The INKEY List

Colette Laxton and Mark Curry started The INKEY List in the UK in 2018, working off a launch budget of just £40,000, small money for a skincare brand trying to break into a crowded market. Their pitch was different from what was already on shelves, though: instead of blending a dozen ingredients into one formula and hoping something worked, they’d build products around a single active ingredient at a time, priced low enough that people could actually experiment and figure out what their skin responded to.

It caught on fast. Within a few years the brand had landed in Sephora across more than 30 countries, plus Boots and Cult Beauty in the UK, and built up a community north of 2.1 million people who’d bought something like 20 million products between them. Growth numbers backed that up too, nearly 600% over three years, according to the company.

Investment followed the traction. Unilever Ventures got involved early on, and then in February 2022, Aria Growth Partners, a New York private equity firm that had previously backed the skincare brand Hero, came in with a minority stake of its own. Deal terms were never made public, but Aria typically writes checks in the $5-30 million range for brands generating similar revenue, which gives some sense of where The INKEY List was sitting by that point.
Alongside the investment came a repositioning push, “we are INKEY,” built around leaning harder into consumer education, bringing in dermatologists and trichologists to back up the ingredient claims rather than just making them. The brand also picked up a handful of industry awards around that period, including recognition from Allure and Glamour, and ran a notable collaboration with TikTok’s Hyram Yarbro under the name Selfless by Hyram.

What hasn’t changed since 2018 is the underlying logic: pick one ingredient, prove it works, and keep the price low enough that people can actually build a routine through trial and error instead of guessing blindly.