Uncommon has won a D&AD Black Pencil for The Periodic Fable, a campaign that catalogued 49 hollow beauty buzzwords into a parody of the periodic table for skincare brand The Ordinary. The award, announced 25 September 2026, marks the highest recognition in design and advertising for work that called out an industry's long habit of writing copy that sounds impressive but means nothing.
"We just started talking about all these made-up words, like elixir and age-defying," said Nils Leonard, co-founder of Uncommon. "Age-defying is a literal lie. We started to pull at that thread, and we started wondering: how many of these words are there? We were just pissing ourselves laughing, because we kept coming up with more."
A system built to expose nonsense
The Ordinary's identity is rooted in science, so the periodic table format was a natural fit. The team worked with scientists to verify that each term on the final table had no scientific or regulated basis. The 49 entries range from "Flawless" to "Crushed Diamonds." Leonard's personal favourite is "elixir." He described it as "kind of King Arthur, bubbling in a pot."
The design took a deliberately restrained approach. Stark, monochrome, and highly legible, it avoided the temptation to make the typography look more "scientific." "We were really paranoid that people wouldn't get it," Leonard said. The rollout placed individual elements on out-of-home sites while other locations displayed the full table.
A launch film designed to shock
The campaign film, directed by Olivia De Camps and produced by Smuggler, shows a classroom of hypnotised students chanting the Periodic Fable elements while performing viral skincare rituals like ice rolling. Leonard said the team always asks one question when making films: "What's the shot that someone's going to print? What's the bit in it that someone's going to repeat, or pause on, or be affected by?"
He credited the client for backing the provocative concept. "Fair play to the client for genuinely partnering with us and trusting us on the provocation of that spot," he said, "because that's a pretty punchy thing to put out into the world."
Results that spoke louder than the buzzwords
The campaign drove an 11.8x increase in website traffic, more than 80 pieces of press coverage, and a 10.4% rise in purchase intent among American women. The mainstream beauty industry largely stayed silent. "I think the game with Big Beauty is that they just want to be quiet and carry on," Leonard said. He noted that some brands have started borrowing from The Ordinary's playbook, and one even produced an AI-generated version of the Periodic Fable. "It was really bad," he said.
Leonard sees a broader lesson in the work's reception. "In a world of AI and hacks and shortcuts, [real] work is sexy and attractive," he said. "When you see brands or people that have clearly taken the time and made the endeavour to make something like that, people want to reward it with attention."
Why this matters for creatives and writers
This campaign is a case study in restraint. The design got out of the way of the message. The concept was simple enough to explain in one sentence. The humour came from the truth of the observation, not from overproduced jokes. For writers and marketers who spend hours polishing copy that consumers instinctively ignore, the Periodic Fable is a reminder that calling out empty language can be more powerful than adding to it. The Black Pencil confirms that juries reward work that trusts its audience to get the point without decoration.
Your membership also unlocks:
