Every Celebrity Has a Skincare Line Now. Does Yours Work?
Sofia Vergara's Toty just landed at Thirteen Lune with a new retinol serum, joining a category so crowded it now has its own graveyard. Here's how to tell the difference between a real formula and a famous face.
Sofía Vergara's skincare brand, Toty, just launched at Thirteen Lune — the inclusivity-focused retailer that's become something of a stamp of approval in beauty right now — with a new retinol serum in tow. It is, by any measure, a solid launch: a recognizable face, a real retail partner, a product with an actual ingredient list. It is also, by our count, roughly the nine-hundredth celebrity skincare brand to launch this decade, which raises the only question that actually matters here. Does it work, or did someone just put a famous face on a bottle and call it formulation?
That question matters more than usual right now, because the celebrity beauty aisle has quietly become a crime scene. For every Rare Beauty or Rhode, there's a Rose Inc. — Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's line, whose parent company Amyris filed for bankruptcy in 2023 carrying $1.1 billion in debt, despite a former team member noting it was "the only profitable brand they owned." The company just didn't let it keep the profits.
The Graveyard Is Getting Crowded
Rose Inc. is not alone. Alicia Keys' Keys Soulcare has struggled to find its footing. Pharrell's Humanrace has gone quiet. Millie Bobby Brown's Florence by Mills, Addison Rae's Item Beauty, and Hyram's Selfless line have all either been dropped by major retailers or scaled back significantly — Sephora cut both Item Beauty and Selfless in the same month in 2023, which is the beauty-industry equivalent of two funerals on the same afternoon. Brad Pitt had a wine-adjacent skincare line. Carmen Electra had one built around a song. Both are effectively gone, which tells you something about how low the bar for "concept" has gotten in this category, and how little that concept has to do with whether the product survives contact with an actual dermatologist.
One PR professional put the general industry mood plainly: she's "more hesitant with celebrity-owned skincare brands" than celebrity makeup, "because I have acne-prone skin and I know how much goes into keeping my skin healthy" — and access to a good dermatologist doesn't automatically translate into a good formula. That's the entire tension of this category in one sentence: proximity to expertise isn't the same thing as expertise, and consumers have gotten considerably better at telling the two apart.
So Which One Is Toty?
Here's the part most of the coverage of Vergara's launch has skipped in favor of "guava girl summer" aesthetics: Toty is manufactured in partnership with Cantabria Labs, a Spanish dermo-cosmetic company with an actual pharmaceutical pedigree — not a white-label factory that also makes eleven other celebrities' identical serums with different packaging. The new retinol serum uses a micro-encapsulated, slow-release 0.5% retinol formula alongside 5% niacinamide and 2% NAG, built specifically to avoid the flaking and redness that scares off first-time retinol users — the exact demographic Toty is chasing, since the brand is explicitly positioned around mature and sensitive skin rather than the 22-year-old TikTok audience every other celebrity line is fighting over.
That's a real formulation choice, not a marketing one, and it's the kind of detail that tends to separate the brands that last from the ones that end up in the same sentence as Carmen Electra's discontinued fragrance line. It doesn't guarantee Toty avoids the graveyard. It does mean this one at least showed up with a shovel and a plan, instead of just a shovel.
If You're Going to Try It Anyway
Skepticism aside, the actual products are reasonably well-built, and the ingredient lists hold up to scrutiny better than most of the category. The Toty Reversa Retinol Serum is the one worth starting with if you've bounced off retinol before — the slow-release formula is designed to be forgiving. Pair it with the Toty Transforma AHA 360º Retexturizing Serum on alternating nights if texture and dark spots are the bigger concern, and don't skip the Toty Solaria Mineral SPF 50+ the next morning — retinol and unprotected sun exposure is how you end up writing your own "beauty regret" interview in five years.
Related reading: our guide to reading an ingredient label like you actually know what you're looking at, and the celebrity beauty brands we think are actually worth the hype — spoiler, it's a short list.
The Takeaway
None of this means you should trust a product because a famous person's name is on it. It means the famous person's name is no longer the interesting part of the story — the ingredient list and the manufacturing partner are. Toty happens to have a decent one. Most of the graveyard didn't bother. The next time a celebrity announces a serum, skip the launch party coverage and go straight to the back of the bottle. It'll tell you more than the guava-themed activation ever will.