Cosmetics Editing and Proofreading Services

A foundation is described as "suits all skin tones" and comes in one shade. The customer buying it online has no way to know whether it will disappear into their skin or sit two shades too orange, because "all skin tones" is not a shade description; it is the absence of one. She orders it anyway, because the alternative is guessing blind, and when it arrives visibly mismatched, the return joins a pile of returns that a genuine shade description, written by someone who actually looked at the product, would have prevented.

We edit what cosmetics brands and retailers produce to help customers choose the right product online — shade-matching guides and undertone descriptions, ingredient lists and allergen disclosures, product claim substantiation for marketing copy, patch test guidance, product comparison and dupe content, and the customer service responses to shade-match and reaction questions. Our editors work on the page that has to substitute for holding the product up to actual skin.

The specific shade description is what lets a customer buy the right colour without seeing it in person, and its failure is marketing language that avoids describing the colour at all. Suits all skin tones describes a marketing ambition, not a shade. We work through these so each shade is described by its actual undertone and depth — warm, cool, neutral; how light or deep — using consistent language across the whole range, since "beige" describes nothing specific and a customer comparing five beiges across a brand's line needs to know how they actually differ from each other; so shade descriptions are anchored to something comparable, such as a well-known reference shade or a numbered depth scale, given that "medium" means something different to every customer reading it; so ingredient lists are complete and current, because a customer checking for a specific allergen is relying on the list being accurate, not indicative; so claims about coverage, wear time or finish are stated as tested facts rather than aspirational language, as "24-hour wear" is a specific claim that either has support behind it or should not be made; so a patch test recommendation appears specifically for products with a real reaction risk rather than as boilerplate on everything, given that boilerplate warnings on every product train customers to ignore all of them; and so shade-match guidance accounts for the fact that screens display colour differently, with a stated caveat rather than an implied guarantee. Descriptions written this way reduce the specific kind of return that happens when a product looks nothing like what was ordered.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including formulations, ingredient data and customer information. We are editors rather than cosmetic chemists, dermatologists or regulatory specialists, and we offer no view on formulation, safety or ingredient suitability. What we can do is make sure the shade description tells a customer what they are actually buying.