Dermatica / Anti-Ageing Treatment

What it is

A compounded prescription night cream for photoageing, prescribed after an online consultation, at $29.95 a month following a $4.99 first month. A provider selects two or three actives from a published palette and blends them into a base the company calls SmartBase. Two bottles ship every 56 days, and the plan runs until you stop it.

The concentrations are on the page. That has not happened before.

Eighteen reviews into this register, the sentence we have written most often is that the concentration is not on the page you buy from. Musely keeps its numbers in a help centre. Agency and Curology decline to give them at all, on the grounds that the formula is personalised. CoreAge Rx publishes some and not others.

Dermatica prints them under the actives, on the treatment page, before you have paid anything.

• ▸Tretinoin 0.025–0.1% — stated as a range, and the range is exactly the photoageing trial band.
• ▸Hydroquinone 4% — a single number, and the conventional prescription strength.
• ▸Niacinamide 4% — a working dose, not a token one.
• ▸Azelaic acid 4–20% — a wide range, honestly wide, reaching standalone treatment strength at the top.

A separate ingredients index goes further and publishes the whole prescription palette with strengths attached: adapalene 0.1–0.3%, benzoyl peroxide 2.5%, clindamycin 1%, fluocinolone acetonide 0.01%, metronidazole 0.75%, tranexamic acid 3–5%. That is the document every other brand in this register told us could not exist because the formulas are personalised. It exists. It took one click.

And then the page stops talking

We searched the page source. Not the visible copy — the source, including everything the page loads and does not show.

• ▸'side effect' — zero occurrences.
• ▸'contraindication' — zero occurrences.
• ▸'ochronosis' — zero occurrences, on a page selling hydroquinone.
• ▸'sunscreen' — zero in the visible copy, on a page selling a photosensitising drug.
• ▸'pregnant' — one occurrence in the entire source, and it belongs to a product card advertising something else.

This is a page that will take a $4.99 payment, open a medical consultation and put topical tretinoin and 4% hydroquinone on your face every night, and it does not tell you that retinoids peel, that they contraindicate pregnancy, or that you need to wear sunscreen with them.

This matters more than a missing paragraph usually would, because the copy is not absent from the company — it is absent from the page. The tretinoin ingredient page states it plainly: tretinoin should not be used in pregnancy, when planning pregnancy, or while breastfeeding, with effective contraception advised during treatment and for a month after. That is the correct warning, correctly worded, two clicks from the consultation and zero clicks from nothing.

We made this finding against Musely for keeping concentrations in a help centre. Dermatica has inverted it exactly: the composition is on the page and the safety is filed elsewhere. Of the two arrangements, this is the more serious one. A buyer who cannot find a concentration buys a product they do not fully understand. A buyer who cannot find a pregnancy warning may not know to look for one.

Hydroquinone 4%, and a plan that outruns the stop

Credit where it is substantial: 4% is the right number. This register has recorded hydroquinone at 12% in a body cream, 12% in a genital cream and 12% in a peel, and at no stated concentration at all in two other products. Dermatica publishes one figure and it is the conventional prescription strength.

The problem is duration, and Dermatica has already written the answer down twice. Its own SkinLab article says a provider 'should only recommend using hydroquinone for short periods, typically in cycles of three to four months, followed by a break'. Its support centre says the dermatology team believe a break is needed after six months, because side-effect risk rises. Both are sound. Neither is on the treatment page.

The pricing page, meanwhile, sells four plans: pay monthly at $29.95, or prepay four months at $25.25 a bottle, six at $23.83, or twelve at $22.42 — $269 upfront, and the largest discount attached to the longest commitment. The savings arithmetic is honest, which is more than most. But the cheapest option on the page is twelve months of continuous supply of a formula that may contain a drug the same company says to stop after three to four.

The ingredient with the most to explain is the only one without a page

Dermatica publishes full ingredient pages for adapalene, benzoyl peroxide and tretinoin — each with targets, strengths, mechanisms, an FAQ and a bibliography. The tretinoin page is the best piece of consumer drug writing in this register.

Hydroquinone gets a line in the navigation under 'Other ingredients', a one-sentence description in the index, and no page. We checked the obvious URL; /ingredients/hydroquinone returns a 404.

