal fats rendered for the kitchen were rendered for soap. Beeswax sealed both pastries and balms. The line between what you ate and what you applied was thin, sometimes invisible.

Rendered tallow was used widely in soaps and balms across Europe and North America well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Ashenburg 2007). These materials were stable, nourishing, and not incidentally, edible.

The turning point came mid-century.

The petrochemical boom that followed the Second World War introduced synthetic emollients, preservatives, surfactants and fragrances into consumer products at unprecedented scale (Brock 1992). These compounds were inexpensive, shelf-stable, and easy to standardise: ideal for mass retail expansion.

By the 1960s and 70s, cosmetics had become deeply industrialised. Ingredient lists lengthened. Formulas became more complex. Marketing grew louder.

The shift was not inherently malicious. It was economic.

Synthetic derivatives were cheaper than agricultural fats. Large-scale agriculture prioritised commodity oils over small-batch renderings. Global brands optimised for margin, scalability and distribution.

Over time, cost efficiency often overtook material simplicity and ingredient quality.

Even the Food Changed

The pattern is visible beyond skincare.

McDonald’s famously cooked its French fries in beef tallow until 1990, when it transitioned to vegetable oils amid public health pressure and cost considerations (Schlosser 2001). The flavour profile changed noticeably. Many argue quality did too.

Again, this was not a conspiracy. It was scale.

Industrial systems reward consistency and cost reduction. Natural fats fluctuate in price and availability. Synthetic and refined alternatives do not.

The same calculus shaped personal care.

The Slow Cheapening

As brands grew, formulations were quietly adjusted. Cheaper carrier oils replaced more expensive ones, synthetic stabilisers replaced whole ingredients, fragrance systems masked base quality, and packaging shifted to lightweight plastics. Margins improved and shareholders benefited, but something was lost: simplicity.

Today, many mainstream skincare products contain dozens of ingredients, many functioning as stabilisers, texture agents, preservatives or synthetic performance enhancers rather than serving as the core nutritive base of the product itself.

Consumers are beginning to notice.

The Return to Substance

There is now a measurable movement back toward fewer ingredients, whole materials and transparent sourcing.

The global clean beauty market was valued at approximately US$8.2 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach more than US$21 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of 14.5 per cent (Grand View Research 2024). Consumers increasingly prioritise ingredient transparency and perceived naturalness.

This is not about fear. It is about preference.

Just as vinyl retains a texture and physicality lost in streaming, natural fats retain a biological familiarity that many synthetic systems still struggle to emulate convincingly. Tallow, for instance, shares key fatty acids with human sebum... palmitic, stearic and oleic acids among them (Smith & Thiboutot 2008). The proportions differ, but the overlap remains notable, particularly for consumers drawn to ingredients that remain closer to their original biological form.

A Simple Test

There is a useful question buried in all of this: would you eat it?

It is not a perfect test. Plenty of things are safe on skin that no one would put on a spoon. But it is a clarifying one. For most of history, the answer was yes, by default. Olive oil, tallow, honey, beeswax... these moved fluidly between the pantry and bathroom.

Somewhere in the last seventy years, that changed.

Most modern skincare ingredients would be unrecognisable as food, and many would be entirely unsuitable for ingestion.

That shift is worth noticing.

The Economics of ''Doing It Properly''

Natural ingredients cost more.

Organic tallow sourced as a by-product of ethical agriculture is more expensive than petrochemical derivatives. High-quality Australian olive oil costs more than refined commodity oils. Aluminium packaging costs more than lightweight plastic.

Could costs be reduced? Yes.

Formulas could be diluted. Cheaper oils could be substituted. Packaging could be lightened. Margins could widen.

But that would mean participating in the same industrial logic that gradually prioritised scalability and margin over material simplicity in the first place.

A Different Incentive Structure

At Rodeo, the objective is not maximum scalability at any cost. It is the quality of what’s in the bottle.

Fewer ingredients. Recognisable ingredients. Ingredients chosen for their function, not marketing theatre.

No fear-based messaging or inflated claims.

Just products made well, with the understanding that quality has a cost, and that cost is visible.

We are not anti-industry. Industrialisation brought enormous progress.

But there is space now for recalibration.

Across culture, consumers are signalling the same desire: fewer layers, more substance. Less noise, more materially honest products.

Skincare is simply catching up.

References

Ashenburg, K 2007, The dirt on clean: an unsanitized history, North Point Press, New York.

Brock, WH 1992, The Fontana history of chemistry, Fontana Press, London.

Bulow, J 1986, ‘An economic theory of planned obsolescence’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 101, no. 4, pp. 729–749.

Grand View Research 2024, Clean beauty market size, share & trends analysis report, Grand View Research, San Francisco, viewed 11 May 2026, <https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/clean-beauty-market-size/global>.

McNeill, JR 2000, Something new under the sun: an environmental history of the twentieth-century world, WW Norton, New York.

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) 2024, Year-end 2023 RIAA revenue statistics, RIAA, Washington DC, viewed 11 May 2026, <https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2023-Year-End-Revenue-Statistics.pdf>.

Schlosser, E 2001, Fast food nation: the dark side of the all-American meal, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Smil, V 2013, Making the modern world: materials and dematerialization, Wiley, Chichester.

Smith, KR & Thiboutot, DM 2008, ‘Thematic review series: skin lipids. Sebaceous gland lipids: friend or foe?’, Journal of Lipid Research, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 271–281.