What we rejected, and why
The products and whole categories that did not make it, with the actual reasons rather than a polite silence.
Routinae sells some of the products written about here, so read this the way you would read any shop’s opinion of its own shelves. Where we think a cheaper product does the same job we say so, and where the evidence is thin we say that too. Our buying standard is published so you can check the argument against it.
A catalogue is defined as much by what is missing as by what is in it. Most shops never explain the absences. Here are ours.
Anything sold on exosomes
This one is not a judgement call. Human-derived exosomes are prohibited in EU cosmetics - Annex II of the Cosmetics Regulation, no threshold, no exception. The plant-derived kind is not prohibited, but there is no INCI name for “exosome”, so you cannot verify from a label what you are actually buying. One regulatory analysis found that more than 75% of tested products claiming to contain exosomes either contained none or failed identification.
Availability is not evidence of compliance. Several exosome products are on sale in the Netherlands today. We are not stocking any of them.
Every powered device we looked at
LED masks, radiofrequency wands, microcurrent devices. We could not obtain verifiable CE conformity documentation for the ones we examined, there are adverse-event reports on file for at least one popular model, and there is an unresolved question about whether some of these fall under medical-device rules rather than ordinary product safety.
They are also already discounted to the floor by retailers with proper returns operations. There is no version of this we would win.
A viral ten-step set
Four of the ten steps did nothing that the other six were not already doing. We sell three of the products in it, separately, and would rather you bought three than ten.
A “brightening” ampoule
The claim was not substantiable under EU rules. We could have listed it with softer wording and let the packaging do the implying. That is the trick, and we would rather not learn it.
An anti-hair-loss tonic
A cosmetic product making a medical claim. Hair loss has actual treatments, some of them effective, none of them cosmetics. Selling hope next to shampoo is not a line we will cross.
Four products we simply could not afford to sell
Less dramatic but more common. For four items in our shortlist, the cheapest Dutch retail price was below what we could plausibly buy them for. A mass retailer buying at volume can sell a sunscreen for €13.36 when our floor is around €7.50 landed — the arithmetic does not work.
We carry one of those four anyway, at almost no margin, because a Korean skincare shop without it looks evasive. The other three are not here, and now you know why.
The category we have not opened
Fragrance and hair are in the plan and not in the shop. We can source them; we cannot yet source them to the same standard, and a department we cannot defend is worse than no department. They open when the paperwork does.