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---Transcript---So how many of you feel overwhelmed with choices when shopping for beauty products. After all Sephora carries over 5000 different products. Ulta has over 20,000, not to mention the department stores. It surely seems like a ton. The question is - is all this choice real? So the big question is this - What do people with great skin do differently to have that? How did they achieve a great look without using celebrity beauticians or spending a paycheck to re-stock their beauty cabinet? What are their mindsets, their approaches, their rituals, the products and tools they use? That is the question and as podcast will give you the answers. My name is Damyan Nikolov and welcome to Skincare Secrets. Hi everyone, welcome to Episode 9 of the Skincare Secrets show. Today I want to talk about consumer choice when it comes to beauty products, which is actually only 20% choice and 80% a total illusion.  On the surface the beauty industry offers you seemingly unlimited number of choices but when you dig in you find that seven big corporations own the top 200 beauty brands. And remember how Sephora carries 5000 different products. They actually come from only 250 different brands.  So 80 percent of everything in the store comes from these 7 corporations. And you've heard of them - L'Oreal, Shiseido, Estee Lauder, Johnson and Johnson et cetera. Now, imagine if you walked into the beauty store and instead of all these brands you see on the shelves you actually saw only seven names across all the products on the shelves. Things would look much different wouldn't they?  This unfortunately is not quite disclosed openly. You have to dig and read to find this out. And it begs the question - why would someone like Estee Lauder companies for example need 35 different skin care brands?  Aren't they competing with themselves? And even more importantly what's really different about them, other than the packaging and the prices so they can target the premium market or the 50+ market or whatever?  Because they share the same ingredient suppliers many of them use the same contract manufacturing facilities. So really what's so different about them? So obviously the big corporations want to position these brands as new and different and exciting. That's why combined they spend over 25 billion dollars every year on marketing and advertising.  Just think about this number for a second. Twenty five billion! And it's not just TV and radio and magazines. A lot of the posts and reviews online now are paid by these corporations. So I'm talking about about Instagram, YouTube, Facebook etc.  These paid social reviews are growing at a rate of 500 percent in 2019. And this becomes the information we use to decide what to buy. So the question really is - are we buying beauty products or are we being sold to?  Ultimately, the burden is on us as buyers to educate ourselves so we can make the right choices. Because remember, at the end of the day brands don't deliver results. Only ingredients do.  And when it comes to skincare, for example, there are only so many ingredients that have proven efficacy. Like SPF and retinoids and Vitamin C etc.  And we want to see these ingredients in the products along with their concentrations so we know there's enough of those ingredients in the product to work and not just to make a claim it does. So next time you're in the store or you're online looking for beauty products try and ignore the brand name and focus on what's inside the bottle or the jar and make sure that's good for your skin. .  Because ultimately, we as the buyers hold the power because we choose what to buy. So stay educated to make the right choices.  That's all for today. It's a short episode. If you'll like this content please subscribe and share it and I'll see you in the next one. Till then - live strong, live with purpose.