BTW: some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links which means if you buy a product through them, I can earn a small amount of commission. This will never influence my opinion on something: I only rave about products I really rate. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone (and, for more on my thoughts on affiliate links, click here.)

That UV Report

For those of you who haven’t seen me banging on about it on notes / Instagram / LinkedIn, last week saw the launch of a year-long project: A preventable crisis: The case for a national UV strategy. The report was the result of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Beauty & Wellbeing’s inquiry into UV safety. The inquiry involved seven in-person evidence-giving sessions and countless written testimonies from individuals involved in all aspects of UV safety — from dermatologists, skin cancer charities, individuals with lived experience of skin cancer, academics, sunbed salon owners and many more. The report draws together what they had to say and looks at the current landscape around UV, at what the problems are, at what’s worked in other countries when it comes to UV safety, at what’s worked in the UK to improve public health in other areas, and makes 29 separate recommendations to government, industry and individuals about what needs to be done to improve UV safety in the UK. And I wrote it.

I was feeling very British about it and nearly deleted that last sentence. But it really is one of the pieces of work that I’m most proud of. I obviously didn’t do it single-handedly. I had huge support from the British Beauty Council — the secretariat of the APPG — and particular from their Chief Policy Officer, Victoria Brownlie when I was in my “shit I’ve never written anything for government before” and “gahhhhhh this is massive how on earth do we work out what our recommendations should be?” episodes. And it could never have happened without Carolyn Harris MP, who heads the APPG, is a total force of nature and is backed by a similarly brilliant team.

Then there are all the people who gave their time and expertise to the enquiry. And they are part of why I’m so proud of it. Because I wrote the report and was pretty happy with it, but it wasn’t until I walked into the room on the morning of the launch when I had a “shit, all those people who gave evidence will be there and I really hope I’ve done them justice” moment. I know there’s one group of people who doesn’t think I have (The Sunbed Association and various salon owners and sunbed manufacturers) but everyone else seems pretty happy.

So far so yay, but the thing is, the wheels of politics turn really, really slowly. And if I think about it too much, I get depressed about the idea that even if any of these recommendations do change anything, it’s going to take a load of campaigning and aaaaaaaages. But I have to remember that change might not happen tomorrow, or next week, next month or even next year (yeah, launching it at a time when members of his party are trying to oust the prime minister was sub-optimal but what can you do?) but what this report has done is create a starting point, or a foundation, that I hope can be built on in the future and, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon (well at some point) things will change.

If you want to read the report — or even just the 29 recommendations (skip to page 50) — it’s here. But I thought I’d pull out some of the things that have either grabbed the headlines, been a topic of conversation, or interested me along the way… (it should be flagged that while many of the recommendations do chime with my personal perspectives, every single one of them is evidence-based and I worked really hard to try to ensure that that comes across in the way I wrote, structured and referenced the report.)

• The Sunbed Association were “extremely disappointed” in the report — you can read their full response here — and specifically with comparisons with tobacco regulation and proposals around advertising restrictions. The report suggested that, in the same way that advertising of tobacco products was banned 16 years after it was classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, so too should the advertising of sunbeds (classified as a Group 1 carcinogen in 2009) be banned.

  Now I’m not sure if you’ve seen the advertising and promotion around sunbeds at the moment but it is wild. Earlier this year the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) flagged some examples of ads that they’d banned. They included adverts that made claims that sunbeds:

  • were safe and healthy

  • could improve brain function

  • could boost vitamin D levels

  • could improve mood, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and psoriasis.
    

  As I’ve whinged before, I think the ASA don’t have as much teeth as they ought to so while this is a slap on the wrists, I don’t think it’s a serious deterrent so ditching sunbed advertising and marketing all together doesn’t seem like a terrible route to go down — especially when there’s good evidence that doing the same with cigarettes had a significant effect.

• Some people have asked about the recommendations around VAT on sun protection. People like Jessica Zbinden-Webster (she had skin cancer in her 20s, was told it was the result of childhood sun exposure, and went on to found the #AxeTheTax campaign) have been lobbying for years for the 20% VAT to be removed entirely from sun protection, arguing that it is treated as a luxury cosmetic rather than an essential health product but the recommendation that the report made was for VAT to be removed entirely from dedicated SPF30+ sun protection products designed for children, and reduced to 5% on dedicated SPF30+ sun protection products.
  This might sound like a bit of an arbitrary distinction but throughout, the aim was to look at precedents. Currently in the UK, essential items for children, such as clothing and footwear, are already zero-rated and there’s a concessionary rate of 5% on other items considered to be socially or medically important – such as smoking cessation aids, contraception and children’s car seats.

  It was felt that using these sorts of precedents — along with financial arguments about how what the Treasury stood to lose in VAT it would gain from reduced spend on cancer treatment within the NHS — was the most likely way to get these proposals considered by Government.

  

• While working on the inquiry there were some things that I was made aware of that I just had known nothing about before. It seems so obvious now but I’d just never considered that sun protection wasn’t a compulsory part of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for outdoor workers. Hearing Shane McCormick, a former landscape gardener who has had skin cancer several times talk about his experiences was really sobering. Outdoor workers face a 60% higher risk of non-melanoma skin cancer compared to indoor workers, and one in three non-melanoma skin cancer deaths worldwide is associated with working outdoors in the sun. When you read things like that you’re like well of course the sun should be considered an occupational hazard, of course employers should be mandated to provide sun protection to outdoor workers and to ensure it’s used properly.

I could wang on a lot more about what was in the report but there’s so much else to squeeze into this newsletter. One of the aspects that I’m choosing to see as a beacon of hope is that throughout the inquiry we encountered so many individuals, retailers and brands who really want to help in this space. They’re already spending a tonne of cash on individual efforts to educate young people for example, or promote the importance of adequate sun protection. If we could pull them all together, pool their resources and create a cohesive campaign with a single message, it could be amazing… but that’s a future project that I’m hoping I’ll get the chance to work on with the British Beauty Council…

The robot will check your mole now…

One of the examples of brands getting involved in this space that I went to last week involved La Roche-Posay. They’re partnering with Chelsea & Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to sponsor (to the tune of £250k) the Trust’s work with teledermatology and at the event we heard about the DERM (Deep Ensemble for Recognition of Malignancy, if you wanted to know) AI tool, developed by Skin Analytics, that has been being used to help speed up skin cancer diagnosis and treatment since 2022.

It means that if your GP is worried about a dodgy mole, you can fill in an online questionnaire, go to a special photography hub and have your mole snapped, DERM will assess whether it’s benign or needs further investigation and you’ll either be discharged or passed onto a human being. Chelsea & Westminster started a research study in 2020, then in 2022 started using DERM alongside dermatologists, and since 2024, it’s been working autonomously — and quite brilliantly. In the last 12 months it’s seen around 6,000 patients and discharged 30% of them without a dermatologist needing to be involved.

According to Dr Lucy Thomas, one of the derms working with the technology, the amount of time that frees up is incredible. “Those who did need to be seen could be reviewed remotely, meaning fewer in-person appointments, increasing clinician capacity by 63%” Given what I was talking about last week about the scarcity of dermatologists in the UK, this is really important stuff.

I can see how some people might be a bit squeamish about this sort of thing and worry about its limitations (yes it has been tested on all skin types, including the darkest ones where skin cancers can be harder to identify — 17,000 darker skinned patients have been assessed by the technology and it picked up 100% of their cancers). But this feels like AI being used for good. AI will never be able to be the human face that you want to talk to when you’ve got skin cancer, but if it can dispatch you quicker if you haven’t, and reduce the time when you don’t know whether you have or you haven’t, I feel like that can only be a good thing.

My hard line on tan lines

Literally as I was on my way to the launch of the UV Safety report, on the Tube I spotted this ad…

… yes I know it’s meant to be a play on tube lines, but it’s also marketing tanning. Sorry, maybe I lost my sense of humour spending too much time talking to people about skin cancer and how, in around nine in ten cases, it’s entirely avoidable. Because the tan line trend has been around a while now — Cosmopolitan and Dazed wrote about it in 2024 — and it’s this weird and fucked up glamourisation of showing how tanned (I really feel like I should start saying “how damaged”) your skin is by showing the contrast between tanned / damaged skin and skin that’s been protected from the sun in some way. It’s dangerous and massively irresponsible, but it seems to have become a part of advertising culture.

Because when I mentioned the tube ad I’d seen to Jessica Zbinden-Webster, she sent me this, which the creative agency behind Victoria Beckham’s Portofino fragrance had proudly posted earlier this year…

…and that put me in mind of this, which I saw last summer on MCo Beauty’s Instagram

Is it just me? It’s not just me is it? Please tell me it’s not just me. I just feel that it’s one thing when you’ve got dumbass teens on TikTok doing this shit, but where are the adults in the room when these sort of things are being conceptualised as adverts? Where are the people saying “we know stupid kids are doing this but it’s literally killing them so how about maybe we don’t promote this sort of stupidity and glamourise it?”

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Lord, I grow weary of this world sometimes.

My (current) sunscreen top ten

A few things before we get into the weeds — I wear broad spectrum SPF 50 on my face every single day of the year. If I do nothing else, I do that. (Which might be part of the reason that I favour hydrating formulas as they’re often my moisturiser too.) Honestly, I do it mostly out of vanity, rather than fear of skin cancer. Do I think that in England, in the depths of winter, on a day when the UV index is 1, I really need broad spectrum SPF 50? Probably not, no, but I do believe in the power of habit, and if that means I wear sunscreen when I don’t actually need it, I’m OK with that. Because I don’t believe sunscreen is toxic. I also have no preference for chemical or mineral filters and don’t tend to obsessively check— I think a lot of my favourites are probably largely chemical and, as a result should be suitable for all skintones, but the best person to check in with if you have darker skin is Julian Sass (Fitzpatrick V/VI) and his sunscreen database.

