In April 2025, The Ordinary opened the doors to a radically different beauty experience. Nestled in the heart of New York City, their “Secret Ingredient Store” wasn’t stocked with the usual glossy imagery or celebrity-fronted posters. Instead, it was stacked—literally—with piles of branded cash. Not as a gimmick, but as a message: this is how much extra you pay for beauty when you buy fame.

The pop-up served as the centerpiece of The Ordinary’s “Secret Ingredient” campaign, an audacious marketing move designed to call out the invisible surcharge of celebrity endorsement. As explained on-site, the brand’s signature decal spelled it out clearly: “This is the amount of money we would have to add to the price of our products if we paid for a celebrity endorsement.” Sourced from Cosmetics Business, the campaign underscored that celebrity marketing can inflate product prices by anywhere from 30% to 100%, with some top-tier influencers commanding up to $10 million per post.

Visualizing the Invisible

For consumers walking through the pop-up, that abstract markup was made real. One display offered a stark product comparison: a skincare item priced at $9.90 next to a hypothetical $15.90 version—same formula, but with a famous face attached. It wasn’t a joke. It was a provocation.

What made the campaign cut through was not just its critique, but how viscerally it delivered it. The Ordinary didn’t rely on dense infographics or pithy slogans. It used a theater. In doing so, it transformed a pricing conversation into a fully sensory brand moment. The Creative Review rightly noted how the activation “brought to life the cost of fame” in a format that was both disruptive and accessible. It was a campaign rooted in experiential truth, not product push, but insight pull.

That design was intentional. The pop-up mirrored a minimalist lab rather than a luxury boutique, aligning with The Ordinary’s long-standing identity: clinical, ingredient-forward, and unvarnished. From typographic cues to the stacks of physical money, the experience was constructed as brand storytelling. It didn’t just make a claim—it let visitors see, touch, and calculate it.

Flipping the Beauty Industry’s Playbook

This campaign really achieved a reframing of value in the beauty category. At its core, The Ordinary has always pushed a brand ethos of radical transparency. From disclosing ingredient concentrations to demystifying jargon, the company built its reputation by selling science, not sizzle. That same ethos was weaponized against the industry’s status quo with this campaign.

Rather than participate in the influencer economy, The Ordinary actively undermined it. Their approach is less “anti-celebrity” than it is pro-clarity. By using the contrast effect—juxtaposing inflated influencer prices with their own—they triggered a reevaluation of what we’re paying for when we buy skincare. According to The Cut, it’s a continuation of the brand’s earlier efforts, like egg giveaways priced lower than grocery stores, reinforcing their “value-first” identity.

A Psychological Pricing Lesson

Nevertheless, the brilliance of the campaign is in its behavioral design. The Ordinary leans heavily into cognitive dissonance and price anchoring. When a consumer sees a $9.90 product next to a 61% markup for the same item, it creates tension. According to behavioral economists, that tension is fertile ground for brand loyalty—once someone reconsiders the fairness of pricing, they’re more likely to seek out brands they believe are honest.

By anchoring expectations around their pricing and then contrasting it with inflated industry standards, The Ordinary effectively reset the mental benchmark for what skincare should cost. They didn’t just make a point—they moved the goalposts.

What the Industry Should Take Seriously

The campaign proves that experiential activations can be used not just to showcase products but to dramatize philosophy. It reinforces the idea that pricing transparency, when made tangible, can be just as emotionally compelling as glamour shots or celebrity cameos. More importantly, it asks the industry hard questions: What are you charging for? Who benefits from your margins? And how do you prove value in a culture that increasingly demands receipts—literal and metaphorical?

The Ordinary documented, and in doing so, they’ve left every other beauty brand with a choice: justify the markup or prepare to explain the silence.