One year after publicly taking on Urban Decay, Skindinavia’s Allen Goldman has found an unlikely partner and a bigger mission. Now that the media dust has settled, Goldman spoke exclusively to BeautyMatter on the “why” behind the move.
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." Allen Goldman laughed as he borrowed Mike Tyson's famous line. A year on from Skindinavia's very public split with Urban Decay, it still feels like the simplest explanation of what happened next.
Before last July, from the outside, Skindinavia looked like one of beauty's quiet success stories. The independent brand had spent years developing the patented cooling technology behind Urban Decay's cult-favorite All Nighter Setting Spray, helping create one of prestige beauty's most recognizable products without ever having their name associated with it. Then the partnership abruptly ended.
What followed was anything but a typical licensing dispute. Goldman publicly accused Urban Decay of replacing Skindinavia's patented formula with a new one, while continuing to sell All Nighter under the same name, turning what could have remained a simple industry disagreement into one of beauty's most talked-about founder stories.
Twelve months later, the sequel is even more unexpected.
Rather than signing with another prestige retailer, Goldman has partnered with Australian beauty powerhouse MCoBeauty, a dupe brand that sparked debate at BeautyMatter’s 2025 FUTURE50 Summit and is best known for making prestige beauty more accessible. The duo is set to launch All Dayer, a setting spray built using Skindinavia's best-selling Bridal formula. Launching first in Target stores across the US, the product will retail for around $20, almost 40% less than Urban Decay's current $34 All Nighter.
On paper, it sounds absurd. The inventor of one of beauty's most famous prestige products has teamed up with a company famous for recreating them. Goldman, unsurprisingly, sees it differently. "This may be the first time the original has become the dupe—and the dupe has become the original,” he told BeautyMatter.
It's a line that's witty enough to become a headline. It's also the commercial thesis behind Skindinavia's next chapter, because Goldman isn't trying to relive the success of All Nighter; he's trying to ensure the company behind it is no longer invisible.
Goldman expected to spend the past year rebuilding distribution. Instead, he found himself rebuilding recognition.
When Skindinavia's split with Urban Decay erupted across social media, Goldman assumed consumers would be talking about formulas, patents, and product performance. Instead, they became fascinated by something much simpler: the company behind the bottle.
Across Reddit and TikTok, beauty enthusiasts started connecting dots they hadn't realized existed. Threads filled with shoppers admitting they had no idea Skindinavia had developed the original technology behind All Nighter. In contrast, others questioned whether the new Urban Decay formula was the same one they had originally fallen in love with.
Consumers were angry with Urban Decay and confused. For Goldman, that confusion revealed something far deeper than a licensing dispute. For nearly two decades, Skindinavia had done what every founder hopes to do: create a category-defining product. But somewhere between invention and commercial success, the inventor had disappeared from the consumer story.
"'I thought it was gone' was probably the comment I heard most," Goldman said. "The truth is, we were selling it the whole time."
The experience exposed one of beauty's least discussed trade-offs. The industry has become incredibly effective at commercializing innovation. Licensing agreements, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships can take a breakthrough technology from niche brand to global bestseller in a matter of years. But that scale often comes at a cost. Consumers remember the campaign, the retailer, and the logo. They don't always remember who invented the product.
Initially, Goldman thought people were mourning a setting spray. Instead, they were responding to the story behind it. "The feedback wasn't product specific," he said. "It became a story of David versus Goliath... integrity... and someone standing up when something was wrong."
One message, in particular, shifted his perspective. A woman wrote to say she had resigned from her own job after reading his post because it had given her the confidence to stand up for herself. "It almost felt like a movement," Goldman recalled.
That wasn't the outcome he had expected. He had gone public to defend a formula. Consumers turned it into a conversation about ownership. For Goldman, that changed the objective entirely. The next chapter of Skindinavia couldn't simply be about finding another retail partner; it had to ensure the company behind one of beauty's most recognizable setting sprays finally became as recognizable as the product itself.
Goldman likes to describe MCoBeauty as a cover band. "They're playing someone else's songs," he said. "Everybody knows they're not The Beatles." It's a line that sounds like a criticism. In reality, it's the reason the partnership exists.
After the Urban Decay split, more than a dozen companies approached Skindinavia about working together. Another prestige retailer might have seemed like the obvious choice. Instead, Goldman found himself sitting across the table from a company built on making prestige beauty accessible to the mass market.