I’ve talked before on how I use sunscreen now — if I’m not going out I try to be liberal with an every day one, if I’m going out, usually an every day one followed by a tinted one — and about how I feel like sunscreen formulation has improved so much in recent years that, to be honest, it’s so much easier than it was to find one that you like and use. I don’t care what you use, just use something. Here are some of the ones I’ve been using and enjoying recently…

The every day ones

I constantly talk about Altruist Sun (£10.50 for 2 x 100ml tubes) — it’s a great, dermatologist-founded brand, that exists to make good, cosmetically-elegant sunscreen available to all — and it gives products and money to children with albinism in Africa. Honestly, there’s nothing not to love.

La Roche-Posay Anthelios Anti-Dark Spot Fluid (£16.50) — the original LRP fluid has been a long time favourite of mine in its many iterations, which included a tinted one, but I like this because it contains Melasyl, the L’Oréal Groupe’s patented anti-pigmentation molecule. Honestly melasma is a constant battle so every little helps.

Australian brand, Ultra Violette, had a rough old ride last year around testing of their products showing SPFs lower than stated and I felt really sorry for them because Ava and Bec are among the people in the industry with the most dedication to what they do and I swear every other suncare brand out there was thinking “there but for the grace of God…” What that whole episode did show up was a massive issue with the testing process that dived into in real detail here — I loved this feature, if you’re interested in learning more. I’m a big fan of their products and while I don’t usually hero miniatures (ecological reasons), I’ll make an exception for these pocket sized versions of their sunscreens — I adore the hydrating Supreme Screen — and the Mini Mate (£15) will be in my bag all year so I’ll never be caught out.

Unless you’re a French pharmacy brand obsessive you might not have come across SVR but they’re another of those in the Bioderma mould that — like Mixa — are starting to gain traction over here. Their Blur Sun Secure SPF 50 (£16.80) has a really interesting and unusual texture for a French skincare brand — I’d usually expect them to be a lot more traditional but this mousse-in-a-tube has an almost bouncy, spongy feel to it and dries down almost powdery with a blurring effect that’s subtle but still there. Plus it has a nostalgic “sun cream” fragrance that I adore.

There has to be a Korean one in there and, like everyone else, I do really like the super lightweight Beauty of Joseon Relief Sun + Rice + Probiotics SPF 50 (£12.40) for its barely there feel. And I am so grateful to Korean sunscreen because I feel it’s really forced everyone to raise their game. New sunscreens from CeraVe (£14.32) and Clinique (£24) have both impressed me in a way that I don’t think they would have done before Korean formulations started to dominate the market.

Next week, I’ll cover the tinted SPFs I’m currently very much enjoying and two that slightly break the bank, but that I think are really worth it.

Despite splitting this in two that was still looooong, ah well, if you’re in the UK then you’ll have large parts of a sunny bank holiday to peruse it over. And more UV geekery incoming next week.

Until next time…

BTW: some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links which means if you buy a product through them, I can earn a small amount of commission. This will never influence my opinion on something: I only rave about products I really rate. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone (and, for more on my thoughts on affiliate links, click here.)

Dermwashing

Greenwashing came first — brands trying to make out that they were more eco-friendly than they actually were. Then a few weeks ago I banged on about Spacewashing — or brands trying to make out that their products were wildly scientifically advance by invoking associations with NASA. Now, I want to talk about dermwashing — or medics sort of kind of letting people assume that they’re dermatologists, without ACTUALLY saying as much, when they’re not.

Let’s be clear, I’m UK-based and I’m talking about the UK system, not the US one (so apologies US readers as I’m not really au fait on how it works over there. I mean, I know you have board-certified, but I don’t know if you have the same issue with individuals intimating that they have credentials that they don’t.)
Here in the UK, you normally start by doing an undergraduate degree in medicine (4-6 years) before moving onto your foundation training — two years where you do rotations which are (usually) four-month stints in a range of specialities including general medicine and surgery, but they might also include dermatology, cardiology, obs and gynae, psychiatry etc etc. Then, after those two years you choose the route you want to go down — you might go into anaesthetics, general practice, or any one of the rotations that you did in your foundation years — if you want to be a dermatologist, you have to do another two years of Internal Medicine Training and pass exams to become a member of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP).

After that you have to get a training post. The number of training posts available in dermatology in 2025 was 57. To put that into context, there were 105 for clinical oncology, 161 for general surgery, and 181 for intensive care medicine1. Once you’ve got a post that’s another four years of training as a Dermatology Specialty Registrar, then you’ve got to pass an exam showing you have in-depth knowledge of thousands of skin conditions, and only then can you become an accredited dermatologist and apply for a consultant dermatologist positions.

Phew. That might explain why there are only around 600 people in the UK who are on the General Medical Council (GMC)’s Specialist Register for dermatology and who can officially call themselves “consultant dermatologists.” Surprised? I don’t blame you because while “consultant dermatologist” is a legally protected title meaning that unless you’ve gone through all of the hard yards above, you can’t call yourself a “consultant dermatologist” without someone coming after you, unfortunately other titles AREN’T protected in the same way. That means literally ANYONE can call themselves “cosmetic dermatologist”, “dermatologist”, “skin doctor”, “aesthetic doctor”, “hair doctor”, “trichologist”, etc. I KNOW!

But a lot of people don’t. Last year, in a bid to tackle this issue — and it is an issue — the British Association of Dermatologists introduced the Consultant Dermatologist Tick, which is a logo with their GMC number on it that shows that the doctor has completed ALL of this training. It looks like this:

This badge above is Dr Ellie Rashid’s and that’s her GMC number. If you look it up on the GMC register, it shows you everything — her full name, when and where she qualified and crucially, that she’s on the Specialist Register for Dermatology…

So why am I telling you all this? Because a lot of people you think are trained dermatologists are not.

That doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, or not good at their jobs. There are some brilliant people in the industry whose knowledge I depend upon, and who I 100% trust with my face, who are not consultant dermatologists and often for very good reason.

I knew Dr Sam Bunting of Dr Sam’s Skincare early on in her career and while she had been working in dermatology within the NHS, she was frustrated that there were areas of dermatology that she was interested in (such as ageing skin) that, understandably, she couldn’t study within the NHS and so she left and started working privately. Dr Beibei Du-Harpur isn’t a consultant dermatologist but she’s a lecturer at the St John’s Institute of Dermatology and is on the register as a trainee in dermatology (and has been for 10 years because she’s doing dual academic training, and she will actually be a consultant dermatologist by the end of this month.) Dr Wassim Taktouk isn’t on the specialist register for dermatology (although he is on the GP register) and did a lot of his medical training in A&E, which might explain why he’s such a calming presence to be around and if I ask him a derm-type question he will very often ask me to talk to Prof Firas Al-Niami (who is a consultant derm.) Sonia Khorana isn’t a dermatologist but I value her thoughts on skin, partly because the first time I asked her for quotes she referenced every single one with a peer-reviewed paper (😍) but also because when I first met her she was a GP with a Special Interest in Dermatology.

And that’s not just a GP who’s abstractly interested in skin, it means she’s done additional courses to get qualifications that prove she’s studied dermatology; I think these days the Special Interest in Dermatology qualification has been replaced by the terminology GP with an Extended Role in Dermatology (GPwER).

Brilliant medics all.

I’m not gatekeeping any of this. Anyone — a brand, a PR, you — can go to the GMC website and search the register, it’s just a lot of people don’t bother. I’ve lost count of the number of times that a PR will tell me that they’ve signed up a dermatologist to front a new skincare campaign and I’ll have to tell them that they’re not actually a dermatologist. A few times when I’ve looked said “dermatologist” up on the GMC website, they have been on the Specialist Register… only for internal medicine, or cardiology. It seems a pity to have done all that training and not use it, but then I guess there’s more money, more sociable hours and more glitz and glamour in injecting Botox, writing private prescriptions for tretinoin, and fronting skincare brands. All totally legit. But they’re not consultant dermatologists.

Double checking people’s credentials is not a new thing for me. Maybe I’m cynical or mistrusting but it’s something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Because when people misrepresent themselves, that tells me a lot about whether I should trust them. About 15 years ago I encountered a plastic surgeon who was launching their own skincare range. The PR (and the business card I was given) told me they were a member of a number of different associations. It didn’t take long to discover they weren’t. Maybe their membership had lapsed, maybe their PR had assumed that because they were on the NHS’ Specialist Register for plastic surgery, they were a member of a British plastic surgery association when they weren’t. But I’ve not had anything to do with them since. I’m just not going to give a platform to someone whose professional conduct isn’t unblemished. I just tried to find their name in one of the registers that they cite membership of on their current website and I couldn’t, so they clearly didn’t learn anything from that little episode. (Interestingly their brand is also one that — certainly in the past — would very much fall into the Spacewashing category.)

The year after that I discovered that when a High Street shop that shall remain nameless launched an in-house service offering Botox and fillers, the people injecting fillers were beauticians, not medically trained, and while they did have a medic into do the Botox, when I looked him up on the GMC’s register, it transpired he’d only graduated from medical school less than two years before and was still doing his rotations (not quite sure where he found the time but…) Again, at the time, all totally legal. But not who I’d want doing my Botox.

The reason that I’m talking about this now is because in the last week I kept on coming across someone on social media who I hadn’t seen before who is a doctor in the skincare space. I looked them up on the GMC website and discovered that while they’re a registered doctor, they’re not only not on the Specialist Register for Dermatology, they don’t currently have a licence to practise. According to the GMC:

“Some doctors hold registration without a licence. These doctors should not practise medicine in the UK, but chose to keep their registration to show that they are in good standing with us.”

Essentially if you have a registration but don’t have a licence to practise, you’re a doctor but you can’t legally treat patients or prescribe medication. Again, there may be a load of very good reasons for this but when I subsequently got an email from a PR offering this “NHS skin doctor” for quotes, it made me angry for everyone who a) is working in the NHS and b) has actually done all the work they needed to to be a dermatologist on the Specialist Register.

