How "OGLF"—Our Good Living Formula test their products

It seems like now more than ever the market is inundated with thousands of products that all promise to increase your health and bodily function due to some scarcely talked about ingrediant, scinece or benefit. 

Unfortunately, these products often contradict each other in why they work and why certain ingredients were chosen over others. The push for a healthier lifestyle for all has opened the floodgates for many legitimate vendors, yet unscrupulous individuals who want to peddle their products do still slip in from time to time.

Review websites aren’t as reliable as they used to be, either. Many people operate under the assumption that reviews are extremely biased and essentially just another branch of a company’s marketing wing, with writers just rewording the advertisement copy, without actually handling the product. There’s an often quoted saying though that the numbers don’t lie, so qualitative and quantitative testing is what can set review sites apart from simple marketing pages disguised as reviews. That’s exactly what the people at Our Good Living Formula (OGLF) have done. They test the products they feature thoroughly before publishing their take.

How is this done, exactly? Luckily, they are very transparent in how they accomplish the task of seeing what a product has going for it in an unbiased, objective manner:

The founder of OGLF, Amy Tribe, has a medical background in the field of Medical Imaging and experience in both the research field and a hospital setting. Suffice to say, she’s no stranger to the scientific method. After a while, OGLF began to pick up steam and she had to bring in contributors Diana Zambrano and Elizabeth Murray to have a more well-rounded idea of what each product contained and the implications of its use.

With this new strategy, it was time to find a location for performing the product tests to ensure uncontaminated data. They decided that it would be most prudent to maintain OGLF’s testing facility in a commercial space in Havant, United Kingdom. It is in this facility that all of their products undergo their comprehensive and rigorous testing regimen to get the most out of each product they put under the microscope.

Since Amy and her team have a medical background, they quickly put together a proper testing regimen that ensured that no stone would be left unturned during the examination process.

Before any physical testing occurs, they first begin at a computer station where they look up the product from beginning to end. This means first looking the product concepts and theories, to determine the purpose behind the products and the claimed benefits the technologies can bring. They then move onto the promotional material from the companies to establish what claims are being made and what kind of ingredients or technology went into their product. From there, they interview industry experts and look for consumer reports, clinical studies and other unbiased sources to look at the most common issues found with the products and what people are worried about in the grand scheme. This way, they know what they need to prove or disprove plus how people are actually interfacing with the product.

Since they deal with beauty products, health care products, and just about everything in between, they now move on to their state of the art physical testing component. If they are testing a hair dryer, they look for things like the exact air speed of the dryer and how hot the air coming from the dryer both at the source and at the distances commonly used.

Other things like how much noise a product produces or how a hair cream works is also tested at this stage. Essentially, her team looks for some quantifiable aspect of a particular item and then they seek to take note of what’s actually happening. The heat of red beauty lights, the feel of products on your skin, as well as the effects of products on real hair mannequins all factors into the testing process.

Another thing they do in this open concept facility is personally assembled products such as exercise bikes they feature on their website. Things like how easy it is to put together or how the instructions are worded are considered carefully and their experiences cataloged accordingly. Then, the bikes can be tested to see if they live up to everything they say they’re capable of doing.

Receiving the data is one thing, it’s a whole other ball game to properly interpret it. The women behind OGLF then pool their collective knowledge to determine what implications these data points have and how they match up with consumer intent. They wished for a balanced look that targets the average person as best as possible, which is why the take this step very seriously.

The next portion of the testing is in a portion of their facility dedicated to taking studio quality photographs. This way, they can test products for themselves and capture the results in high quality 1080p so consumers know what kind of results to expect from them instead of possibly touched up promotional photos that come solely from the manufacturer. They also discuss aspects of the products of film to be shared with their readers should they deem it necessary.

Each product is then stored and kept in black, UV resistant boxes to keep them in good condition so they can be revisited in subsequent, updated articles or should they need to examine said product at a later date upon reader request.

You can see a tour of OGLF’s testing facility here:

Amy and her team decided to branch out to testing the products as fully as possible since they talked amongst themselves and noticed a serious lack of unbiased results about common products on the internet. All too often, they noticed a manufacturer’s claims were the only claims, period. Seeking to actually publish meaningful and usable information for their readers, the testing facility was deemed absolutely necessary. For these industries that are notorious for taking advantage of people’s insecurities, their unique approach founded on honesty, transparency and no-nonsense data collection are a breath of fresh air, thanks girls!