Picture a shopper standing in front of a display of microcurrent facial tools. Two devices, side by side, nearly identical in size, price, and promise. One carries a small regulatory clearance mark tucked into the fine print. The other doesn’t. Nothing about the packaging tells her why that matters, or that it matters at all. She picks the one with the nicer box.

That scene plays out thousands of times a day, in stores and on scroll-heavy product pages. And it captures something the cosmetics industry has been slow to reckon with: the products themselves have changed faster than the conversation around them. What used to be a shelf of jars and tubes now includes tools that deliver microcurrent, light therapy, vibration, and electrical stimulation, technologies that, until fairly recently…