Loads of people will think I’m nitpicking. Loads of people will think this doesn’t matter. Although I hope the examples above explain why it does matter. Because it really matters to me. It matters because there is SO much bullshit in the beauty industry. And brands getting endorsement from medics is one way that they try to give themselves credibility and gravitas. But if you want a consultant dermatologist to give your brand credibility, hire a consultant dermatologist, do the 20 seconds of work it takes to check that the person you’re hiring is what they think they are. And, if you’re hiring someone who isn’t a consultant dermatologist, make sure you’re not misleading about this in your communications. Because — in this, as in everything, all I want to do is strip away the bullshit, look at the facts, and the science and the truth.

Rediscovering Dermalogica

I’ll be honest, while I ADORED Dermalogica in the noughties (if people wanted a really deep cleaning, degunking, not wildly expensive facial, Dermalogica was where I sent them, and I swore by some of their products — more on this later) but it has kind of fallen off my radar in recent years. I think it didn’t really help that they seemed to be launching a load of random serums that checked some fairly dubious (for me anyway) buzzwords like “collagen banking”, “exosomes” and “facial sculpting”.

However a few weeks ago I got invited to their immersive event that was celebrating the 25th anniversary of their Daily Microfoliant. I don’t know if you remember Daily Microfoliant, maybe you still use it, but it’s this white powder that’s a blend of colloidal oatmeal (super soothing), rice bran (also soothing and a bit brightening), papain (an enzymatic exfoliant found in papaya), and salicyclic acid (a BHA, gentle exfoliant, pore degunker), white tea (brightening) and liquorice (also brightening). It was kind of the grown up version of The Body Shop’s Japanese Washing Grains (RIP, but a 1990s staple that was, I think, ground rice and adzuki beans that you made into a paste and washed your face with.)

Anyway, it was revolutionary in being a product that had been designed to be gentle enough for daily exfoliation and yet still effective. Have a look at their befores and afters (independent clinical testing for four weeks), it’s not mind-blowing, but it’s also not nothing.

I’ve got to be honest and say that if you’ve already got a good skincare routine in place, I’m not convinced you’ll see significant changes but TBH, at the moment I’m all about the incremental gains and so after using it religiously for a while in the noughties / 2010s, I’ve added it back into my routine. And this time I’m using it properly.

Because, it turns out I was using it completely wrong — and chances are, if you’ve used it, so were you (I only say that because when we were told the right way to use it, literally every journalist / content creator there was flabbergasted.) So the way I — and most other people there — had been using it was to make it into a loose, gritty paste that we slathered over our faces. After all we were the generation raised on St Ives scrubs and Aapri, if it wasn’t gritty and scratchy, how could it POSSIBLY be doing any good?

But also, I’ll be honest, the instructions don’t exactly suggest anything drastically different: “Dispense about a half-teaspoon of Daily Microfoliant into very wet hands and create a creamy paste by rubbing hands together. Apply to face in circular motions, avoiding the eye area. Massage gently for one minute, then rinse thoroughly.” And yet at the event, we were shown how Dermalogica facialists are taught to use the Daily Microfoliant in a facial and it basically involves whipping it with a mask brush in a little bowl until you end up with something that’s more fluffly egg whites than creamy paste — and it’s that almost-not-gritty-at-all substance that you’re meant to massage into your face. (You can just do it in your hand, you don’t need a brush and bowl.)

So yes, welcome back into my life Daily Microfoliant (from £19), now being used in the way you’re meant to be. But it also got me thinking about the other Dermalogica products that I used to swear by — there was the Precleanse (£49), which I now realise was Dermalogica talking double cleansing way before anyone else was. the Special Cleansing Gel (from £14), a really gentle foaming cleanser, their Barrier Repair (sadly discontinued), a silicone-based, oat-imbued barrier gel that I slathered on in ski season to protect and repair my skin, YEARS before the skin barrier became the topic du jour.

And having a look at their site again, it looks like they’re doing great things from a sustainability perspective. A number of their products are available in 500ml refills, which use — they say — 75% less plastic (also WAY cheaper, if you buy a 250ml cleanser it’s £42 or 16.8p/ml, if you buy a 500ml refill, it’s £59 or 11.8p/ml) but also, their 500ml pump bottles are monoplastic, meaning everything — including the pump, traditionally really tricky to recycle because they’re made of multiple different components, including metal — can be recycled as a single unit. I didn’t know any of this. Which means you probably didn’t either.

I’d be interested to know what you think because it feels like, like a lot of skincare brands to be honest, Dermalogica has got caught up in the race to be doing the new, new thing. Jumping onto trends rather than just sticking with what made them so great in the first place — they were the Gap of skincare, where you went for reliable basics (although admittedly those basics seem a lot pricier than they did 20 years ago, but doesn’t everything?) I don’t need Gap to be selling me cutting-edge trends and sequinned ballgowns, and I’m not sure I want Dermalogica to be trying to flog me their skincare equivalents… But, as ever, let me know what you think in the comments.

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That is all for this week. Next week, the brilliant ’s affordable fragrance thoughts, and much more. If you enjoy Beauty Geekery, please think about subscribing and sharing it with your friends. All my posts — including the full archive — are currently free. Until next time…

If you’re hoping for coverage of Met Gala lewks, you’re in the wrong place I’m afraid (for that you need ’s genius bird/outfit matchups that I saw on her Instagram stories but I am very much hoping make it into her newsletter or at least her notes over here), but what I can offer you this week is a rant about dupes, a deep-dive into some recent Advertising Standards Authority rulings, and a bit of musing on the beauty brands that Time mag has included in their list of the most influential brands of 2026. So let’s kick off with that one…

BTW: some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links which means if you buy a product through them, I can earn a small amount of commission. This will never influence my opinion on something: I only rave about products I really rate. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone (and, for more on my thoughts on affiliate links, click here.)

Beauty’s real influencers?

I’m always interested in how media / individuals outside of the beauty space are viewing things because it can be an indication of how much traction a brand is getting outside of the beauty bubble that I live in. And, although the success, or otherwise, of products is obviously linked to a brand’s financial clout and credibility, and how it’s playing out on social media, the sort of metrics that Time Magazine use to make a call on the year’s most influential beauty companies are likely to be different from the ones I’d use. So, who do they rate…?

First up, Byoma. To me this is a total gimme. Full disclosure, I consulted with the brand pre-launch and on some projects since and, that aside, I really like them. In fact one of my chats with the founder, Marc Elrick, was the subject of an early Beauty Geekery newsletter. But yes, from a numbers perspective — over $500million in sales, selling two million units of an single SKU in one year — it makes sense for Byoma to be included. But I’m also heartened to see that Time focus in on the clinical trials that the brand does because I’m really hoping that they’ll be influential in this way. Beauty brands need to provide more proof their products can do what they say and this is one of the ways they can do that

.Next SharkNinja Beauty - I’ll be honest, this surprised me. I knew SharkNinja for being yet another vacuum brand that diversified into beauty, presumably because, like Dyson, they saw gold in them there hills. And, to date, most of their beauty tech (by which I mean their hair devices, because those are the ones I’ve tried) has not really wowed me at all. To be fair, I haven’t tried their newest, the wet to dry straighteners, and I also haven’t tried their Facial Pro Glow device which did interest me because, unlike most of what they’ve produced, it seemed to be innovative rather than just another LED mask / hair tool. There is definitely an element of me that mistrusts a brand that sells blenders and vacuums and air fryers as well as beauty gadgets, even though, arguably, Philips has done exactly that for years. Maybe the difference is that Philips make a real effort to show their proof points (I still use both the now-discontinued Visapure facial brush, and their Lumea IPL device.) If you’re a SharkNinja beauty fan, do let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Picking L’Oréal Groupe as an influential beauty brand seems a bit obvious but in this instance, Time has focused on their strategic acquisitions — basically buying into fragrance just as fragrance became the fastest-growing category in luxury, and also looking at the fact that they’ve scooped up Medik8 and Color Wow. At this level, you’re not looking at individual brands and products but about how a multinational maintains a position of supremacy as a business in a changing market, and what they buy and sell in order to do that. I have some serious thoughts about what happens to brands when they have been acquired by major conglomerates like L’Oréal Groupe and Estée Lauder Companies and whether it’s ever possible for them to retain their individuality and personality once they effectively cede their independence — but that’s for another newsletter…

Rhode again is a bit of a gimme. Hayley Bieber feels like she’s delivered a masterclass in how to do a celebrity beauty brand. The seamless and credible integration of social media, merch — that lip gloss phone case was EVERYWHERE — and product that not only found favour with its obvious target audience but also beyond, is obviously what led to its staggering $1 billion pricetag when e.l.f. beauty acquired it last year. Again, it will be really interesting to see what happens to the brand now it’s part of something a LOT bigger — and has to pay its way BIG time.

It would have been criminal not to include a Korean brand in this list. As per last week’s newsletter, Korean beauty is dominating the industry right now and APR is not only Korea’s biggest beauty brand, but one of the world’s. Not familiar with the name? Neither was I, but then I realised they’re the ones behind Medicube, one of the Korean beauty brands that has gone mainstream over here in recent years, in part thanks to their dominance on TikTok. The numbers behind it are impressive — $1 billion in annual revenue and the top-selling beauty brand on Amazon Prime Day last year. Everyone is talking about the Pore Pads and the AGE-R Booster Pro device — but not always in glowing terms. Have you tried them or any other Medicube products? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

And finally, N8iv. This was a totally new one on me. But according to Time, it’s “the first Indigenous American-owned skincare brand to bring products to the mainstream market nationally; in 2025, the company won an Allure Best of Beauty Award for its exfoliator and became the first Indigenous beauty brand featured at Coachella. This year, N8iv is launching at Nordstrom, entering over 100 Ritz-Carlton spas.” I’m really glad to see Time hero-ing a brand like this and I’m really glad it’s being showcased as it is. But it’s not an inexpensive proposition (that exfoliator is $80) so I will be interested to see how it holds up against other prestige brands at a time when wallets are being squeezed. (US readers do please let me know if you’ve tried it / have thoughts.)

Would these have been the brands I’d have picked as being beauty’s most influential for this year? From a UK perspective, Byoma and Rhode would definitely have been in there. Medicube would have been fighting it out with Beauty of Joseon for the influential Korean brand, possibly Skin Rocks for their consumer products plus diversification into pro, and I’d have been tempted to throw in a wild card, like Exist, the new brand from the people behind The Unseen Beauty (more on their founder, Lauren Bowker here) which I’m hoping to cover in a future newsletter. Who would be on your list?

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“Clinically-proven”… but not

I’ve whinged repeatedly before about how the ASA are essentially a toothless organisation — they’re the UK Advertising Standards Authority and they’re the ones that investigate adverts and marketing that seems to go OTT. But the sanctions they can impose are relatively limited and largely confined to banning adverts and reputational damage. While in theory repeat offenders can be investigated by Trading Standards or the Competition and Markets Authority, who can impose fines and prosecute, in reality this rarely happens and so brands largely get away with making outrageous claims and just getting a slap on the wrist when they get called out.

However, in recent weeks two big brands have had rulings against them for “clinically proven” claims and I think it’s worth having a look at them because these aren’t two-bit companies, they’re L’Oréal and Beiersdorf, huge multinationals that have big legal and regulatory departments so to me it’s FASCINATING that these adverts got through in the first place, especially when you read the full ASA judgements.

At the end of April, the ASA upheld a complaint against an on-demand video for Garnier’s Vitamin Cg Serum that claimed that it was “clinically proven to reduce hyperpigmentation in 2 weeks”, a claim based on a clinical study of 44 subjects over 10 weeks.

Annoyingly the full details of the clinical trial they reference have been kept confidential because Garnier say it’s “commercially sensitive” but ultimately the ASA didn’t believe that the trial justified the claim. You can read the full ruling yourself (if you’re so minded) but the main reasons relating to the trial that the ASA gave for ruling against Garnier were…

• small sample size and no evidence about whether the sample size was big enough to be clinically robust;

• no information about how participants had been randomly assigned to treatment or control group;

• the trial was carried out in a country with a hotter, sunnier climate than the UK;

• although the trial included Fitzpatrick skin types I to VI, the distribution of these skin types in participants in the trial was different from the distribution of skin types you might expect to see in the UK;

• trial participants were told to avoid sun or artificial UV exposure and use SPF, while the model in the ad was seen outside in bright conditions;

• although the results showed some statistically significant differences in the treatment group after two weeks, the reported percentage changes were small, and were only seen amongst a minority of subjects.

It was this last point that REALLY staggered me. What were they thinking? (Apparently 82% of participants in the clinical study agreed that their dark spots looked less visible after 2 weeks but nobody at Garnier is dumb enough to think that this sort of consumer perception study justifies a “clinically proven” claim.)

Then just last week, the ASA upheld a complaint against this Eucerin ad for their Hyaluron Filler serum that appeared at Balham tube station.

It claimed “Look up to 5 years younger.” and referenced a study that involved 160 participants who used the product for four weeks. But also included the words “Clinically proven” next to the product. The ASA said, not unreasonably I think, that viewers would think that the product was clinically proven to make you look up to five years younger.

You can read it all here, but the reality was that the “up to 5 years younger” claim was based on 160 people using the product and being asked after four weeks if they thought they looked younger and if so, by how many years. I mean COME ON. That’s not a clinical study, that’s a consumer perception study

Beiersdorf also gave the ASA a number of other unpublished studies in support, one which the ASA dismissed as not being relevant because it didn’t look at quantifying the anti-ageing effect, another that was basically a consumer perception study that asked people whether they agreed that they looked up to five years younger, and one which did objectively assess skin age, but only showed a reduction of one year in biological skin age after 4 weeks (even though the participants in that same study reported an average reduction of five years.) They also submitted a peer-reviewed published study of the active ingredient which the ASA dismissed because it wasn’t based on the serum itself and didn’t look at daily use and the impact it had on improving the youthfulness of the skin.

My suspicion — and I can’t know this for certain — is that Beiersdorf knew that they didn’t really have data that proved that this serum was clinically proven to make you look up to five years younger. However they knew that they had a published clinical trial to show that Epicelline — one of the active ingredients in the serum — had anti-ageing properties (I’m fairly sure that this is the active ingredient study the ASA is referencing) and they gambled on putting the words “Clinically proven” far enough away from the “Up to five years younger” claim that they had some sort of plausible deniability. Interestingly, the original complaint about the product didn’t reference the “Clinically proven” claim, just the “Up to five years younger one” and the ASA adjudication suggests that even without that “Clinically proven” tag, the complaint would have been upheld.

There is SO much to talk about here, not least about the fact that the number of complaints about each ad was, er, one. Yep, a solitary, single complaint. And — again, I have no way of proving this, but I KNOW that this happens — I suspect that the complainant in each case may well have been a brand competitor. In fact last year an ASA complaint against another L’Oréal brand, La Roche-Posay, which was in-part upheld, was openly made by Beiersdorf.

I’m not saying we should disregard complaints if there’s only one, or if they’re made by competitors, I think it’s important that these things are flagged and held to account, so we don’t get that Overton window effect, where eventually it’s fine for a brand to claim with no evidence at all that a cream will make a 50 year old look 15. But I do think where complaints come from and the number of them is very indicative of how much the general public entirely disbelieves / ignores / doesn’t care about how they are marketed to.

However I am pretty pleased to see that these adjudications seem to show that the ASA doesn’t consider consumer perception studies good grounds for claims, and send the message that if you want to make a claim, you need to make sure that you’ve designed a clinical trial that can substantiate it. (I spend a LOT of my time as a consultant trying to get companies to work out what they ideally want to claim and how to design a trial that will substantiate that claim rather than doing a trial and realising they don’t have the data to support what they want to claim *eye roll*)

Let’s be clear, I don’t think any of this means these aren’t good serums. But I do think that it’s yet another example of the marketing department either extrapolating the science, or not understanding what the science shows. What baffles me is how the legal and regulatory departments didn’t intervene before it got to this point. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Duping as a dud marketing strategy

Can we talk about dupes? Of course I’ve talked about dupes before, in the context of MCo Beauty, for The Sun — and on my LinkedIn — and I’ve got a Lidl round the corner from my house so I often stop to look at their homages / rip-offs of Lush / Jo Malone London / L’Occitane and more. But this one landed in my inbox from a brand I’ve not really paid much attention to before.

Harry’s is a men’s shaving brand and as I rarely cover men’s grooming, I generally tend to glance through and delete, but this release, with the subject “LAUNCHING TODAY - Harry’s REDACTED. No Name. No Number. No Markup.” was about a body wash, specifically “Harry’s drops a body wash that smells like THAT scent - for a fraction of the price.” Now I don’t need to smell the “seriously familiar woody santal scent” to know that that Harry’s Redacted Body Wash (£8 for 458ml) is a rip off of Le Labo’s Santal 33 Shower gel (£48 for 237ml) — I mean just look at the packaging for a start…

Now what I don’t get is WHY? Arguably you could say job done, they’ve got my attention (and subsequently yours) by doing this. But is any attention good attention? Apparently the rationale behind this product is that it “leans into something consumers already say about Harry’s online: ‘the scents smell like they should cost ten times as much.’” In which case publicise that, but don’t do it by really obviously duping another brand.

Am I being too holier-than-thou about this? Is this brilliant, savvy marketing that will bring in customers who didn’t know the brand before? (Interestingly as I was writing this newsletter, the Business of Beauty published a feature on beauty brands faking scandals for attention and the associated risks of this strategy, which feels along the same lines.) Personally I think there are FAR cleverer ways to do this sort of thing. This is where good PR comes into its own. They could have made the same product in its usual packaging and the PR could have met up with a load of their contacts and said something along the lines of “OBVIOUSLY we can’t say this, but if you smell this next to Santal 33, I genuinely think you can’t tell the difference.”

Because they’re not the first brand to — deliberately or otherwise — create a smell-a-like of Santal 33. M&S’s Apothecary Warmth (£12) scent is not a million miles off although it doesn’t have anything like the complexity and doesn’t linger — but also, M&S kept it classy and didn’t go all out boasting about how they’d ripped off Le Labo. There are other products out there that have similar notes. I’m so obsessed with the Beauty Pie Le Smash Santal body cream (£35) that I actually can’t stop sniffing myself when I slather it on, while other people I rate rave about Saltaire’s Santal Bloom range (from £15).

My view on dupes broadly is quite simple. Fundamentally I’ve always believed that consumers, whatever their budget, should have access to good, effective products. And if, as a brand, you stand by the quality of your products, you shouldn’t have to rely on another brand’s reputation, formulation, or packaging to sell them. , a perfumer and author of Demo Accords, a book on fragrance (and so much more) has expressed a similar view. The debut issue of On The Scent magazine, a new fragrance-focused quarterly publication, features an abridged extract of her chapter on dupes and is well worth a read. I’m not going to reproduce it all here but her argument is, like mine, not that fragrance shouldn’t be democratised but that the way to democratise it isn’t through dupes.

“Dupe companies aren’t owned by poor, working-class people who are heroically Robin Hood-ing their way through perfumery’s elitism problems. They don’t take from the rich corporate brands and donate these formulas to struggling independent perfumer-wannabes; they don’t give consumers free perfume or operate as a non-profit. They’re stealing from everyone (not just from the rich and elitist), and making money from stolen labour.”

Instead she says that there are a LOAD of really good perfumes that AREN’T dupes and aren’t expensive — she mentions one of her favourites in the On The Scent feature and, rather brilliantly, she’s agreed to let me quiz her about other brilliant and not expensive fragrances so expect to see that in a forthcoming newsletter.

