Beauty’s Turned Us All Into Unpaid Scientists. This Founder Wants To Undo That
Main image – Svetolk
There’s a specific kind of modern skincare exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too little – it comes from trying to do everything ‘right’.
The endless launches. The ingredients Olympics. The sense that if you’re not on top of the latest acid, you’ve somehow failed a test you didn’t actually agree to sit.
When I sat down with Assel Kapparova, founder of new brand NecessaryGood which aims to de-stress our routines, I was interested to find out why she thought skincare had become so needlessly complicated in the first place.
Because even Kapparova – someone who openly admits she’s “always been obsessed with” beauty – had hit a wall. And that moment of frustration is what ultimately led her to question why the industry has made it feel so hard to do something that should, at its core, be simple.
“There are so many products, launches, trends, fads, you know, every day it’s this ingredient, it’s that ingredient. And I think you as a consumer now kind of have to be almost like a chemist or a scientist for it all.”
Read on to find out how that realisation turned into NecessaryGood – and why its approach might feel like a relief if you’ve ever stood in front of an over-stuffed skincare shelf wondering where you went wrong.
The stat that explains why you feel like you’re failing skincare
Kapparova didn’t just go off vibes. She tested her overwhelm theory with a survey – and the result is… bleakly relatable.
“We did a survey and it was about 200 people… and what really came through in this research and this survey… 71% of women said that they feel really overwhelmed by the category,” she tells me.
One in three, she says, didn’t even want to guess at ingredients many of us now treat as basic knowledge.
“When we listed all the common ingredients you could think of… retinol, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid… at the very end we gave the option ‘I have no idea’, and one in three clicked that.”
If you’ve ever felt behind, that’s why. It’s not that you’re careless. It’s that the category has become a full-time job.
The FOMO loop
One of the most honest parts of this conversation is admitting the emotional undercurrent. Skincare doesn’t just confuse us – it can make us feel… weirdly excluded.
“You’re always feeling like you’re playing catch up,” she explains. She tells me that she- like me- spends a lot of time digging through Reddit; the place where you’re most likely to find unfiltered beauty routines/reviews/confessions.
Assel Kapparova believes skincare should be straightforward. Image – @necessary.good/Instagram
She explains that, even in this relatively unjudgemental context, the beauty overwhelm is eye-opening. “I see people saying, ‘You need a 20 step routine,’ ‘You need this product, you need that product…’ and at the end of the day, I think there’s a lot of people who are trusting this.”
She goes on, “They ask on Reddit, ‘Do I actually need this?’ Or like, ‘Is this unnecessary? Because someone said it’s really crucial for me to do’.”
That question – “do I actually need this?” – is basically the mission statement behind her own brand. “I can certainly say that I think we know what ingredients work. We know what actually makes a difference,” she says. “It’s always three things. SPF, vitamin C, retinol.”
And she’s blunt about the rest. “Everything else is new, trendy, and mostly backed by theoretical science or evidence.”
And she says that this simplification of skincare has had a surprisingly positive response. “When I actually say that, it puts a lot of people at ease because it’s trustworthy, straightforward and it’s something that they can actually do.”
So what did NecessaryGood launch with?
Here’s where it gets interesting. If you’re going to build a brand around simplifying skincare, you can’t launch with twelve serums and a ‘routine builder’ quiz.
Kapparova didn’t. “We launched with two products… we have an SPF and a moisturiser.”
Why those two? “Everybody uses moisturiser, everybody needs SPF. So these products are essentials, and that’s how they made the cut into the range.”
She’s careful not to pretend basics can solve everything though. “If you are dealing with very severe hyperpigmentation or acne… there are other brands that have specialised treatments.”
Image – NecessaryGood
She also makes a clear line between “essentials done well” and fantasy claims. “I am not gonna sell to you and tell you this is definitely going to cure you or that it won’t.”
Instead, Kapparova’s whole thing is reducing steps without reducing results. “Every product that we make I really wanted to be smart, efficient and genuinely cut down on steps and time in a routine and do a lot in one product.”
Or as she puts it simply, “I’m going to do the science so you don’t have to.”
The SPF useability problem
We all know SPF is non-negotiable. The problem is that some formulas make it feel like punishment.
Kapparova went straight at the usual complaints when she created hers. “There are so many sunscreens that are sticky or greasy or give you a white cast. This one doesn’t do any of that.”
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She also wanted that to apply to reapplication (which, if anything, is often even less user-friendly than initial application). “When you need to reapply it doesn’t feel gross because it absorbs instantly,” she tells me.
“You don’t need to think, like, ‘wait, is my face okay?’”
And the packaging detail that’s weirdly satisfying
I’ll admit, packaging talk often makes my eyes glaze over. But when Kapparova tells me about the K beauty-inspired innovation NecessaryGood uses, I was pleasantly surprised to note that it wasn’t one that was just “nice” – it actually solves a real irritation; wasting product you paid for.
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Kapparova explains it like this; “We have a balloon inside our packaging… the product is in the balloon and when you use it up, the balloon gets smaller and smaller and it collapses.”
The point? “You get like 99.99% of your product out.”
She continues, “It’s for the consumer’s sake so that it’s easier for them to get the most of their formula out. Because I want them to get their money’s worth.”
The takeaway
If you’re overwhelmed by skincare, the answer isn’t always to become more “educated” in the way the industry quietly demands – the answer is sometimes to stop letting the category bully us into complexity.
Kapparova’s whole point is that you shouldn’t need to be a scientist to have good skin. Instead, she’s trying to build the opposite: fewer steps, clearer choices, products that earn their place.
If that sounds like the kind of calm your bathroom shelf needs then, you’re not alone.
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