How much is actually in it (price)
From the founder
They'll tell you what's
in it. They won't tell
you how much.
Ours is 1% PDRN. We're printing the number. Then we're going to refuse to tell you what it will do for your face — and that refusal is the entire point.
Julian · Founder of ZUVIE
What it is
A serum for your face and neck. Apply a few drops as needed — after you cleanse, before your moisturizer. That is the whole object. Everything below is about what is in it, and what we will not claim it does.
$69 · 35 ml · one bottle
Printed up here for the same reason the percentages are printed further down. It isn't on sale yet, and this page isn't selling it.
Why $69, honestly. Not the ingredients. Serums that cost more than this hold stronger doses of things we don't have, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. It's the list. We looked at nine serums between $55 and $90 and not one of them prints how much of every active is inside it — the brands that print everything sit under $30. Ours is also 35 ml where almost everything on that shelf is 30 ml.
And one number we'll stand behind rather than sell you: niacinamide at 2%. It's the one ingredient in here where two different amounts were tested and the difference published — 2% and 5%, in a peer-reviewed journal. We print our number so you can read that work and judge it yourself instead of taking our word for it.
If the last serum you bought did nothing, I don't think that was your fault, and I don't think it was your skin.
Here's what I found when I stopped reading the fronts of the bottles and started reading the backs. Almost every serum in this category puts one fashionable ingredient in large type on the front — PDRN, peptides, whichever molecule is having its year — and then never tells you how much of it is actually in there. Not on the carton. Not on the website. Not if you email and ask.
That isn't an oversight. An ingredient list has to be ordered by concentration, but it does not have to carry a single number. So a company can put a spectacular ingredient in at a trace amount and still print its name in the biggest font on the package, and every word stays technically true. You pay seventy or eighty dollars for a quantity nobody will show you, and the whole arrangement is perfectly legal.
Then it does nothing, and you draw a conclusion about yourself. That your skin is difficult. That you left it too late. That this stuff just doesn't work on you. I'd like to offer the duller explanation instead: you may simply never have been told what you were buying.
You can't compare what you're
never shown. That isn't an accident.
It's the business model.
So here are our numbers
Judge them yourself. That's the whole offer.
1% PDRN. Six peptides at 3%. Niacinamide at 2%.
That's the top of the formula, printed. Not "clinical strength." Not "maximum concentration." Three plain figures you can carry over to whatever is already on your shelf and hold up against what that brand is willing to tell you — which, in most cases, is going to be nothing at all.
Whether 1% impresses you is genuinely yours to decide. I'd just rather you got to decide it.
Three numbers isn't the formula. Here are all 29 ingredients, each with a number next to it.
Our ads print four of these figures. They add up to 83.8%, and more than once someone has done that sum in the comments and asked what we're keeping in the other 16.2%. Fair question. Nothing. It's below, down to the two colorants that make up 0.00056% between them.
Palmitoyl Tripeptide-1 · Palmitoyl Tripeptide-8
Acetyl Heptapeptide-4 · Oligopeptide-1
Heptapeptide-6 · Acetyl Hexapeptide-8
The colorants are printed in red because that is the line most likely to matter to you, not because it helps us. Patch test on your inner arm, twenty-four hours, before it goes near your face.
Niacinamide, 2%. The one ingredient in here where two different amounts were tested and published.
Our niacinamide is at 2%. That's the lower of the two levels tested in the published split-face work on the appearance of facial spots — 2% and 5%. We're telling you where we sit on that scale. We're not telling you what it will do for your face.
Niacinamide is one of the few ingredients in this category where somebody actually tested two different amounts and published the difference. Most ingredients on most labels have never had that done. That's why we're willing to print our number next to it.
PDRN is the word on the front of this whole category. Niacinamide is the one somebody measured twice. We'd rather say that ourselves than let the flashier word quietly do the work. Here's what PDRN actually is, including the parts that don't flatter us.
And the plainest part of the bottle: 5% glycerin, hyaluronic acid, squalane. That part holds water at the surface of your skin and softens it. It's a moisturizing claim, and it's the one thing in this bottle we can say without an asterisk.
We're not going to tell you what those numbers will do.
Nobody has used this serum. Not one person. There's no study with our name on it, no trial, no panel of forty women reporting a precise-sounding percentage improvement in something.
You've read numbers like that. They usually come from a small survey a brand ran on itself, in which women were asked whether their skin felt better. That isn't evidence, and putting a decimal point on it doesn't turn it into evidence. We don't have any, so we're not going to manufacture the kind that's easy to manufacture.
Fragrance-free. No SPF. And yes, there are colorants in it.
The fragrance came out deliberately. There's no SPF in it, so it doesn't replace your sunscreen and it isn't pretending to. And it's pink because there are two colorants in it, CI 16035 and CI 15985. They do nothing for your skin. They make it pink.
None of that helps me sell anything. You'd have found it on the ingredient list eventually. I'd rather you found it here.
Our reviews page has nothing on it. It's the most honest page we have.
We could buy four hundred five-star reviews this afternoon for less than we're spending to put this page in front of you. That market exists, it's cheap, and you have read its output — almost certainly today.
When there are actual customers, you'll read what they actually wrote, including the ones who didn't get on with it. Until then the page stays empty, and I'd rather explain why than quietly fill it.
The honest part
And here's the list of things it won't do.
It won't lift skin that has genuinely gone slack. It won't replace filler or a needle. It won't do anything overnight. Nothing you put on your skin does those things, and the people selling you one are counting on you not knowing that.
What it's made to do is quieter and slower: it holds water at the surface of your skin and softens it. What it does beyond that is the part we're not going to claim — nobody has used this serum yet. If that isn't what you came here for, I'd honestly rather you didn't buy it.
One more thing you'd rather hear from me
Than find on the back of the box.
It's manufactured in Foshan, Guangdong, in China.
I'm telling you here rather than letting you discover it later, because I think you'd be entitled to be irritated about the order you learned it in. A great many serums sold under Korean-sounding names come out of the same region, in the same kind of factory, and will never say so. We could have done the same thing. It's easy, it's normal, and I didn't want to.
What I can offer you instead of a flag is paperwork. The facility is certified by SGS:
US FDA CFSAN Cosmetic GMP
Certificate CNCPCH20240734E
ISO 22716
Certificate CNCPCH20240735E
Both valid through July 17, 2027
Those are numbers, not adjectives, and you can look them up. One caution, since I'm the one handing them to you: a GMP certificate is about how a factory is run. It is not an FDA endorsement of this serum, and I'm not going to let you read it as one.
Ask the last brand you bought from for theirs. See what comes back.
It isn't free. It just isn't for sale yet.
It will be sold, not given away — there are no free samples and no test bottles. What costs nothing is joining the list: no payment, no card details. No launch date. An independent safety assessor still has to sign the formula off, and until that's finished there is nothing to sell you. Put your name down and I'll write when it changes — including if it changes for the worse.
$69 when it launches · Nothing to pay to join the list · Leave the list any time
I'll write when there's something real to say, and not before.
— Julian, ZUVIE