On the Discipline of the Plain Label
Notes from two winters spent rewriting a product page until nothing remained but the molecule, the percentage, and the volume in millilitres.
In January of 2022 our team at a small skincare studio in Lisbon spent fourteen working days arguing about a single line of copy on a 30 ml bottle. The line read, in our first draft, “a powerful brightening serum for radiant, healthy-looking skin.” The argument ended when our chemist, a quiet woman named Inês, asked what any of those adjectives meant in a beaker. We could not answer. We deleted the line and replaced it with three words: Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1%.
§ 02 The label as honest contract
What we lost was the marketing. What we gained was a kind of legibility we had not budgeted for. A label that names its molecule and its concentration is, structurally, a small contract. It does not flatter the shelf or the customer. It states what is inside the bottle, in the same notation a pharmacist would use on a prescription pad, and it leaves the reader to decide what to do with that information.