Brandon Truaxe: the man who will change the way you buy beauty

His game-changing but affordable products have gained cult status among industry insiders. As he opens his next store in London, Laura Craik meets the beauty world’s most exciting disruptor...
Laura Craik4 May 2017

The beauty industry isn’t exactly known for its plain speaking. A spade is rarely a spade: it’s a shiny rectangular tool with a sharp metal blade and a long, smooth, tactile wooden handle that will give you multiple orgasms and the promise of eternal youth. Which is partly why Brandon Truaxe is so refreshing. To the 38-year-old founder of Deciem, a spade is most definitely just a spade. His succinct, no-bull approach to beauty has won him an army of loyal fans, from fashion editors to beauty bloggers to regular people who can’t quite believe that some of his products are so effective yet so cheap.

All credible brands balk at being called ‘cheap’, of course, but that’s exactly what his newest range, The Ordinary, is. £3.90 for its High-Adherence Silicone Primer? £8 for its Advanced Retinoid 2%? £5.90 for its soon-to-launch Colours range of foundations? (Good luck with buying some — there are already 70,000 names on the waiting list.) Vogue might have dubbed Truaxe fans ‘skintellectuals’ (because they nerdily embrace his products’ scientific claims), but you could equally call them ‘people who are sick of paying over the odds for spurious promises’. When you consider that moisturisers and serums from leading beauty brands routinely cost upwards of £100, it’s hardly surprising that Victoria Health — the exclusive stockist when the brand launched last August — sold 5,000 The Ordinary products in 50 minutes.

Next up is a new range of products focusing on sun protection as well as more Deciem global store openings. London’s existing Shoreditch store opened in March, Covent Garden is due to arrive in June and Westfield is on the horizon. ‘These days I live on an aeroplane,’ Truaxe says, cheerfully. You can now also buy all of his products through the Deciem website.

How does he keep The Ordinary prices so low? ‘Because prices of those ingredients are low,’ he says simply. ‘I’m sure the first time the world discovered peanut butter it was a very expensive process, but as more got produced, it became a commodity. I’m not really convinced that if you spend $50 on peanut butter you’re getting better quality than if you spend $5 — you’re just buying a different approach to branding. Our margin percentage is really the same across all of our brands. We’re just very honest about it. What is really needed more than anything is transparency.’

But price point only partly explains The Ordinary’s rapid ascent to cult status: the main reason is that the products work, and that users are evangelical about them — as they are about so many of Truaxe’s wares. Despite only founding Deciem four years ago, Truaxe has already launched 10 brands within it and more than 150 products, shipping nearly 5.3 million items to over 12,000 stores worldwide. These include the haircare ranges Stemm and HIF, the male-focused AB Crew and the body range Chemistry (Hand Chemistry is one of Boots’ top-selling products). Most cult of all is NIOD, which stands for Non Invasive Options In Dermal Science (Truaxe’s ‘calling a spade a spade’ approach extends to his giving scientific names to products rather than whimsical ones, and also explains its packaging: think ‘pharmacy’ rather than ‘Prada’). Functioning as something of a big-sister brand to The Ordinary, NIOD prices range from £21 for Sanskrit Saponins (a sulphate-free face cleanser) to £60 for a 30ml bottle of CAIS (Copper Amino Isolate Serum).

When one of my most clued-up beauty friends first told me about CAIS, I was cynical, and never more so than when I applied the strange, thin blue liquid on to my skin. Rich, buttery moisturiser this is not. But the results (for me, at least) are compelling. Blemishes seem to fade more quickly, tone is evened and skin looks almost lit from within. The last time I checked, a vast swathe of fashion’s front row was using NIOD as their primary skincare range. Truaxe barely advertises: word-of-mouth recommendations ensure he doesn’t need to.

That he is one of the beauty industry’s most incessant disruptors is something he attributes to his ‘computer geek’ background. After studying computer science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, he ended up working on analysis software for ‘one of the big cosmetic manufacturers — a big brand that owns many things’, and was shocked at the mark-ups it charged. ‘One of the products they’d launched for $1,000 cost them less than $2.17 to make,’ he remembers. ‘I didn’t understand how that could possibly be.’ It angered him. ‘In the computer world, everything is 0 or 1; something is either there or it isn’t. I took an approach of saying look, I can breathe some geekiness into it. Things either work or they don’t.’

One can imagine his uncompromising stance has won him enemies as well as friends — as has his outspokenness. ‘You can create expensive products that bring value, ’ he says, but ‘I’ve yet to come across a product [that costs more than $100] where it wasn’t just mumbo jumbo.’

He is equally outspoken about cosmetic procedures. Botox and fillers? ‘They’re fantastic. Everyone should be really proud of them. But they have nothing to do with skincare. They do things that, topically, you can’t do. So anyone who tries to compare skincare to Botox is simply doing an injustice to both of them. No amount of Botox or filler can ever improve your skin texture. What’s even more interesting is that people often say, “How does it compare to surgery?” — plastic surgery has nothing to do with the skin. It pulls the skin, but it’s all about ligaments and fatty tissues and rearrangement of things under the skin. The moment you start to pull the skin itself is when everybody starts to look very fake. No surgery will improve the quality of your skin and make it better, whereas skincare actually does. I don’t think anyone should discredit those things — these are developments in the world that are truly innovative. I would never criticise. In fact many users of our skincare are probably also very avid users of Botox.’

At what age does he think people should start using it? ‘That depends. Botox has a tremendous amount of preventative value as well as reparative value, so that can start at fairly early ages. Obviously, if it doesn’t bother you then you should start at no age —ultimately you should do what you like.’

He is less keen on fillers. ‘I’m semi against them — generally, they look fake and overdone. I’d delay until you actually see areas that would need it.’ Lasers he is ‘very much against. Anything that causes inflammation has long-term disadvantages... You immediately expose yourself to more pollution, more sun [damage]. The first few times your skin might repair itself really well and you’ll look fantastic, but if it becomes a way of life then your body will lose its ability to catch up and repair the damage.’

How lucky that he owns an arsenal of skincare products to counter their ageing effects. Not that he’s worried about the ageing process. ‘Better ageing is much better than being young,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen many people who are 20 years old but just look terrifying. And people in their 60s who look fantastic. I don’t think what the world really wants today is to look younger. I think they just want to look better.’

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