Just last month, The Ordinary released their new campaign titled the “Periodic Fable”. The campaign consisted of an interactive periodic table, a short film directed by Olivia de Camps (which is literally so perfect, because this whole brand direction is beyond campy), and a coffee-table book titled “Ingredients” which goes into all the formulations of their products to provide transparency on ingredients placed in their minimalist packaging.

The Ordinary even had posters put up around cities that spell out words like “Gimmick” (Gi:Green Ingredients + M:Medical Grade + Mi:Miracle + Ck:Celebrity Skincare), “Hoax” and “FFs”, highlighting how product marketing might successfully make some products sound credible and technical on a scientific level. In actuality, what the brands are doing is using buzzwords that do not hold any actual effects when considering the ‘health’ of its product.

The short film itself is beyond art. It featured people sitting around in a classroom setting, absorbing the propaganda of social media and marketing terms, violently beating up their skin while chanting beauty. Each of them represented some bizarre and extreme form of facial therapy, and as wildly discomforting as it was to watch, it is not far off from the morning sheds that circulate on TikTok, or the skincare routines that dominate online spaces.

It is a whole separate issue on how low the bar is for targeting the younger demographic, highlighting the issue of ingredient transparency and the meaning behind the words that we throw around, thinking we have unlocked the secret to eternal youth just because something is ‘cruelty and paraben free’. I bet you do not even know what a paraben is, and that is fine - just do not think that you do, if you do not. Why? Because that baseless assumption and vagueness is exactly what companies want you to latch onto and defend.

The way this campaign strings itself together makes one thing obvious: half the skincare industry has convinced people that fluency in buzzwords is the same as understanding what true skincare is and looks like. The Ordinary is banking on that gap of knowledge, and calling out just how wide we have let it become. The interactive table, the film, the book, even the obnoxiously on-the-nose posters are all designed to expose how flimsy the “science” most brands parade around actually is. When “Gimmick” can be broken down into pseudo-chemistry like it is some legitimate molecular structure, it shows how embarrassingly easy it is to pass off marketing as expertise. What this campaign does spectacularly is it holds up a mirror to the consumer, making them realise just how easily fooled you can be by words that sound smart and important even when they genuinely mean absolutely nothing. It forces you to see how quickly people will repeat a term, simply because it sounds clinical enough to give them a sense of control. Sure, the film is borderline grotesque. But it is honest about how skincare culture has mutated and deformed into something performative and punishing. The violence shown toward our own skin is not metaphorical; it is a very real, albeit dramatized, version of an obsession that drives people to exfoliate until they burn or “lymphatic drain” until they bruise. This is where the campaign’s critique lands hardest, because while most like to believe they are well informed, the most vulnerable are those who just follow along with what everyone else is doing: the young ones. The industry counts on young consumers having just enough vocabulary to feel informed, without ever actually being informed. It is the illusion of literacy that dominates product advertising. Words like “clean,” “non-toxic,” “medical-grade,” and “active” get tossed around with the confidence of lab technicians, yet most of them do not even point to anything measurable. The Ordinary’s point is not that people are stupid, but that we are being trained to overestimate how much they understand. And the more we cling to a glossary ripped out of influencer captions, the easier it is for brands to sell them treatments that promise everything while explaining literally nothing. That is the real tension the campaign exposes: not between jargon and transparency, but between what consumers think they know about their own skin and the reality that the industry profits from burying knowledge under hype which attracts people to their potions like moths to a trap. Zeinab Helal is a Deputy Columns Editor. Email them at feedback@thegazelle.org.