Alternatives
Refresh theme alternatives for beauty & skincare brands
Refresh is free, made by Shopify, and better than most brands expect. Beauty brands usually go looking for an alternative not because it is bad but because their catalogue has outgrown what it expresses — ingredient depth, routines, shade filtering. Here is what it actually gives you, and what the alternatives cost.
What Refresh actually gives you
Worth being precise, because a lot of the advice online is not. Refresh is free, developed by Shopify, and its Theme Store listing advertises colour swatches, product videos, enhanced search, a mega menu, quick buy, a slide-out cart, a size chart — and an ingredients or nutritional information block. That last one matters: plenty of comparison pages claim the free Shopify themes cannot show ingredients at all, and that is simply not true.
For a brand with a handful of SKUs and good photography, that is a genuinely capable starting point, and the money you would spend on a theme is usually better spent on the photography.
Why beauty brands start looking anyway
Four things tend to trigger the search. None of them are Refresh being broken; all of them are a catalogue outgrowing a general-purpose template.
The ingredient section stops being enough
A block that holds a list is not the same as one that holds an INCI list in its legally required descending order, separates actives with their concentrations, and carries sensitivity flags a shopper can filter by. If your support inbox keeps answering “is this fragrance-free?”, the block is not doing the work. We wrote the long version of this in the ingredients guide.
Products stop being sold one at a time
Skincare sells in sequences — cleanse, treat, moisturise, protect. Once you want routine or regimen merchandising rather than a related-products carousel, you are asking for something a general theme does not model.
Browsing by concern, not category
Filtering by collection and price makes a shopper with sensitive skin read every product. Attribute filtering by skin type, concern and shade is a different piece of plumbing.
Everyone else is using it
Free Shopify themes are widely used, which is a real cost for a brand whose whole proposition is that it looks different from the shelf.
The alternatives, compared
Prices and developers below were read from each theme’s own Shopify Theme Store listing on 16 August 2026. Staying put is in the table because it is often the right answer.
Sources: each theme’s Shopify Theme Store listing, read 16 August 2026. Listings change — check before you buy.| Theme | Price | Built by | Best for |
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| Refresh (stay) | Free | Shopify | Small catalogues, strong photography, no ingredient depth needed yet |
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| Sense | Free | Shopify | A different free look with a comparable feature set |
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| Broadcast | $420 | Presidio | Feature breadth and 30+ sections across any vertical |
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| Prestige | $400 | Maestrooo | Luxury art direction, built for high-end fashion rather than beauty |
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| Darkroom | $350 | Fyzn | Beauty specifically — INCI ordering, routines, shade, before and after |
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Sense — the sideways move
Also free, also Shopify, also advertising an ingredients block. If your reason for leaving Refresh is that you want a different look rather than more capability, Sense is the cheapest way to get one. If your reason is depth, this changes nothing.
Broadcast — breadth
$420 from Presidio, sold on feature count and 30+ sections. A reasonable answer if you want many merchandising tools and are willing to assemble the beauty-specific parts yourself.
Prestige — luxury, but for fashion
$400 from Maestrooo, and genuinely beautiful. Its listing positions it for premium, high-end brand appeal rather than for beauty commerce specifically, which is why beauty brands often adapt it rather than choose it.
Darkroom — ours, and what it is for
$350. Darkroom is built only for beauty: native ingredient and INCI sections, routine merchandising, shade swatches, before-and-after, and a product page designed for this category rather than adapted to it. It ships no JavaScript framework, its motion is CSS-driven, and its build fails if any single page ships more than 16 KB of minified theme JavaScript.
We are not going to pretend it is the answer for everyone. If you are three products in and price-sensitive, it is not.
When Refresh is still the right choice
Stay if your catalogue is small and simple, if your ingredient lists fit comfortably in the block Refresh already provides, if your photography is doing the differentiating, or if the money is better spent on product photography, samples or ads. A free theme that fits is worth more than a paid one you use at ten percent.
How to move without breaking the store
Install the new theme unpublished and build it out there — Shopify lets you preview an unpublished theme against live data, so nothing your customers see changes until you publish. Record your Core Web Vitals before you start so you can tell afterwards whether you improved anything. Check every product template, not just the one you designed against. Then publish, and keep the old theme in the library for a fortnight.
Your URLs do not change when you change theme, so the SEO risk people warn about is mostly imaginary — what does change is page speed and whatever structured data the new theme emits, and both are worth measuring rather than assuming.
Frequently asked questions
Is Refresh a good theme for a skincare brand?
For a young brand, yes. It is free, it is maintained by Shopify, and its listing includes an ingredients or nutritional information block, colour swatches and enhanced search. The question is not whether it is good but whether your catalogue has outgrown what it expresses.
Do I have to pay to get ingredient display?
No. Both Refresh and Sense advertise an ingredients block, and they are free. What a paid beauty theme adds is depth — INCI in its legally required order, actives separated with concentrations, sensitivity flags a shopper can filter by — rather than the existence of the section.
Will switching themes hurt my SEO?
Not if your URLs stay the same, which on Shopify they normally do — products, collections and blog posts keep their handles. What moves is your Core Web Vitals, in either direction, and your structured data if the new theme emits different markup. Measure both before and after rather than assuming.
How long does moving themes take?
The theme install is an afternoon. The real work is content: re-entering settings, moving section-by-section homepage content, and checking every product template. Budget days rather than weeks for a small catalogue, and do it on an unpublished theme so the live store never breaks.
Not sure which of these fits your catalogue? Tell us what you are selling — if the answer is “stay on Refresh”, that is what we will say.