In short: dupes — not big, not clever, even in a pseudo-ironic fashion. There are better ways of drawing attention to yourself and selling your products.

That’s all for this week. I would love to hear your thoughts on any of the above — as well as ideas for anything you might like to see in future newsletters. Until next time…

So apologies if last week’s first paragraph seemed insane. Next week I promise the first paragraph will not reference dropcaps. Anyway, moving on… this week I’ve got my idiot’s guide to getting a perfect fake tan, and I picked the brains of a friend who was at the biggest international beauty trade show last month to give you an insight into what we might be seeing in the world of cosmetics in the future…

The ultimate fake tan guide

For the first time in ages I fake tanned and every time I do it, I wonder why I don’t do it more often. Everyone bangs on about how much better they look and feel with a tan and I am WITH you. I am anti the real UV-induced tan for multiple reasons (in brief: skin damage, premature ageing and skin cancer) but the mood-boosting value of faking it should not be under-estimated.

Indulge me in a bit of geekery before we get onto practicalities. In 2007, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary that has gone down in British beauty history. It was a programme about the science of skin and, among other things, looked at a University of Manchester study that appeared to show that a High Street product could actually reverse the signs of ageing. That High Street product was No7 Protect & Perfect and it led to a gold rush for the brand who sold a year’s supply in just two weeks. No7 have been trying to replicate that sort of magic ever since — and to be fair to them probably did it with Future Renew a few years ago. I loved the fact that that programme seemed to show that science could actually sell a beauty product, and that it prompted brands to invest in science — and talk about it. (On the flipside, it also led to a load of pseudoscience and marketing BS, but that’s another story.) Fun fact: at the time it was thought that the ingredient doing the heavy lifting in Protect & Perfect was retinyl palmitate, but nearly 20 years on, it seems likely that it was actually the peptide combination (Matrixyl) that was having the most significant effect.

Anyway, because everyone wangs on about the No7 thing from that documentary, they’ve forgotten some of the other stories that were covered in it. And one of my favourites was some research conducted by Paul Matts who, at the time was with P&G, home of Olay (also big on peptides, as it happens). You can read the paper that was subsequently published here but basically what they’d done was take clinical images of people’s faces, remove the wrinkles so you only saw the changes in colour, standardised the face size and shape and then asked people to make judgement calls about how old and how healthy the person was. It turns out that, as humans, we see even skintone as a signifier of health and youth. Basically being the same colour all over is more appealing to the human eye. I LOVED this research because it made me realise why I LOVE a (fake) tan. Having a (fake) tan evens my skintone — face and body — in a way that nothing else can.

For years I was a weekly faker. Back in the noughties, Judy Naake had revolutionised the world of fake tan with St Tropez. She knew that the best advocates for the tan were the women who had it and so every week Debs, from Calthrop PR, their PR agency, would ring round all her contacts and book you in. And every Thursday and Friday, the whole of mag-land and much of newspaper-land, would trot off to Judy’s mews house off Marylebone High Street where Sophie Evans or James Read would stick you in a booth wearing nothing but a pair of black paper pants and some sticky pads on your feet, and spray-paint you as if you were a car about to roll off the production line. Then, at beauty desks across the capital, women who looked like they were dressed for a funeral (on Fridays we wore black and loose, all the better to avoid stains and strap marks) grew browner and browner as the day wore on, and a stale biscuit-scented miasma hung over the computers.

These days I tend to DIY, and irregularly. But every time I do do it, I wonder why I don’t do it more often. The thought of it is more stressful than the actual doing and the difference it makes to how I feel about myself is off the scale. You’re going to want to know what I use, aren’t you? Well it’s all about personal preference and personally I want to go dark (if I’m going to do it, I might as well LOOK like I’ve done it) and I prefer a mousse with a guide colour. I find they spread more easily and I can be more convinced I’ve not missed a bit.

My current mousses of choice are the OG St Tropez Bronzing Mousse in Extra Dark (£34) and Vita Liberata’s The Mousse - Dark Result (£27). That said, I really think that fake tans have got so much better since the time as a teen I left orange hand prints on my upper arms, so largely I don’t think you can go wrong. I’ve used the super cheap St Moriz in the past and got a result I was very happy with. (Although with the cheaper ones, you might find they don’t have as many hydrating and moisturising ingredients in them so you might have to make more effort with slapping on a body moisturiser in the days after you’ve tanned.)

I also think that there is a far better range of tones so if, unlike me, you don’t want to look “coffee with just a splash of milk” tan and prefer something more “tea which is mostly milky” tan, there is something out there for you. (I’m reliably informed by paler-skinned friends who prefer a more subtle effect that Bare By Vogue is the way to go.)

I use a combo of gloves (surgical ones, ones left over from the last time you dyed your hair, any will do) and mitts (any mitts will do. I was once in the US and couldn’t find any in Target so I bought car polishing mitts instead and they were great) because however waterproof mitts say they are, they just aren’t and tan staining your hands is not what you want. I also wear a mitt on each hand as I think it’s easier and I use a third mitt, shoved on a long-handled body brush and secured in place with a hairband to do the bits on my back I can’t reach easily.

In an ideal world you’ll have exfoliated the day before. Usually I haven’t. I often haven’t shaved my legs either and if you’re planning on shaving them I strongly recommend you do it after you’ve tanned rather than before as, past experience suggests, you can end up with dots of tan in the pores. Yes shaving after can take off a bit of the tan, but I still think it’s the better option.

Over the years, I have developed what I consider to be a foolproof fake tanning method. Bits of it might sound faffy and a bit weird, but I SWEAR if you do it this way, it will be immaculate.

1. Ideally do it fully naked in front of a full-length mirror in strong light. I know, I know, but being able to see everything, and the bits you’ve done or not done makes for a better all-over tan (hence why I love a product with guide colour).

2. Apply a non-scented moisturiser to toes, heels, a line around the edge of your foot, knees, elbows and any other dry skin. I use the CeraVe Moisturising Cream but honestly anything without colour or scent (both of which could make the colour of the tan change) is fine.

3. Put on your gloves and mitts, and apply product to the mitt, then start at the shins and do shin to below the knee on both legs, adding more product if necessary. I use a circular motion pretty much all over my body, as if I’m buffing it in. Once you’ve done shin to below the knee, back and front, left and right, use what’s left on the the mitts to wipe over your feet and ankles.

4. Apply more product then do the leg from above the knee upwards on both sides, adding more product as necessary. Once you’ve done the top bit of your leg, back and front, left and right, use what’s left on the mitts to do your knees back and front.

5. Then do your bum, your belly, your lower back, then up as high as you can go on the back, your chest, your neck, adding more mousse as you need. Then do your face and ears with whatever’s leftover on the mitt. (Bear in mind, I’m dark so have no issue with tan getting into my eyebrows or hairline, but if you’re blonde, you might want to be a bit careful in these areas, and maybe use a dry flannel to wipe tan off these areas after you’ve done your face.)

6. By this point you should have done everything but your shoulders, arms and the bits of your back that you can’t reach. This is when I’d apply more product and do my shoulders. As I haven’t done my arms yet, I will push on the opposite elbow to get further round onto the shoulder blade on each side.

7. Now’s the point that you need your mitt on a stick. (You can buy a dedicated back applicator, but this has always worked fine for me. I’ve even used a mitt over the top of a kitchen fish slice in the past.) Apply your mousse then take the stick first in one hand and then in the other, working first from the top and then from the bottom. Apply more mousse if you need to, but at the end of this, you should have done the whole of your back.

8. Apply more product and do your forearms, all the way round and your upper arms in the same way, then use what’s leftover on the mitt to do your elbow. Finally I like to hold my hand above my head and do a complete sweep in little circles, down the inner arm from wrist to inner elbow to under arm to side boob, and then repeat on the other side.

9. Take off your mitts and gloves and put a line of moisturiser across all three sets of knuckles, then wipe whatever’s left on the mitts over the backs of your hands, and around any areas of your wrists that were covered by the mitts. Rub the backs of your hands together and interlace the fingers backwards.

10. Dab some moisturiser on the inside of your wrists and rub them together as if you were applying perfume. Then moisturise your palms and hands and interlink them as if you were praying. Let your tan dry a bit until it’s no longer tacky and put on something loose and dark. If you can avoid wearing underwear, so much the better.

I like to sleep in it but it does make your sheets a bit “Shroud of Turin” so if you have multi-million thread count Egyptian cotton you don’t want to stain (even though I do think it comes out), shower before bed and moisturise REALLY well. That’s it! I promise it really does take less time to do than to read about doing it. If you do try my foolproof plan, let me know in the comments how you get on.

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The future of beauty

Much as I would love to spend my time flying round the world attending geeky beauty conferences and trade shows, the reality is that the combo of childcare required and ROI isn’t really worth it. Fortunately I do have a number of like-minded friends and contacts who, between them, cover a lot of them. And, I figured if I’m interested in what they’re reporting back, you might be too. So, when I mentioned spicules on Instagram a few weeks back and Elissa Corrigan messaged me saying “Everyone was talking about spicules at Cosmoprof”, I obviously asked her what else they were talking about and whether she’d be keen to contribute some thoughts to BeautyGeekery.

For those that don’t know, Cosmoprof is basically the biggest beauty industry trade show. It takes place annually over about three days in Bologna, and is where people meet to do deals, identify trends, be inspired, and find out what’s next. So you can see why I’d be keen to know more.

I first met Elissa through Instagram. She founded her own supplement company, Elle Sera, and, when she wanted to launch a new, and very geeky, collagen supplement last year, she asked me if I’d do some consulting around the launch. When I met her, not really knowing what to expect, I really liked her no-BS approach to everything. She’s a former journalist so understands the game, and she’s also a super-savvy businesswoman who knows her customers inside out and has a real sense of loyalty to them. Have a look at her Instagram, or if podcasts are more your thing, take a listen to hers, which covers “midlife vitality, female health, fitness, mindset and creating a life (and business) that actually feels good.”

