You can see the split from the end of the aisle. One side is the crystal-charged serum, the oil timed to the moon, the adaptogen blend in heavy amber glass, every one of them telling a rich and hopeful story on the front of the pack. The other side is the vitamin D, which does something, in a clinical white tube with a chemical name, a dose, and a list of warnings. Nobody photographs that side. Somebody reaches past it and puts the beautiful jar in the basket.
It looks like credulity
The obvious reading is that the shopper has been taken in. People want hope and stories, so the products that sell hope and stories win; science is dull because facts are dull, and anyway the serious stuff ought to be sober rather than enchanting. Some of that is plainly true. Hope sells, and a beautiful pack doing better than a plain one is not a mystery that needs solving.
The interesting possibility, and the one everything below rests on, is that the shopper is not confused at all. Ask directly and most would tell you the moon jar is a stretch. They bought it anyway.
The ambition
The position I have argued from, and the one Potions was drawn up around, is that you take the wonder back for the things that are true. The genuinely astonishing object in that aisle is a molecule that measurably and repeatably changes your skin or your sleep, proven across a dozen careful trials run by people trying hard to show it did not. That is more remarkable than any crystal has ever been, and the only reason the woo owns the wonder is that the evidence-based world was too timid, too clinical, or frankly too embarrassed to claim it. A badge reading twelve trials, strong evidence is not a disclaimer. It is a thrilling sentence, if you have the nerve to tell the proof as the marvel it is. The woo has to manufacture its wonder out of nothing, which is precisely why it has to shout. Real evidence never needs to shout.
I still think that is the right ambition. It rests on two assumptions, and both of them turn out to be shakier than the sentence they hold up.
The shelf is not split in two
The first assumption is the split itself: wonder over here with no proof behind it, proof over there with no wonder in it. Sort the aisle honestly and it does not come out in two piles.
Collagen is the awkward case. A 2023 meta-analysis pooling 26 randomised trials and 1,721 participants found hydrolysed collagen improved skin hydration and elasticity, with the effect strongest past eight weeks. (Pu S-Y 2023) A 2025 meta-analysis of 23 trials and 1,474 participants found the same headline result, then split it by who paid: positive in industry-funded trials, absent in the independently funded ones, absent again in the higher-quality ones. Its conclusion was that “there is currently no clinical evidence to support the use of collagen supplements to prevent or treat skin aging”. (Myung S-K 2025) That is not a crystal. It is a real literature having an argument with itself, which is a different thing and needs a different word. Ashwagandha sits in the same bracket: pooled analyses report significant reductions in stress, anxiety, and serum cortisol against placebo, from trials that are mostly small, short, and heterogeneous.
The correction runs the other way too, which I did not expect. Zinc is one of the molecules I have been holding up as the real thing. The 2024 Cochrane review of 34 studies and 8,526 participants found that zinc may shorten a cold by around two days, called the evidence inconclusive, found little or no effect on preventing colds at all, and noted more minor adverse effects. (Nault D 2024) That is a genuine finding and a modest one. It is not the sentence I would have printed on the label.
| Tier | Example | What the literature says |
|---|---|---|
| No evidence | Crystals, moon timing, detox | No stated mechanism and no trial literature to review. The absence is the finding. |
| Contested | Collagen for skin | 26 trials pooled positive for hydration and elasticity; a 2025 review of 23 trials found the effect in industry-funded studies and not in independent or higher-quality ones. |
| Modest and real | Zinc for a cold | 34 studies, 8,526 participants: may shorten a cold by around two days, evidence rated inconclusive, little or no effect on prevention. |
Crystals belong in the top row and nothing else does. There is no mechanism anyone can state for them and no trial literature to review, and that absence is itself the finding. Vitamin D belongs at the bottom, where it does something specific and bounded: it corrects a deficiency, which is common enough here to matter. Between those two rows sits most of what is actually for sale, and an evidence badge applied honestly would have to say so, which is a good deal less marketable than the badge I had imagined.
The clean split I opened with is a story too. It is just that this one is mine.
What the shopper came in holding
Fixing the map does not fix the problem, and the second assumption is the one that really breaks. I had taken it that proven products lose because they are packaged badly: the proof is there, the storytelling is missing, so better design closes the gap. That assumes the customer is asking a question about the product.
Clayton Christensen would say they are hiring the product for a job, and this job is emotional: reassurance, ritual, the small daily act of taking care of yourself, in the way his commuter was hiring a milkshake to make a dull drive bearable rather than to be a beverage. (Clayton M. Christensen 2016) Proof does not do that job. You cannot put a badge reading twelve trials on a feeling and have it deliver the feeling. So a shop that leads with evidence can end up in the odd position of winning the argument, yes, this one is real and that one is not, and losing the sale, because it answered the practical question beautifully and left the emotional one untouched.
Both sides of this are argued hard by serious people, which is how you know it is the real seam. The skeptics, David Gorski among them, make the case that the magic of the placebo is largely a measurement artefact: it moves how a patient feels and what they report rather than the disease itself. They mean it as a debunking. Read from the aisle it is not a debunking at all, it is a product description, because for a large share of what sells in wellness the felt experience is the entire point, and something that reliably changes how you feel is not a trick to be exposed. It is the thing being bought. On the other side, Rory Sutherland has spent a career arguing that meaning has real effects and that stripping a product back to its functional core can destroy the value that made anyone want it in the first place. (Rory Sutherland 2019) Between the debunker and the ad man there is furious agreement about the fact and total disagreement about what to do with it: the ritual works, on the thing people care about.
Which is where the ambition comes apart, at the exact point it felt strongest. Real evidence never needs to shout, and that is true, and it is also the trouble. A shelf is not a debate. Nobody standing in an aisle is listening for the quiet one. Being right is not the same as being chosen, because most purchases settle an emotional question with a logical alibi, and evidence is a magnificent alibi and a hopeless emotion.
What a badge is for
A badge is a claim about the object. Twelve trials, strong evidence: every word of it is addressed to the jar. The question the customer walked in holding is addressed to themselves. Am I doing something about this. Is this the sort of person I am. Will this small thing make the week feel handled.
A ritual answers that question, because a ritual is a thing you do, at a time, in a place, that tells you the matter has been attended to. Proof is not a thing you do. It is a thing you are told once, on the way past, by a tube that has no opinion about your morning. The gap between the two is not made of graphic design, and it does not close by putting a nicer face on the evidence. It closes, if it closes at all, in the part of the product that happens after the money changes hands: the jar by the sink, the same minute every day, the small ceremony of it. That is buildable. It just has nothing to do with the badge.