Cynic: This Week's Thingdrop

Meet the Mysterious Founder

Ali — also known as "A Fellow Cynic" — has worked in beauty for eight years, first in perfume, then at a skincare brand, then in haircare. She started Cynic in 2024, during a stretch when she was out of work and had time to play with ideas for her own skincare brand on no-code design platform Canva.

The mood she was in at the time went straight into the brand's persona. "I was in a really cynical headspace to a point where it really spurred everything that Cynic became," says Ali, who has asked to keep her last name private.

She remembers telling her mom the name. "And she's like, cynic?" Ali knows the word carries a connotation of being jaded and pessimistic, but she doesn't read it that way. To her, it's a feeling you're left with after things go wrong enough times, and you've become sharper. "I've been fired from jobs. I've had so many disappointing things happen, but I learn from every single one of them. And I think like that cynical perspective is actually a strength, and it makes you stronger and a little bit smarter."

There is a soft side to the cynic too, Ali says, which she was thinking of when coming up with taglines. "There's like this thick skin, like you earn your thick skin... the softest part of you is your skin. But it's also the thing that's like protecting you from everything else going on." The line on the site is "soft by choice, cynical by nature."

The CVS Glycerin Fix

The idea for Cynic's Sexy Skin Serum ($42) came from something Ali was already doing to the skincare products she was buying from other brands.

She has acne-prone skin and had been trying mandelic acid, a milder type of exfoliating alpha hydroxy acid that brands often recommend for daily use. Every version she tried felt "kind of astringent and a little too strong," so she started mixing pure glycerin, the kind you can pick up at CVS, into the bottles to make it more hydrating.

This is essentially Cynic's formula. It contains 8% mandelic acid, 10% glycerin and niacinamide, an ingredient mix which, the brand says, exfoliates and hydrates in one step. "I wouldn't put anything out if I couldn't live without it. I use [this] every single day."

Building the Brand

Two years went by between the first Canva file and Cynic's launch. Ali found a lab that would take a small order, brought in a friend who does product development, and hired a brand designer she found on TikTok. She paid for the first production out of her own pocket. "I was just like, you know what? Do it and see what happens."

She's building Cynic around a full-time job, and she's blunt about the fact that getting strangers to spend $42 on a serum from a brand they've never heard of takes up most of it. Ever the cynic, Ali describes the day a brand goes live was "one of the most anticlimactic days of your entire life. It's like your family and friends and no one else cares."

Every stranger who does buy it, though, provides a few clues about how to sell it to the next one.

What She's Asking Testers

Ali is after specific type of feedback. "I want a cynical point of view and what you love, what you don't love, what you want to see."

Three things in particular she'd like to know: Where the serum lands in your routine (Ali uses it at night, her sister uses it in the morning as a primer, and she wants to know which is more common); whether it holds up as a daily product on your skin, given the brand's "gentle enough for every day" claim rests on its own two-week study of 18 people); and what actually changed for your skin, over how many days.

Cynic is this week's Thingdrop

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