The founder and C.E.O. of Deciem, Brandon Truaxe, launched The Ordinary, in August of 2016, almost as a provocation. Photograph by Jay Brooks

On a recent evening, when I visited the first New York outpost of Deciem, a Toronto-based skin-care brand, the store’s back room had a mood of hushed giddiness, like there was a secret craps game going on and all the players were winning. The rear chamber of the narrow space, appointed in gleaming white subway tiles and aquamarine neon, is where Deciem sells products from its most popular line, the Ordinary, which aims to undercut the rest of the booming skin-care market by selling luxury ingredients at wholesale prices. Customers (mostly women, a few men) scurried around like they were at a fire sale, grabbing products off the shelves by the handful. They filled their wire baskets with vials of retinoid, a much-heralded wrinkle-fighting compound that sells for more than eighty dollars in serums at Sephora and can be bought for $13.90 from Deciem. They perused rich rose-hip oil ($9.80) and de-puffing caffeine solution ($6.70) and a plumping serum, simply called Buffet, that costs $14.80 and contains a smorgasbord of peptides meant to save the nasolabial folds from the ravages of time. As supplies dwindled, an air of competition intruded. Two customers lunged at the same time for the last vial of A.H.A./B.H.A. peeling solution, a cabernet-tinted gel that earlier this month was the subject of a viral Facebook post, in which a woman joked about using her menstrual blood as a face mask. Another woman inquired about the sought-after seven-per-cent glycolic toning lotion, which had been out of stock for days. “But when will you get it back?” she asked, with no small amount of desperation in her voice.

The founder and C.E.O. of Deciem, Brandon Truaxe, was a computer programmer before he got into the beauty business. He came up with the idea for Deciem after working on software for a skin-care lab and noticing the drastic difference between the cost of raw ingredients and the price of finished products. Many of the chemicals used in skin care, like niacinamide (a pimple fighter) and hyaluronic acid (a moisturizing element that slakes dry pores), are dirt cheap to produce but are marked up by skin-care companies when they are mixed together into miracle creams du jour. Truaxe decided that if he developed the chemicals himself, in an in-house lab, and offered them in their purest, most isolated forms, he could cut out the middleman and offer the same products as other brands at drastically lower prices.

The Ordinary, a skin-care line, aims to undercut the rest of the booming beauty market by selling luxury ingredients at wholesale prices. Photograph Courtesy Deciem The Abnormal Beauty Company

Truaxe launched The Ordinary, in August of 2016, almost as a provocation (on the Emma Guns podcast, in September, he called the beauty industry a “just a lot of gray hoo-ha”), with twenty-seven products sold exclusively online. He figured that word would spread gradually through beauty circles. Instead, orders flooded in at a pace much faster than his Canadian lab could meet, and products started to accumulate long wait lists. When the company announced, in early 2017, that it was introducing a seven-dollar foundation that would rival the most expensive formulations at department stores, the wait list swelled to more than seventy-five thousand names. “It was the biggest disaster,” Truaxe said on the podcast. “We don’t plan a waiting list. Nobody plans a waiting list. This is not an Hermès bag. It’s skin care.”

But skin care is, in many ways, the new cult clutch, and Truaxe has cannily tapped into the exploding market. He named the company Deciem because he intended to launch ten lines under the brand’s umbrella; instead, by the end of the year, he and his co-C.E.O., Nicola Kilner, will have launched at least twelve. When I stood in the middle of the melee at the Deciem store—one of fifteen scheduled to open around the world this year, including at least two more in New York—I thought of a viral tweet that keeps resurfacing on the Internet, in which a young man imagines a woman’s nighttime routine: “My future wife prolly getting ready for bed, mixing her lil skin care products rn lol apply ya mask and get some sleep ily my lil chemist.” The tweet’s cutesy condescension notwithstanding, it’s true that the skin-care craze, and the Ordinary in particular, has a way of turning its most devoted adherents into amateur scientists. The Ordinary’s products come in unadorned dropper bottles that look like prototypes straight from the lab. Most contain just one ingredient —salicylic acid, ascorbyl glucoside, matrixyl—and customers are encouraged to devise their own regimens, concocting magic potions with a squirt from bottle A, a drop from bottle B. The Reddit forum Skincare Addiction contains hundreds of thousands of posts about “TO,” with people swapping tips about what order and in what amount to use each ingredient. The brand further foments this obsession on its Web site, which is stuffed with detailed descriptions of chemical compounds that often need deciphering from the online hoard. The Ordinary is the first modern beauty brand to earn acolytes by making them feel smart enough to know how to decode it; it turns skin optimization into a nerdy club, where the cost of initiation is about what you’d pay for a latte.

The lure of the Ordinary is that it makes customers feel as though they have somehow beaten the system. Photograph Courtesy DECIEM The Abnormal Beauty Company

After hearing about the brand from friends, last year, I found myself deep in the rabbit hole of Deciem’s Instagram, where Truaxe, a perfectly coiffed thirty-nine-year-old, often appears in videos. He is obsessed, above all, with “transparency,” a buzzword that has been embraced by other cost-cutting brands like Warby Parker and Everlane, whose first New York brick-and-mortar store is next door to Deciem’s, in Nolita. In a recent update, he appeared close to tears as he announced that Deciem was cancelling all publicity efforts. “Marketing is simply a way to convince people to buy what they don’t want or don’t need,” he said, gazing warmly into the camera.

In an industry full of obfuscation and profiteering, where it is difficult to tell snake oil from argan oil, this is a seductive idea. The lure of the Ordinary—which was introduced into Sephora’s online store, in December, and sold out entirely within a week—is that it makes customers feel as though they have somehow beaten the system, reaping the benefits of skin care without getting sucked into the beauty-industrial complex. The irony—which is surely not lost on Truaxe, who refers to the Ordinary as Deciem’s “gateway brand”—is that the low prices, more than any marketing campaign, seem to be persuading people to experiment with skin-care products that they didn’t previously know they wanted or needed. I now use at least eight of the Ordinary’s products in regular rotation. This has cut my skin-care budget in half. Do any of them actually slow sagging, or tighten pores, or decimate smile lines? The only way to find out is to keep using them.