Prestige houses where the question is never whether it feels expensive, but whether the formula justifies the receipt.
Tatcha publishes its full ingredient lists, which is more than most of this price bracket manages. Read them and you find a very good silicone-and-rice-ferment gel, a trademark doing the heavy lifting, and colloidal gold at position eleven.
Dior Beauty contains two brands: a professional makeup house doing genuinely excellent work, and a marketing operation selling the most ubiquitous fragrance on earth.
Sisley is the quiet one among the French luxury houses: family-owned, botanically obsessive, and expensive in a way that generates far less argument than La Mer does.
Tom Ford Beauty is a fragrance house with a makeup range attached. The Private Blends are genuinely good and genuinely overpriced, and the lipsticks are better than anyone admits.
A real stem-cell scientist put his name on a moisturiser. The underlying burn research is genuine; the leap from it to a $290 face cream is where the argument gets thin.
Crème de la Mer is mineral oil, petrolatum and fermented kelp, sold for around $380 for two ounces. It is a good occlusive moisturiser. It is not a two-hundred-dollar-per-ounce one.