"I wasn't really familiar with them," he admitted. "I knew they were an Australian brand, known for dupes." The irony wasn't lost on either side. For MCoBeauty, however, All Dayer was never intended to be another "inspired by" launch.
"This is not a dupe, and it is not an ‘’ product," said Peter Stocks, Chief Marketing Officer Europe at MCoBeauty, in a press release. "It is the original patented formula that millions of consumers have trusted for years, now made available at a price point that is more accessible to a wider audience."
That distinction matters. MCoBeauty has built one of Australia's fastest-growing beauty businesses by challenging the relationship between luxury and price. But rather than recreating another prestige bestseller, the company saw an opportunity to bring back the original formula itself.
"For too long, the beauty industry has prioritized exclusivity over accessibility," Stocks said. "Our mission has always been to challenge luxury beauty pricing, and this launch proves consumers do not need to compromise on performance to pay less."
For Goldman, that philosophy solved a problem he'd spent the previous year wrestling with. He didn't need another prestige partner. He needed a partner capable of putting Skindinavia's technology back in front of mainstream consumers.
Launching through Target in the US, before rolling out through Superdrug, TikTok Shop, and Amazon in the UK, immediately gives All Dayer national reach. Just as importantly, at $19.99 (£15), it returns the original patented formula to shelves at almost half the price of Urban Decay's current All Nighter.
"We'd already spent a year trying to educate customers," Goldman said. "To put it somewhere else and start over would have been incredibly difficult." In many ways, the partnership isn't really about dupes at all. It's about access.
But while the Urban Decay dispute largely united the beauty community behind Skindinavia, the MCoBeauty partnership has produced a far more complicated reaction.
Within hours of the announcement, Reddit threads filled with consumers celebrating the return of what Goldman describes as the original patented formula. For shoppers who had spent the past year hunting for the "real" All Nighter, All Dayer represented the ending they had hoped for.
But not everyone was convinced. Some users welcomed Skindinavia's decision to reclaim its technology but questioned whether MCoBeauty was the right partner, arguing they still wouldn't purchase from the Australian brand because of it being a dupe business. Others described the collaboration as "ironic," suggesting that a founder who had spent a year defending intellectual property had now aligned himself with a company whose business model had often attracted criticism from the industry. Pushback also came from those who work within the beauty industry, as individuals criticized a dupe brand retailing a product for $20, which is almost double the price of other MCoBeauty setting sprays.
The reaction highlights a tension Goldman knew would accompany the launch. His objective wasn't to persuade every beauty consumer to embrace MCoBeauty overnight. It was to reintroduce Skindinavia's technology to the widest possible audience while reframing the conversation around what consumers were actually buying.
For Goldman, there is a fundamental distinction between a brand creating an "inspired by" product and one bringing the original patented formula back to market. That difference, he believes, will become clearer over time.
After all, he argues, All Dayer isn't recreating the original. It is the original. That may not win over every skeptic on Reddit, but Goldman is betting that performance, not perception, will ultimately shape consumer opinion.
For much of the past year, Skindinavia's story has been defined by what it lost. Goldman is determined that the next chapter is defined by what the company builds.
That starts with the patented cooling platform that first put Skindinavia on the map. Rather than chasing the next viral ingredient or expanding into unrelated categories, the company is investing in new formulations designed for sensitive skin and blemish-prone consumers, and broader applications for its proprietary cooling technology beyond setting spray.
The ambition is noticeably different from the one that shaped the Urban Decay years. Then, success was measured by how widely the technology traveled. Now, Goldman wants Skindinavia's own name to travel with it.
It is a subtle but important shift. The goal is no longer simply creating products that become category leaders. It is ensuring the company behind those products is recognized as the innovator from the outset, rather than being an invisible partner behind someone else's brand. That ambition extends beyond Skindinavia.
The beauty industry has become remarkably effective at commercializing innovation through licensing agreements, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships. Goldman's experience suggests the next challenge for founder-led brands is protecting something less tangible than patents: recognition.
Innovation may create a blockbuster. Recognition determines who gets remembered for it. Whether All Dayer becomes another All Nighter will ultimately be decided by consumers. But one year after publicly fighting for ownership of a formula, Goldman is chasing something even harder to protect. Not the patent. The credit.