Anyway, I grilled her about what she thought were the most exciting aspects of Cosmoprof this year…

K-Beauty marches on

Elissa says that Korean beauty was the single most dominant force at the entire show and, in her words, “I have complicated feelings about this. We have completely different skin in the UK. Korean skin is typically more sebaceous oilier, with different pore structure, different moisture retention patterns, different baseline hydration levels. The K-beauty routine was designed around that skin type. Seventeen steps, hydration layers, essence on essence on essence: brilliant for Korean skin, and potentially a one-way ticket to a compromised barrier for a lot of British women whose skin is drier, thinner, and generally not built for that volume of product.”

Now, I don’t know if I agree with her assessment. As much because, from what I understand, K-beauty is generally about protecting the skin barrier, and it’s us over here that slather on actives that ruin it. But I do agree that — broadly — we might be looking for very different things from our skincare. I also agree that “Korean formulation technology is genuinely extraordinary. Their capsule tech, their texture innovation, their willingness to experiment, it’s all exceptional.”

On which note, expect to see…

Temperature-changing experiential skincare

“The cooling category is exploding, masks, moisturisers and essences engineered to physically lower skin temperature on contact, using menthol-free cooling technologies, encapsulated water, and temperature-adaptive textures that respond to body heat. The heating version works the opposite way: solid products or masks that melt and activate on contact with skin warmth, releasing actives as they do so. The logic behind both is more than purely sensorial. Cooling reduces inflammation, calms redness, and addresses what the industry is now calling ‘heat-ageing’ the idea that chronic heat exposure and facial flushing accelerates skin ageing in a way we haven’t historically paid enough attention to.”

I was particularly interested by Elissa’s postscript on this one: “dermatologists point out the cooling sensation is largely experiential rather than therapeutically transformative on its own, but when you pair that mechanism with genuinely active ingredients in a format that feels like an immediate reward, you’ve got a product people will actually use consistently. And consistent use is, as always, where the results actually come from.”

Pestlo

Elissa said this Korean brand, which describes itself as “a skin pharmacist who heals your skin”, was her “favourite stand of the whole show” and she was particularly taken by their Saferecipe sunscreen line. I’ve got to be honest, the fact that this range is described as being EWG-compliant (see previous rants about Yuka) would turn me off, but I do get the appeal of The Grinding Sun Pact SPF 50+ PA+++ , which has the same sort of massive pencil sharpener delivery system I’ve seen before. “You apply it over makeup with the puff,” says Elissa. “It transforms from a smooth balm into a soft, powdery, matte finish on skin which doesn’t disturb makeup underneath.” Like her, I’m a fan of anything that’s going to encourage people to reapply sun protection over makeup. I will be getting my hands on this and putting it to the test.

Wearable collagen

When Elissa mentioned this, it made me think of when M&S did tights with micro-encapsulated moisturiser so that your skin was moisturised as you moved… I’m not sure they still do them which might tell you all you need to know but Korea-based brand Filagen Global have taken things a step further with a fibre made from “marine collagen peptides extracted from milkfish scales (a food industry waste product — credit where it’s due) fused with cellulose from wood pulp, using nanotechnology. The resulting fibre is reportedly biodegradable, sustainable, and — they claim — genuinely functional for skin.”

The suggestion is that you could have sports kit made from this stuff and, because the peptides aren’t coated onto the fabric, the idea is that they can’t be washed out. Other benefits the company is claiming include moisturising, UPF 50+ UV protection, deodorising, antibacterial and anti-static. Crucially their testing claims skin moisture content SPF 50+, PA+++ in Filagen wearers than in cotton wearers.

Now, as I mentioned, Elissa launched a collagen supplement so, as you might expect, this is kind of her bag…

“The moisturising mechanism is actually the most defensible claim,” she says. “Collagen peptides are hygroscopic — they attract and hold water molecules — so wearing them next to skin in a warm, slightly sweaty environment could genuinely create a more hydrated microclimate at the skin surface. Fine.

The idea that your gym kit is doing your skincare while you do your downward dog, however, requires a reality check. The 500 Dalton rule is the established threshold for transdermal penetration — molecules above that size don’t cross intact skin. Collagen molecules are nowhere near small enough. Even hydrolysed collagen, which has been broken down into smaller peptides, still sits at around 3,000 Daltons. That is six times too large to penetrate skin.”

But wearable skincare is definitely becoming a thing, if it’s not already. Elissa told me about a brand called Coperni who this year launched probiotic and prebiotic-infused athleisure in collaboration with Swiss biotech company HeiQ. Their USP is the fabric contains a blend of prebiotics and probiotics that last for up to 40 washes and transfer to your skin via body heat and friction. It’s an interesting concept and I can see how you could — temporarily at least — adjust the skin microbiome in this way. Although I’d like to see the long-term data. And so would Elissa. “Fashion is becoming a health asset,” she says. “Consumers are thinking about what their clothing is doing to (or for) their skin. That’s a real cultural shift worth tracking. I just want the data first.”

Spicules

When I mentioned spicules on Instagram, people were definitely interested in learning more so I might gloss over this one now, with a view to more of a deep dive in a few weeks time. But spicules, another Korean creation, are microscopic needle-shaped structures from marine sponge skeletons that when included in formulations can apparently both exfoliate and improve penetration of actives.

“Spicules were everywhere at this show,” Elissa told me. “On every other stand, in every other ingredient story, and unlike approximately 60% of what was being shouted about, the science behind them is legitimate.” More on this in a few weeks…

Packaging innovation

What product goes in is as much a story as the product itself, and according to Elissa, there are some interesting things going on there too. She flagged Shinkwang M&P’s Air Mist Gas-Free Spray System (another Korean invention) which won a Cosmopack Award. “It eliminates the aerosol propellant entirely — no gas, no flammability, no transport restrictions — using mechanical air compression to deliver stable 360° atomisation. It’s mega. It should be, and will be, everywhere soon.”

And, while she says she was initially suspicious of Korean contract manufacturer Cosmax’s Flush-it Melting Pad, it eventually won her over. “It’s made with a plant-based material designed not just to be technically flushable but to genuinely dissolve and biodegrade in water. It maintains its structure completely during use — you apply your toner, it holds together, does its job — and then breaks down when disposed of. No fatbergs. No microplastic. No landfill. Unlike the wet wipe industry’s version of “flushable” which essentially means “capable of leaving your U-bend and then becoming someone else’s sewage problem” this product appears to have actually solved the disposal question at a materials level.”

And while Korean innovation clearly dominated, there were other noteworthy contenders…

The cleanser that makes its own cotton pad

“This was a Cosmoprof Awards finalist, and deserved to be,” Elissa tells me. “Colep Consumer Products Portugal developed the Skin Sync Clean Slate Make-Up Remover using what they’re calling Dermapad technology — and the mechanism is genuinely clever.”

The aerosol delivers a foam that transforms into a soft, cotton-like pad which is already infused with a cleanser designed to remove makeup. It sounds brilliant and eco-friendly (although I’d be keen to know if — by switching a cotton pad for a can, you’re just swapping one sustainability issue for another.)

“I have questions about how it performs on heavy or waterproof makeup,” says Elissa. “I’d want to test it properly. But as a format innovation — actually impressive.” Agree. (I found a video of it on Insta which I’ve shared below…)

Hearteningly, sustainability did seem to be a big part of the conversation — but in a different way from previously. “Before brands were bolting an eco story onto an existing product and hoping nobody looked too closely,” says Elissa. “What I saw at this show were engineers and materials scientists solving actual problems — the aerosol propellant problem, the cotton pad waste problem — with real solutions. Not all of it is there yet. But the quality of thinking has gone up considerably.”

Our chat about Cosmoprof was extensive — and there was a LOT that we covered that was less convincing and more ethically (and evidentially) questionable, but I think I’ll save that for another time as this is getting WAY too long.

By the way, if you’re a beauty editor / writer and you’re reading this and you’d like to confess your worst beauty habit to me, I’m thinking about putting together a load of them in a forthcoming newsletter. It was prompted by me thinking about some of my guilty beauty pleasures. Y’know… stuff that derms say you shouldn’t do, stuff that you know is an eco crime but you’re just obsessed, stuff that people are shocked you do because you’re a beauty editor. You can be anon if you’re really ashamed of it, but if you fancy ‘fessing up, I’d love to hear it…

Phew…. that was a long one… until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

Sadly it’s not all Pollyanna stuff this week because you’ve also got my take on “intimate” moisturisers (who knew? Not me until the release landed in my inbox this week, but apparently there are loads and they have been all over TikTok.) And I know other people have had their say on this but SheerLuxe’s new way of covering beauty (and fashion and travel) has not landed well with me either.

As ever, I’d love to know your thoughts on ALL of this, so do chime in in the comments below…

An update or two…

Last week I promised you an update on two stories that appeared in this newsletter in recent weeks. The first was the massive environmental abomination of a PR mailer that I called out in my Unearthed beauty geekery newsletter. Quick recap…

I did actually post an update to this one on Notes but I think it’s only fair to pop it in the newsletter too as I think Notes can get lost.

After I’d flagged it with the PR, they told me that they took my point, that it was something that they were mindful of, that they would be discussing it with the brand and would keep it in mind in the future. They then forwarded me the brand’s response…

As a brand, we take this very seriously and will be more vigilant moving forward, particularly in limiting PR mailers that involve excessive packaging. It was quite surprising to see our products featured in that context, and we’re taking this as an important learning.

Regarding the XXXX PR mailer kit, the concept was rooted in offering a Korean gifting experience. The acrylic component was intentionally designed as a reusable beauty/vanity drawer rather than a single-use PR element. It was meant to reflect a meaningful cultural reference - drawing inspiration from how women in the XXXX dynasty stored their most personal and treasured items. We had positioned this as a keepsake gift for editors to highlight our heritage as part of the brand introduction.

