A few distractions, as a treat

I come bearing distraction. Since 2016, reporter [Cheryl Wischhover]( — first at Racked (RIP) and then The Goods — has covered Deciem, the Canadian upstart that transformed the $500 billion beauty industry by selling $5 serum. The company captivated experts and the skin care-curious alike thanks to its low prices and ingredient transparency, and then the wider internet when its controversial founder Brandon Truaxe began behaving erratically on the brand's widely followed Instagram account. In a [new longform piece](, Cheryl reflects on the years she’s spent reporting on the company, including how she found herself a part of the narrative she was seeking to tell, culminating with breaking the story of Brandon’s sudden death. A year after his passing, she visited Deciem HQ for closure and to explain how this company totally shifted how we think about and buy skin care. It’s so great! Read it! Also, stay safe. Safe sane. I’ll use this space to plug Vox’s truly excellent [coronavirus coverage]( — I am so proud of my colleagues, and I encourage you to lean on them to keep up and keep calm in this unbelievably difficult time. If there’s anything you want to see more of, coronavirus-related or not, from The Goods right now, please email me at julia.rubin@vox.com. —[Julia Rubin](, editor of The Goods Deciem fueled the skin care boom. Then it almost went bust. [Deciem store and products, in an artsy way]( Sarah Palmer for Vox There’s a big hunk of human skin in the freezer. It’s in a plastic-wrapped package and labeled as a “full thickness” sample from a 67-year-old woman. It takes a flat, rectangular form that looks like a slab of bacon, about two inches thick. It’s from the woman’s back; she apparently died of cancer. This skin will be doused in hyaluronic acid or perhaps slathered with vitamin C, two of the most popular and effective ingredients in serums, moisturizers, and all matter of face potions today. The skin care company Deciem spent hundreds of dollars and jumped through many mandated regulatory hoops to obtain this sample, which was donated to a company called [Science Care](. Beauty companies and labs often use samples like this one, or sometimes synthetic skin or lab-grown skin cells, to test the absorption of their products. This particular sample is housed in a light-filled laboratory at the new Deciem headquarters in Toronto. Sun streams in and highlights the vials, technical instruments, and powdered jars of chemicals that are scattered around. In the seven years since its founding, Deciem has totally changed how we think about and buy skin care. Thanks mostly to its biggest brand, the Ordinary, it’s allowed a new generation of consumers to understand ingredients and, perhaps more radically, offered them in ridiculously cheap formulations. It’s championed transparency in an industry that wants you to think expensive products are better — an industry where inviting me, a reporter, to poke around in the skin samples and see how formulas are made is unheard of. [Read the full story on Vox ]( The best $29.95 I ever spent: A lumbar pillow I finally admitted to myself that I was, in fact, aging. [Read the full story ]( The porn we see — and sex we have — is influenced by the adult industry’s biggest spenders Or, how spanking went mainstream. [Read the full story ]( More good stuff to read today - [How to gather with friends while social distancing, according to a meetings expert]( - [Exclusive: Goldman warns clients about a rise in hostile takeovers amid coronavirus market meltdown]( - [How long will essentials like toilet paper be hard to get? It depends.]( - [People who travel for a living are struggling to find work]( - [A grocery store clerk explains what it’s like on the front lines of coronavirus panic]( - [With sanitizing-solution shortage, liquor distilleries are stepping up and making their own]( Manage your [email preferences](, or [unsubscribe]( to stop receiving emails from Vox Media. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved.