Deconstruct Brand Audit: The Percentage Is Never in the List

Deconstruct’s flagship serum says “10% Niacinamide” on the front of the bottle. Its ingredient list, on the same page, carries no percentage at all. Neither does any of the other 15 product pages we read on thedeconstruct.in on 1 September 2026. The brand’s whole pitch is that it tells you what is in the bottle and how much. This audit tests that pitch against the brand’s own pages, its entry on the company register and its prices at Nykaa the same day.

Snapshot

Legal entity

Baypure Lifestyle Private Limited, HSR Layout, Bengaluru; incorporated 16 April 2020

Brand launched

Early 2021, from the founder’s garage in Bengaluru

Owner

Unlisted and founder-directed; L’Oréal’s BOLD fund holds a minority stake of undisclosed size since 30 January 2025

Who makes it

Third parties only; five factories across 16 product pages, none showing a licence number

Core line, selling price

₹524 to ₹799 on 30 ml serums, ₹299 to ₹559 on sunscreens, checked 1 September 2026

Revenue

₹15.46 crore in FY2024 per its filings; ₹130 crore for FY2025 by the company’s own announcement

How it started

Malini Adapureddy read civil engineering at IIT Kharagpur, took an INSEAD MBA and spent about a decade at Procter & Gamble, Kraft-Heinz and Flipkart. She started Deconstruct during the pandemic, packing and shipping orders from her garage and answering customer service herself. The trigger, in her telling, was postpartum hair loss. The company behind it, Baypure Lifestyle Private Limited, was registered on 16 April 2020; the brand launched in March 2021 by its investor’s account, early 2021 by the press. Both dates are right; they describe different things.

Two things the retellings get wrong. It is a Bengaluru company, not a Hyderabad one: the registered office is in HSR Layout, the GST number is a Karnataka one and the garage was in Bangalore. And the register shows two directors from day one, the founder, recorded as Adapureddy Srimalini, and Sreedevi Adapureddi, who shares her surname and appears in no press profile we found. Both also sit on the boards of a hospital company in Andhra Pradesh and an IT firm in Telangana, neither of which owns Baypure.

Every step adds a shareholder and none of them takes control, which is the fact most articles about this brand get wrong. “L’Oréal owns Deconstruct” is the common error. L’Oréal’s corporate venture fund, BOLD, came in as one of three new investors in the ₹65 crore Series A that closed on 30 January 2025. Its stake size has not been disclosed, no valuation was announced and no holding company appears on any register record we read. L’Oréal’s actual Indian acquisition in 2026 was Innovist, owner of Bare Anatomy, announced 18 June 2026 without a mention of Deconstruct.

The revenue figures need the same care. The last number sourced to the company’s own filings is ₹15.46 crore of revenue for FY2024, with a loss of ₹4.9 crore, as read from the RoC record by Entrackr. The ₹130 crore for FY2025 is the company’s own announcement, not a filed figure, and the “profitable” claim that came with it is adjusted EBITDA, not profit after tax. The ₹200 crore you will also see quoted was an annualised run rate in January 2025, which is a projection, not a year’s sales.

What they actually make

Nothing. The founder describes the model as third-party manufacturing with access to “pharma-grade R&D and testing infrastructure”, and the company’s own activity code on the register is “other wholesale”. Unlike Campus, which runs its own footwear plants, Deconstruct is a marketer. We read 16 products on thedeconstruct.in on 1 September 2026 and noted the “Mfd. by” line on each.

“Mfd. by” declarations on thedeconstruct.in product pages, read 1 September 2026.

Kapco International in Parwanoo, which makes the flagship niacinamide serum, also makes face washes and a sunscreen for Mamaearth and products for Pilgrim. A shared contract plant is normal in this trade and the formulations are different; it is a fact about where the bottle was filled, nothing more. The more distinctive finding is that nine of the 12 products with a named maker come from Maharashtra, a different footprint from the Himachal and Uttarakhand belt most Indian skincare comes from.

What the pages leave out matters more. The Derma Co prints a state manufacturing licence number on 12 of its 12 product pages; Deconstruct prints one on none of 16. Not one of the 16 pages states a shelf life, an expiry, a best-before or a period-after-opening, and that includes the 0.2% retinol serum and both vitamin C serums. Four pages, the Acne Control Moisturizer and three of the six sunscreens, name no manufacturer at all, though the Cosmetics Rules 2020 require the maker’s name and address on the label.

Now the percentage. Across the 16 products, 13 name a concentration in the title or the copy. The number of ingredient lists that carry a percentage next to an ingredient is zero. No Indian rule requires a concentration on the pack, so this is not unlawful; it is simply unverifiable by the buyer. The one check available is position, because ingredients above 1% must run in descending order of weight. Ten products name two or more percentages and can be tested that way.

The two reversals are mirror images. The serum claims more niacinamide than salicylic acid and lists salicylic acid first; the face wash claims more salicylic acid than niacinamide and lists niacinamide first. At most one of those two lists can be in correct descending order. That is not proof that a percentage is wrong; a list can be mistyped, and a raw material can outweigh the active inside it. It is a disagreement between two things the brand printed on the same page, and the brand publishes nothing that reconciles them.

Three more identity questions come off the pages. The “1% Kojic Acid” body sunscreen contains kojic acid dipalmitate, an ester and a different substance, the same substitution The Derma Co makes on its face wash. Deconstruct spells the full name out in the product’s web address and in its sunscreen collection listing, then drops it from the heading a buyer reads. The “10% Vitamin C” serum is mostly 3-O-ethyl ascorbic acid, a derivative, with L-ascorbic acid eighth in the list. The “1% Peptide” serum has no ingredient with peptide in its name; a pea extract stands in for it. In each case the list is honest and the title is not specific.

Every percentage Deconstruct sells on lives in the product title; not one appears in the ingredient list.

The sunscreens are where the gap is widest. Five of six carry “In-Vivo Tested” in the product title, and a blog page says the sunscreens were tested to ISO 24444, the human-skin SPF standard. What is published to back that, across every sunscreen page and both blog pages read on 1 September 2026, is nothing: no laboratory name, no report, no certificate number, no volunteer count. Of ten Indian skincare brands we checked on this point the same day, Dot & Key and Minimalist publish named studies with measured values, Mamaearth publishes a lab and study numbers, and Deconstruct sits at the bottom with Foxtale and Pilgrim, publishing no report at all. That does not mean the SPF is wrong; no independent test exists in either direction. It means the number on the front is, on the brand’s own site, an assertion.

Two things cut the brand’s way here. The face gels use modern, photostable filters, and the lists are complete. And the brand’s own explainer of in-vivo versus in-vitro testing is accurate, which is rarer than it should be. It teaches the standard and then does not show that it met it. No sunscreen states the concentration of a single UV filter, a failure the whole category shares.

What Deconstruct costs in India

All prices were checked on 1 September 2026, when the brand’s own store ran a banner reading “Upto 50% off Sitewide”. The serums sit at ₹699 to ₹799 MRP for 30 ml, or ₹23.30 to ₹26.63 per ml, and several sold at MRP that day. The Dark Spot Clearing Serum and the hyaluronic acid serum were discounted to ₹524, or ₹17.47 per ml. The face sunscreens run ₹299 to ₹559, and the 80 g gel at ₹6.99 per gram is the best value in the range, 43% below the 30 g Oats & Ceramide at ₹9.97 per gram.

The per-ml column exposes the trial sizes. The 10 ml vitamin C serum costs ₹349 MRP, or ₹34.90 per ml, against ₹26.63 for the 30 ml. The 10 ml clearing serum is ₹29.90 per ml against ₹23.30. That is ordinary retail practice, and it is the reason this site prints price per millilitre rather than price.

10% Vitamin C Serum, 30 ml

₹26.63 per ml at ₹799 MRP

10% Vitamin C Serum, 10 ml

₹34.90 per ml at ₹349 MRP

Trial-size premium

+31% per ml

Checked on

1 September 2026, thedeconstruct.in

The channel comparison is the opposite of what most brands show. On ten products listed at both the brand site and Nykaa, the MRPs matched, so there is no marked-up marketplace price here. But Nykaa was cheaper on seven of the ten.

The Detan body lotion was ₹175, or 35%, cheaper at Nykaa. The brand site’s sale won on the clearing serum and the vitamin C sunscreen. Neither channel wins consistently, so a buyer has to check both, which is the same MRP-versus-real-price lesson our Metro and Mochi audits draw in footwear: the printed price is a ceiling, not a price.

Who Deconstruct is actually for

Deconstruct suits a buyer who wants the full ingredient list published, and it is, on all 16 pages we read. It suits someone who wants named actives in pairs rather than a single-ingredient bottle; the founder says on the record that this is “not a single-ingredient kind of brand”, and almost every hero product pairs two or three. It suits a buyer who is put off by “chemical-free” and “toxin-free” marketing, because we found neither phrase on any page.

It does not suit a buyer who wants the percentage on the front proven by the pack. On that test Deconstruct sits with The Derma Co, not with Minimalist, which is the only Indian brand we found that prints concentrations inside its lists. That matters because Deconstruct positions itself much closer to Minimalist than to The Derma Co. It also does not suit anyone who wants an SPF report, a licence number or an expiry date before buying, since the pages carry none of the three.

Reputation and controversies

No statutory regulator’s order, court judgment, penalty or concluded settlement stands against Deconstruct or Baypure Lifestyle Private Limited. The rulings that follow come from the Advertising Standards Council of India, a self-regulatory industry body rather than a statutory regulator. Deconstruct does not appear on ASCI’s published list of non-compliant brands and influencers for June 2021 to April 2026, status as of August 2026, and ASCI’s 2024-25 annual report names no individual advertisers. The council’s record of complaint outcomes carries four entries for the brand. Three were upheld: a YouTube advertisement carrying the Brightening Serum on 18 February 2022, an influencer post on 4 July 2023 that was not labelled as an advertisement, and, on 24 June 2025, the claim that the gel sunscreen “prevents tanning and sun-related aging”. The fourth, a complaint that the NMF moisturiser was sold as oil-free, was not upheld on 17 December 2024. Only the sunscreen finding goes to what a product does; the 2023 one is about labelling a post as an advertisement. Each decision was on one advertisement as it stood on its date, not a standing bar on any form of words, and nobody has ruled on the product pages as they read on 1 September 2026.

