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Duplicate a cosmetic formula of defunct brand
There is a mascara I want to duplicate under my own brand. The mascara is no longer on the market and hasn’t been for a few years. Is there a way to find out who produced it? Thank you
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5 Replies
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Google?
What is the name of the brand?
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Probably not. If the company didn’t make it themselves, the information about who did make it is almost certainly covered under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). That means that even if you contacted every single contract manufacturer in the US, you would be unlikely to find out.
It’s possible to duplicate a mascara formula from an ingredient label, but you’d very likely get a decent formula much faster if you told the manufacturer to just match the performance of the prototype without worrying too much about what ingredients go into it. There are probably a dozen different ways to get the same performance out of a mascara formula, and a manufacturers R&D team will have a very good idea of which formulation strategy/ingredient combinations work best for their particular configuration of processing and filling equipment.
Something that most people don’t realize about mascara which is different from almost every other cosmetic is that the performance of the finished product is affected not just by the formula of the product, but also by the way the mascara is filled into containers, and by the configuration of the container/wiper/brush system. If you are trying to duplicate the performance of a specific mascara, you must have the container/wiper/brush system already decided on, and provide it to the chemist(s) working on the project. Otherwise, the formula cannot be optimized, and the best you can hope for is a generic mascara formula.
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It’ was made by English Ideas and was called mega mascara. I’ve done a lot of google searches and can’t find it anywhere- I’ve researched the husband/wife who owned the company too- they were out of California. I definitely have the ingredient list and may even still have an old (5+) years old opened tube somewhere. I would need to search. I had no idea I would need all the components during the formulation phase- thank you so much for that info. Are there places that provide everything or is it better and more cost effective to get the tube, brush, etc at different places. This would be for the luxury market and not marketed for mass retail
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If you have an LOI for the original product, then an experienced chemist can take a crack at reverse engineering it. You’ll probably get something that may be reasonably close, but without an original to directly benchmark against, you essentially would be creating a new product, but using the same ingredients as the original.
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Thanks so much
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