That said, we completely agree with the concerns around packaging. Internally, we had already been discussing ways to minimize this; however, we were advised by the production team to reinforce packaging due to risks of breakage during air shipment from Korea, which led to overpackaging. We will absolutely take this feedback on board and refine our approach going forward.

I mean some explanation of the context would have been good (there was literally a postcard giving me the names of the products), and there’s a certain naivety about just how many mailers editors get and the limits of our storage capacity if every single one of them includes a keepsake gift… but credit where it’s due for the response.

Similarly, some of you may remember my rant about Bioderma platforming the pseudoscientific app Yuka on their website, which I talked about in my Demonised ingredients geekery newsletter. Well here’s Bioderma’s response…

We have carefully read your recent Substack on YUKA scoring. Thank you for your feedback. We would like to reassure you that, the real proof of our products’ quality and safety comes from the clinical studies and rigorous testing behind them. These are the references we trust and prioritise when it comes to demonstrating the performance and safety of our formulations. YUKA’s evaluation method only considers the INCI list, which makes it incomplete for fully appreciating the complexity of a skincare formula and the importance of proper ingredient dosages.

That said, many of our consumers follow YUKA closely and often look for those scores. Mentioning the rating on our website is simply a way to reassure them and provide transparency, but it remains a very small part of how we demonstrate the quality and safety of our products.

We’re currently migrating our website and reviewing all content for the updated site. Some items were already planned for removal, so this timing aligns with our ongoing updates.

The PR confirmed that YUKA will not be on the Bioderma site going forward. So that’s a lovely little win on the pseudoscience whack-a-mole front.

Does your vagina need beautifying?

There’s a joke in journalism about headlines that are QTWTAIN — Questions To Which The Answer Is No. This is one of them. I’m not going to mention the brand here because, honestly, I don’t want to give them the oxygen of publicity, but I got a press release the other day for “naturally dissolving melts designed for intimate self-care.” (i.e. pessaries that you stick inside your vagina. Also, medical fact of the week: pessaries are for your vagina, suppositories are for your anus. In case you were wondering.) I tried to take a moment to work out why it angered me so much and tried to think reasonably about how maybe I just wasn’t the target audience but maybe there would be some people who would be. And I just kept coming back to the same thing. This is a product designed to harness shame and present it as self-care.

The website talks about it being indulgence for “an area that's been left out of the beauty conversation for way too long.” Do we really need to talk about why your vagina does not need to be a part of the beauty conversation? Do you even know what the inside of your vagina looks like? Does anyone except your gynaecologist actually know what the inside of your vagina looks like? The inside of your vagina does not need moisturising with plant oils, vitamin E and fruit extracts. Especially when the different fragrances are called “Ripe Cherry”, “Sweet Strawberry” and “Soft Peach”. This is like “intimate deodorants” and “yoni steaming” all over again. Your vagina doesn’t need moisturising, deodorising or detoxifying. It’s an amazing self-cleaning, self-regulating part of your body that can quite happily look after itself without intervention. And if it does need intervention, it should be medical, not beauty.

But don’t just take my word for it. I spoke to Dr Clare Spencer. She’s an NHS GP who initially trained in obstetrics and gynaecology, and a registered menopause specialist.

“If you’re experiencing vaginal dryness in menopause, for example, then it’s far better to use a vaginal oestrogen and/or a lubricant that are matched in acidity to the vagina,” she says. “My worry about using melts like this is that they are unlikely to be as evidence-based as vaginal oestrogens or the non-hormonal moisturisers that we can prescribe, and we don’t know what they do to the vaginal bacterial balance, which is really important for vaginal health.”

She also points out that because the vulval tissue is really delicate, shoving anything up there can cause irritation, itching, and excessive vaginal discharge which can further irritate it.

And, she says, products like this can mask underlying health issues.

“If there’s a change in odour, that needs checking out to make sure you haven’t got bacterial vaginosis or an STI or thrush. If there’s sudden dryness, why is that the case? Is it a sign of the menopause or other hormonal disruption? If so that can be managed more effectively by treating the root cause.”

Also let’s get really real here. I have not tried these particular pessaries, but I have had IVF which entailed using progesterone pessaries and even if you rebranded them as “dissolving melts designed to deliver medication to your most intimate area” they’d still leave you feeling sticky and unpleasant with waxy gunk in your underwear. TMI? Sorry but if you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about.

Let’s be really honest, this feels like a product that is designed to make women feel that what they are naturally is not enough for men. It’s an extension of the pornification of women and sex that we’ve seen happening for a long time. Just like it’s not enough to have normal sex, you have to have porn filmworthy sex, it’s not enough to have a vagina, you have to have a moisturised, fruit-flavoured one. Oh do me a favour.

I think the reason that this bothers me so much is the framing of it as “self-care”. This isn’t self-care, this is the very definition of “other-care”. It’s not for your benefit, it’s entirely for someone else’s.

writes really well on the way in which the beauty and wellness industries have reframed certain products as “self-care” as a particularly insidious and privileged form of marketing, and this feels like that but to the nth degree. Rant over.

Tell me which retinoid your microchip is loving this week

Sometimes things happen and they just make me feel really old. So last week online magazine SheerLuxe posted a reel with four new AI influencers. For clarity, these are not influencers that talk about AI, they are “people” (avatars) who don’t really exist. They’re generated by AI and will each be “bringing their own perspective on fashion, beauty, travel and careers.”

Wait WHAT? I know, I know, we’ll get to ALL that. If this story sounds a bit familiar, it’s because this isn’t the first time that Sheer Luxe has done this. Back in July 2024, they introduced their first AI avatar, “Reem” and there was a huge outcry. People accused them of depriving real people of jobs and called it weird, disturbing and performative. At the time, Sheer Luxe responded in a statement that said:

“Since the start of SheerLuxe, innovation has been central to what we do - and as we enter a new era of tech and AI, we wanted to stay at the forefront. It is clear we didn’t explain it properly and we’re sorry.

Reem was born entirely from our desire to experiment with AI, not to replace a human role. She is an AI generated image only, and is not able to create content or articles. No jobs were compromised in any way as a result of her creation and we would never publish any content that hasn’t had human involvement.

We’ll keep innovating and, as ever, are always keen to hear from people - we are listening and in future we will explain such newness better to our readers.”

Well they may say they’re listening but flash forward almost two years and they’re not just doubling down, they’re quadrupling down, with three new AI avatars joining Reem.

The one that obviously caught my eye was Gigi, “the beauty obsessive of the group.” In “her” intro vid, she says “Think skincare routines, makeup discoveries and the products actually worth adding to your routine. I love testing new launches, sharing glow-boosting skincare and finding those every day beauty staples that make getting ready feel a little more special”

This is just MAD, right? I get that “Gigi’s” opinions are going to be an amalgamation of those of the beauty team at SheerLuxe but then why are they not giving them to us direct? Because that is SheerLuxe’s schtick, making stars of their editorial team. It’s the first person thing that I feel like really seized and ran with with xoJane and continues to do with here. And while I get that there is a place for it within media, as I’ve said before, I don’t think it should be the only way that stories in the lifestyle space should be told. Although you might think that I’d love this — after all it was only a few newsletters ago that I was wanging on about not wanting to show my own face. Maybe the solution is Ceecee, my own personal AI avatar who can be the mouthpiece for everything I want to say about beauty? Or maybe not. Because aside from the “pay real women” argument, it’s weird and it’s creepy and we don’t have to be able to articulate what it is about publications using AI avatars rather than real people that makes us really uncomfortable, we just know instinctively, in our guts, that it’s not what we want.

Maybe it’s that we’re actually scared by the idea that the nature of what it means to be a person, to be real, is threatened by the existence of bots who almost look and sound convincing. (I’d love to get ’s take on this.) Maybe it’s the far more prosaic inability to trust the recommendations that are being made, as makeup artist, Lan Nguyen-Grealis (@lanslondon) pointed out. “With no practical experience an Ai avatar cannot or should not be recommending anything as we all want to know who’s behind the button.” Or, as comedian Ellie Taylor put it, “Would love to know what retinol a hard drive uses. You ok Hun?!” Then there’s the fact that every single one of these avatars is conventionally beautiful and catwalk model sized — “You made these people from scratch and not one of them could have been midsize or plus size?” asked . This is clearly, transparently, if you go by the comments on the post, not what anybody wants.

So why are they doing it? I can’t see this being the sort of “any publicity is good publicity” stunt that will pull people towards the brand. So they must genuinely feel like this is the future. If you take the emotion out of it, and take at face value the fact that, as they claim, nobody’s being done out of a job, and these are just mouthpieces for the SheerLuxe staff, it sort of makes sense, right? I mean, you can understand the utility of creating a generic person who you think your readers will relate to, the perfect blend of the aspects of various members of staff that are shared with your readers, and none of the bits that aren’t.

After all archetypes are not new. Politicians think about voters in terms of White Van Man and Centrist Dad. And, in the past, when I’ve done copywriting for brands, they’ve often given me a pen sketch of their consumer (“Brenda is 52 and lives in the Midlands. She works in a bank, has two grown-up children who still live at home. She buys most of her beauty products with the weekly supermarket shop but might be tempted by something on a promotion in Boots etc etc”)

These can be helpful when you’re thinking about policies, or how to write something that will engage someone. But when you meet the actual people who these archetypes are meant to represent, for all that they may, collectively, have shared values and things in common, they’ll also have quirks, aspects of their personality that don’t fit your pre-conceptions. Maybe White Van Man listens to opera, or Brenda has a past as a heavy metal roadie and has a load of tattoos you weren’t expecting. People are multi-dimensional, that’s what makes them interesting.

And I think that (among many things) is the issue here. We mistrust someone who is always completely on message. And I love that we do. I think it’s healthy that we can tell that something is off. The same is true with all the A.I. word slop that I keep seeing being churned out. It just feels off, even if we can’t pinpoint why, it lacks heart, personality, emotion. It’s all the words, put down in a way that makes sense, but nothing that interrupts the monotony to excite us, engage us, shake us up.

