The Real Reason Eye Cream Is So Expensive
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Conspiracy theories are an understandably contentious topic these days, but if you’ll indulge me for just one moment, I’d like to introduce you to one of my own: I have long harbored a sincere personal belief that eye cream is fake.
Not in the sense that eye cream doesn’t exist. Tubs and tubes of the stuff line the shelves of drugstore skin-care aisles and brightly lit department-store beauty counters alike. Sephora’s website boasts 190 eye-cream or eye-treatment options; Ulta carries 192 creams alone. In that sense, eye cream is probably a little too real. The fakeness that I’m talking about is molecular. Eye creams make a lot of, or, more specifically, with the chemicals that many of them advertise in big print on their tiny packaging: retinol, vitamin C, caffeine, peptides, hyaluronic acid. They’ll also almost always be notably more expensive by volume than a regular facial moisturizer.
