The question we get most from other founders is not “how do you make your products.” It is “why are you not on TikTok.” Sometimes the question is curious. Sometimes it carries a polite suggestion that we are being precious. Either way, the question deserves a real answer rather than the one-line one we tend to give in conversation.
The short answer is that the platform’s incentives and our editorial position are incompatible. The long answer is the rest of this piece.
What TikTok rewards
The platform’s algorithm rewards three things, in roughly this order. Novelty. Velocity. Repetition.
Novelty means new products, new formulations, new claims. The “skincare trend of the week” cycle is not an accident. It is the natural output of an algorithm that boosts content the user has not seen before. Brands that ship new SKUs every six to eight weeks have something new to film. Brands that ship one or two products a year do not.
Velocity means short, frequent, repetitive content. The brands that win on TikTok are not the ones with the best products. They are the ones that can produce 200+ pieces of content a year about the products they have. The content engine has to be larger than the formulation engine. That is a structural fact of the platform.
Repetition means the same claim, the same hook, the same shot, repeated thousands of times until the audience cannot remember a time before they had heard it. This is how brand awareness is built on short-form. It is not subtle and it is not editorial. It is rhythmic.
What we cannot reconcile
The editorial position of Elelaf is that fewer products, used longer, deliver better results. The slow skincare manifesto sets it out at length. The thesis is that skin biology is patient and that consumer skincare culture is not, and that the gap between the two is where most barrier damage and most wasted money happen.
You cannot run a TikTok engine for that thesis without contradicting it. The platform will not boost a video that says “use this serum for twelve weeks and judge it then.” The platform will boost a video that says “I tried this serum and at day seven my skin was different.” That is not a skin transformation. That is the placebo effect lit nicely.
To play seriously on TikTok we would need to release products more often than we believe is right, make stronger short-term claims than we believe are supported, and pay creators to film themselves having results we cannot verify happened. We are not willing to do any of those things. So the platform is not for us.
The contrarian section: most TikTok skincare brands will not exist in 2030
I expect to be wrong about some specifics here, but the structural prediction feels safe. The brands that have built audiences purely on short-form virality face two compounding problems. The cost per acquisition on TikTok keeps rising as competition grows. And the lifetime value of customers acquired through pure trend cycles is low, because those customers are loyal to the trend, not to the brand. When the next trend lands, they move with it.
The math gets ugly fast. Rising CAC plus falling LTV is the textbook collapse profile. The brands that survive that collapse will be the ones that built durable audiences elsewhere — email, editorial, podcasts, real-life retail — and used short-form as one of several channels, not the whole business. The brands that did not will be footnotes by the time we’re a few years older.
Where we put the energy instead
Editorial. The pieces on this site take between fifteen and forty hours each to research, write, and edit. We publish them slowly, anywhere between two and six a month. They are the asset.
Email. A weekly Sunday letter that runs long, says what it means, and does not pitch every issue. People stay subscribed for years.
Retail relationships. A short list of stores that share the editorial position. The buyers there can vouch for the brand in a way an algorithm cannot.
Press. Long-form interviews with publications whose readers are skeptical of trend cycles. The Guardian beauty desk is one example of a place that asks real questions; we have appeared there occasionally because the editorial fit is real.
Word of mouth. Slow, expensive, and the most durable channel we have. Customers who tell three friends about the Microbiome Glow Serum are doing more for the brand than any 200-creator campaign we could run.
The trade-off we accept
Not being on TikTok means we are smaller than we would be otherwise. That is the trade. We grow at maybe a quarter of the rate of brands of similar age that built their audience on TikTok. We also keep most of our customers, year over year, at a rate that those brands do not. The retention curve over five years probably favors us. The acquisition curve over two years does not.
That is fine. We are not optimizing for two-year acquisition. We are optimizing for a brand that we want to be running in 2035, with customers we recognize and products we still believe in.
For the deeper philosophy, the slow skincare manifesto sets out the editorial position. The 12-step routine critique and diminishing returns piece show why the platform’s content incentives produce skin damage in practice.
FAQ
Are you anti-TikTok in general? No. People can use the platform however they want. The question is whether the platform’s incentives match the brand’s incentives. For us, they don’t.
Don’t you miss younger customers by not being on TikTok? Some, yes. Younger customers also have phones and read email and visit shops. We meet them through those channels instead. The brand’s customer base skews slightly older as a result, which is fine.
What if a TikTok video about Elelaf goes viral organically? It has happened twice. We are grateful. We do not chase it.
Will you ever reverse the decision? If the platform’s incentives change, we will reassess. If they don’t, we won’t.
Don’t you feel left out? Occasionally. Then I look at our retention numbers and at the founder of a TikTok-first brand who just had to lay off half their team because their CAC tripled, and the feeling passes.
Sources
- Pew Research Center. “How Americans use TikTok.” 2024 report.
- Statista. “Beauty industry social media marketing trends.” 2024–2025 data.
- British Association of Dermatologists. “Position on social-media-driven skincare advice.” 2023.
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