The claims record is the reputation story. “Clinically Tested” appears in two serum titles and “clinically tested and approved by dermatologists” on the salicylic face wash, and no study, panel or named dermatologist is published for any of them. “Clinically tested” means a test happened; it does not mean the product passed, and it does not mean a dermatologist recommends it. “Liposomal Technology” in four serum titles is at least consistent with the phospholipids and lecithin in the lists. The transparency promise is half kept: every list is there, and every number that would let you check it is not.

Buying it in India

Deconstruct sells through its own site, Nykaa, Amazon, Myntra and the quick-commerce apps Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart, with about 75 products on its store and 61 at Nykaa on 1 September 2026. The legal name on the contact page, Baypure Lifestyle, differs from the brand name, in the way Bata the brand and Bata India the listed company are separate things; on Deconstruct’s product pages the “Marketed by” line names only “The Deconstruct”, which is a brand, not a company. Five checks before you pay.

Common questions

How we research and verify brand audits: our methodology.

References

1. Deconstruct contact page, read 1 September 2026 — legal name Baypure Lifestyle Private Limited, HSR Layout address and Karnataka GSTIN
2. IndiaFilings, Baypure Lifestyle Private Limited, read 1 September 2026 — incorporation 16 April 2020, directors, no holding company, last AGM 29 September 2025
3. ZaubaCorp, Baypure Lifestyle Private Limited, read 1 September 2026 — unlisted private company, activity code “other wholesale”
4. InstaFinancials, Baypure Lifestyle directors, read 1 September 2026 — the two directors and their other directorships
5. Local Samosa, 15 May 2023 — founder’s background, the Bangalore garage, “not a single-ingredient kind of brand”
6. DSG Consumer Partners, read 1 September 2026 — brand founding date of March 2021
7. The Deal Matter, on the Series A of 30 January 2025 — ₹65 crore round, BOLD, DSG and V Cube as new investors
8. Entrackr, January 2025 — FY2024 revenue of ₹15.46 crore and ₹4.9 crore loss from filings, seed-round shareholding, ₹200 crore run rate, no valuation disclosed
9. Indian Retailer, on FY2025 results — company-announced ₹130 crore revenue and adjusted EBITDA profitability
10. Indian Retailer, founder interview — third-party manufacturing model, distribution channels, transparency statement
11. L’Oréal Finance, 18 June 2026 — the Innovist acquisition, which does not name Deconstruct
12. Deconstruct, Brightening Niacinamide Serum page, read 1 September 2026 — Kapco International as manufacturer, ingredient order, no percentage in the list
13. Deconstruct, Oil Control Serum page, read 1 September 2026 — salicylic acid listed above niacinamide against a 3% and 2% claim
14. Deconstruct, Salicylic Acid Oil Control Face Wash page, read 1 September 2026 — niacinamide listed above salicylic acid against a 2% and 1.5% claim; “clinically tested and approved by dermatologists”
15. Deconstruct, Detan Body Sunscreen Lotion page, read 1 September 2026 — “1% Kojic Acid” title, kojic acid dipalmitate in the list and in the web address
16. Deconstruct, 10% Vitamin C Serum page, read 1 September 2026 — 3-O-ethyl ascorbic acid second, L-ascorbic acid eighth; “Clinically Tested”
17. Deconstruct, Retinol & Peptide Serum page, read 1 September 2026 — no ingredient named peptide; pea extract; no shelf life shown
18. Deconstruct blog, “Best In-Vivo Tested Sunscreens in India”, read 1 September 2026 — the ISO 24444 assertion, with no lab, report or volunteer count
19. Deconstruct, Gel Sunscreen for Oily Skin page, read 1 September 2026 — “In-Vivo Tested” title, Kain Cosmeceuticals as manufacturer, 50 g and 80 g prices
20. CDSCO, Frequently Asked Questions on cosmetics — manufacturer name and address on the label; percentages submitted at registration, not required on the pack
21. Pharmadocx, Indian cosmetics labelling guidelines — a consultancy reading of the descending-order rule for ingredients above 1%
22. Deconstruct, all products, read 1 September 2026 — “Upto 50% off Sitewide” banner, about 75 products, card prices
23. Nykaa, Deconstruct brand page, read 1 September 2026 — 61 products, Nykaa prices and discounts on the ten compared products
24. ASCI, non-compliant influencers and brands, June 2021 to April 2026 — Deconstruct and Baypure Lifestyle absent from the list
25. ASCI, Annual Complaints Report 2024-25 — reports by sector, names no individual advertisers
26. ASCI, complaint outcomes, 2 September 2026 — four entries for Deconstruct; three upheld, one not