How we choose what to sell
The ten questions every product has to pass, the ones we are still waiting on answers to, and why we publish this at all.
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.
Most shops do not tell you how their catalogue was assembled. That is understandable - usually the answer is margin, availability and whatever a distributor was pushing that quarter. We would rather publish ours, partly because it is more interesting and mostly because it lets you hold us to it.
The six a product cannot fail
- One clear job. If we cannot say in one sentence who it is for and what it does, you will not understand it either.
- A place in a routine we actually recommend. No orphans. If our routine builder cannot use it, it does not belong here.
- Formula honesty. Where a product leans on an ingredient in its name, that ingredient has to be present at a concentration that plausibly does something. A hero ingredient at 0.01% is decoration.
- Sensitivity legible. Fragrance and common irritants disclosed and tagged correctly, because the people who trust us most are the ones who get hurt worst when this is wrong.
- We have physically tested it. Ordered, opened, used. No product is listed from a catalogue photograph — which is one of the reasons nothing is listed yet.
- Claims we can substantiate. If describing it honestly requires a claim we cannot evidence, we do not stock it. This eliminates most brightening, anti-ageing and anti-hair-loss positioning, and it should.
The four we score
A product needs at least three of these: it gets finished and rebought; we can answer “why not the cheaper one?” in a sentence; it does not duplicate something already here; and it survives being posted without leaking or arriving broken.
The compliance screen
Separately, every product is checked against EU cosmetics rules before it can be listed. Leave-on salicylic acid above 2%, retinol above 0.3%, kojic acid above 1%, any leave-on methylisothiazolinone, 4-methylbenzylidene camphor, silver, or the banned fragrance allergens Lilial and HICC are automatic rejections.
Two categories are excluded permanently. Anything marketed on exosomes - human-derived exosomes are prohibited outright in the EU, and the plant-derived kind has no INCI name, so nobody can verify from a label what is actually in the bottle. And every powered beauty device - the CE documentation is usually unverifiable and the injury reports are not.
What we are still waiting on
Here is the uncomfortable part. Under EU law every cosmetic needs a named Responsible Person and a CPNP notification, and that obligation belongs to whoever imported it. We are asking every supplier for both, per product, in writing.
We have not finished collecting them. Until we have, nothing goes on sale. That is why this shop has been visible for longer than it has been open. We would rather explain the delay than open with forty products we cannot vouch for.
The cap
The catalogue is capped. Something leaves whenever something arrives. A large catalogue is easy to build - you list everything, sort by margin, and hand the decision to the person least equipped to make it. That is where most of this goes wrong.