So the ingredient with the exogenous ochronosis literature, the mandatory treatment break, the rebound-pigmentation risk on abrupt withdrawal, and the FDA action that removed it from over-the-counter sale in the United States — the one active in the palette that genuinely needs a page — is the one active in the palette without one. The three that have pages are the three that need them least.

Twenty times stronger than what?

'Up to 20x stronger than the high street' appears in the What's included list, beside 'Evidence-based ingredients' and 'Dashboard to track your progress'. The page never says what the comparator is.

The company's own social advertising completes the sentence: 'up to 20x stronger than generic retinol'. With that anchor the claim is arguable — retinol needs two oxidation steps to become retinoic acid and the conversion is inefficient, so potency estimates in the region of ten to twenty times are commonly cited. Without the anchor, sitting on the page as written, it reads as twenty times stronger than anything you could buy in a shop, which is not a statement about anything measurable.

It is a small thing on an otherwise numerate page, and it is the same habit as the retinal serum's '11x faster than retinol' — a round multiplier presented without its denominator. A company this willing to publish real figures does not need them.

'FDA REGULATED', between 'CRUELTY FREE' and '100% VEGAN'

A scrolling badge strip runs across the treatment page: alcohol free, fragrance free, 100% vegan, cruelty free, easily recyclable packaging, formulated by experts, science backed, developed with dermatologists, FDA regulated.

Eight of those are cosmetic marketing attributes. The ninth is a regulatory status, and in that company it will be read as a quality mark meaning approved. Compounded preparations are not FDA-approved: they are made for an individual patient under section 503A and are expressly exempt from premarket review. A 503A pharmacy is subject to FDA oversight, so the two words are defensible in isolation. Placed ninth in a list that begins with vegan and cruelty-free, they are doing different work.

One contradiction they should fix in an afternoon

The tretinoin FAQ tells patients that keratolytic agents — sulphur, salicylic acid, benzoyl peroxide, resorcinol — 'should not be used whilst you are using tretinoin'. That warning is inherited from decades-old tretinoin labelling, written when benzoyl peroxide was thought to oxidise tretinoin in situ. Modern stabilised formulations have largely settled it, and fixed-combination benzoyl peroxide and tretinoin products are now FDA-approved.

It also contradicts Dermatica's own catalogue, which lists benzoyl peroxide 2.5% in the same prescription palette as tretinoin. Either the combination is dispensable or the FAQ is right, and both documents are on the same website.

If you are considering it

• ▸Read the tretinoin ingredient page before the treatment page. It is where the side effects, the pregnancy warning, the sunscreen instruction and the retinisation protocol actually live, and all four are good.
• ▸If you are pregnant, breastfeeding or trying to conceive, say so unprompted. The consultation page will not raise it, and the pregnancy-safe formula exists.
• ▸Ask which two or three actives you have been given and at what point in each published range. 'Azelaic acid' spans 4% to 20% here.
• ▸If hydroquinone is one of them, put the stop date in your calendar yourself — three to four months by their blog, six by their support centre. Do not rely on the subscription to raise it.
• ▸For that reason, think hard before prepaying twelve months. The discount is real and so is the drug's clock.
• ▸Buy sunscreen. Nothing on the purchase page will tell you to, and a retinoid without it is working against itself.
• ▸Give it twelve to twenty-four weeks. The page's twelve-week figure is honest by the standards of this category.

Where we stand

At 71 this is the highest score any provider-selects-your-actives formula has earned here, ahead of Agency's best at 65 and Curology's at 59, and it earned it on exactly the axis this site was built to measure. Dermatica publishes the numbers. It publishes the palette. It cites the literature. It prices per unit and the arithmetic checks out. Everything we have spent eighteen reviews asking for, one company has simply done.

It is not higher because the same page that tells you the concentration of the drug tells you nothing about the risk of it. No side effects, no contra-indications, no pregnancy warning, no sunscreen — while the cheap cosmetic upsell three inches below carries all four. That is not a company that does not know; the evidence that it knows is on its own website in better prose than most dermatology practices manage.

Move the tretinoin FAQ's safety block onto the treatment page. Give hydroquinone the ingredient page the other three actives already have, with the break written into it. Publish the SmartBase INCI and the fill size. Stop selling twelve months of a drug you say to stop at four. None of that is a reformulation — it is copy that already exists, filed in the wrong place. Do it and this becomes the first prescription product in this register we recommend without conditions.