I do realise I may be a dinosaur in thinking like this, and that this is the future and SheerLuxe are just ahead of the curve. But I sort of hope it isn’t. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

TLC

After all that ranting, something a bit more calming…I’ve had a few dry patches on my face this week and so I’ve dialled back the prescription tret in favour of some serious soothing and hydration overnight. I love to use something that’s going to put some moisture into the skin layered under something that’s going to hold it there. So a humectant, followed by an occlusive, or something watery followed by something oily.

My go-to combo for this is Reome Active Recovery Broth (currently from £35.20 at Space NK with the code FIRST20 if you’ve not shopped online at SpaceNK before) followed by Skin Rocks The Support Oil (currently £52 with that SpaceNK code). Both are brands set up by women who I know and respect when it comes to skincare and these two products are TOTALLY worth it, although I realise that neither are exactly budget.

This week, I grabbed a couple of other options (Reome and SR were in the bedroom, I was in the bathroom) and layered the Belif Aqua Bomb Sleeping Mask (£29) under Trilogy’s Rosehip Oil (£14.62). Did that two nights on the trot and the dry patches have disappeared. I have to say that the Belif mask doesn’t have half the brilliant actives in it that the Reome broth does and so while you definitely get the hydration, you don’t get the soothing — and the same is true for the Trilogy oil vs Skin Rocks. So, if you’ve got some sort of stress or irritant reaction going on, the pricier ones would be my recommendation. But if you just want a bit of hydration, Belif and Trilogy have you covered.

That’s all for this week. Cannot WAIT to hear your thoughts on all of the above so please do not hold back in the comments. Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

Drunk Elephant goes to rehab

Last week I said I wanted to have a bit of a dig into whether Drunk Elephant could rehab its reputation and lord knows they’re trying. First up if you don’t know what’s been going on with Drunk Elephant, let’s start at the very beginning. Drunk Elephant is the brainchild of Tiffany Masterson, a Texas housewife, it launched in the US in 2013, in the UK in 2018, and was acquired by Shiseido in 2019. Her founder story was a classic “I couldn’t find anything blah blah blah so I made it myself.” To which my response these days is frequently “look a bit harder.”

(Honestly, there is an entire newsletter to be written about founder stories. In exactly the same way that literary theory has it that there are only a limited number of story archetypes, I’d argue that there is a similarly limited number of founder story archetypes, but that’s for another day.)

When Drunk Elephant launched, it was very much positioned as a “clean” brand. Now I’m not sure if I’ve ranted about “clean” on this platform before but if I had to briefly sum up my beef with it as a concept:

1) it means nothing — literally. There’s no legal definition of “clean beauty” although it often involves demonising a load of ingredients that have been shown to be safe to use in skincare. And there is also no consensus among the brands about what those demonised ingredients should be.

2) it suggests that anything that’s not branded as clean must, by default, be dirty or toxic, which is just BS because as established previously, there are actual laws based on actual science, created with toxicologists who have done the work (not just decided that if you can’t pronounce something, or might find it in another form in a non-skincare product, it must be dangerous) to ensure that beauty products aren’t toxic.

3) oh do I really have to explain further? It’s just pseudoscience and scaremongering and all the bollocks that seems to get traction because screaming “THIS FACE CREAM IS GOING TO GIVE YOU CANCER AND YOU’RE GOING TO DIE” gets way more attention than calmly saying “You’re going to die at some point, we all do. But the likelihood that your face cream is going to cause your death (via cancer or any other route) is, on the balance of things, based on biology, chemistry and probability, vanishingly small.”

Anyway, yeah, when Drunk Elephant launched, they weren’t screaming about death and cancer, at least not overtly, but what they were doing was talking about “The suspicious six—silicones, essential oils, chemical screens, SLS, drying alcohols, and fragrances or dyes.” I can’t actually be bothered to go into why, individually each of these is not really that suspicious at all for most people (although if you want me to I will, just let me know in the comments). Interestingly, a few years later, when the clean backlash had started in earnest, Tiffany Masterson had toned down the language she was using around these ingredients. In this 2022 interview with Get The Gloss, she says “I knew there were six ingredients that I wasn’t going to include. That’s not that because they’re dangerous – I’m not scaremongering by not including them…” I mean calling ingredients the “suspicious six”≠ scaremongering? Whatever.

She also had what she called a “Skin is skin philosophy”, rejecting the idea of skin types (oily, sensitive, dry) and instead calling them “skin ‘behaviours’ because they are something we can fix very easily by eliminating bad ingredients from our routines.” There are quite a lot of dermatologists and a fair amount of scientific evidence that would suggest otherwise on that but let’s just let that one go for now…

So that was the start. And then there was the Sephora Kids issue. If you’re not familiar with it, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph about it last year. Ugh. I mean it wasn’t exactly Drunk Elephant’s fault that they’d made brightly-coloured, supremely Instagramable packaging that appeared in a gazillion social media posts that were watched by teens, who then went out to buy products that were entirely unsuitable for their skin and in all likelihood would actually damage it. But it’s not like they really tried to stop it.

In a now-deleted Instagram post (they’ve deleted a LOT of Instagram posts, but more on that later) in December 2023, Masterson assured customers that most of the products were “designed for all skin, including kids and tweens”, responding to the question, “Can kids & tweens use Drunk Elephant?” She said “Yes!” adding that they should “stay away from our more potent products that include acids and retinols—their skin does not need these ingredients quite yet.” In emails to Glamour for a piece published in January 2024, she clarified her position and said that although the brand had gained its “highest number of followers ever this year across all social platforms,” leading to a “growth in awareness and our sales” she was adamant that they weren’t purposefully marketing products to children.

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For what it’s worth, I believe they weren’t purposefully marketing products to children, but their attempts to actually put a stop to kids using their products were seriously half-hearted. I’d like to believe that a massive company sees thousands (millions?) of dollars of sales and decides that they don’t want the cash, but it kind of felt they were doing a v-e-r-y slow-motion run to slam the tills shut before those pesky kids and their parents could throw any more money into them.

Flash forward two years and the brand are really trying to distance themselves from kids. And with good reason, Cosmetics Business reported DE had experienced “multiple consecutive quarters of declining sales” which is kind of not surprising. The kids wanted it, the kids got it, the kids got told it wasn’t for them, but the grown-ups decided that if the kids wanted it then they didn’t… Maybe… Anyway, in January this year, they wiped clean (LOL) their Instagram, and relaunched with their “Please Enjoy Responsibly” campaign, claiming “The next era of Drunk Elephant is here: refined, elevated, and strictly intentional. We believe skincare works best when every ingredient has a purpose and every step has a plan. No fillers, no distractions.”

I mean, you kind of had me up until the “no fillers” bit. Fillers has become one of those words that “clean” brands like to use. As far as I’m concerned it’s another way to scaremonger or throw shade. Brands that talk about “no fillers” are suggesting that other brands use “filler” ingredients — ingredients that don’t have an active role to play in a product formulation — to bulk it out. But, this is bollocks. Products are more than just active ingredients. An active ingredient on its own is like a chocolate cake made only from chocolate. It’s not a cake. An ingredient needs a delivery system to get it to where it needs to be, a preservative system that keeps it safe to use, ingredients that make it feel nice to use and make the consumer want to keep using it. So calling any ingredients “filler ingredients” is just the same “we’re better than they are” BS repackaged.

And I’m kind of fine with that, it’s what I expect from a clean brand. But the rebrand doesn’t stop there. A few weeks ago, my Instagram feed was packed with journalists, influencers, dermatologists, aesthetic doctors talking about the Drunk Elephant event that they’d gone to, it was all about “the new era” and “reminding everyone of its serious skincare roots.” Er, sorry what? A brand that starts out by demonising ingredients by definition doesn’t have serious skincare roots.

If you read my newsletter from a few weeks ago about demonised ingredients, you’ll know how strongly I feel about this sort of thing. In that newsletter I said:

I kind of feel like you live by the science and you die by the science. You can’t just pick up “science” and use it as a marketing tool when it suits you and then drop it when it doesn’t.

And to a certain extent I feel that the opposite should be true too. If you’re going down the clean, anti-science, woo-woo line, go down the clean, anti-science, woo-woo line. But don’t pretend you can be clean and scientific and serious about skincare. Because you can’t. It’s like being wet and dry at the same time. They’re two polar ends of the same spectrum. I’m fascinated to see how this works out for Drunk Elephant and who they’re really targeting as a consumer — not just from an age point of view, from a psychological point of view. Because while I think clean and serious skincare are a total contradiction, maybe they’re actually bang on. Maybe there are clean fans out there who do think clean is about science and serious skincare. Maybe this is what they want. Watch this space.

The new No7 — what’s the deal?

I wasn’t going to write about the new launch from No7 for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s for women in their 30s and as so much beauty journalism these days is based on “I tried this and I thought it was…”, there was no way I was going to be asked to try out a product range designed for a woman 10 years younger than me. But more importantly, I did some consultancy work with the brand on this project.

I’ve worked as a consultant for brands for years and I always try to make sure I’m really clear with them about the line that I draw between consulting and journalism. I think it’s really important that there is a line. When I started out as a consultant, before the social media explosion that changed everything, the idea that a journalist would be paid to write about a brand was absolutely anathema. It was the sort of thing that would get you blacklisted by a publication or an editor. Of course now all that has changed. But I personally still hold the line. If I’m writing or talking about a brand on my own platforms, I’ll say that I’ve worked with them. And I don’t pitch stories on projects that I’ve consulted on. It just doesn’t feel ethical. Even if it’s not the case, it could look like I’d been paid to place a story. I care about the truth, but I also care about the optics.

So yeah, Prime Forever was not something I planned to cover. But when the range launched last Wednesday my DMs, my WhatsApps, my inbox were on fire with people asking me what I thought about it. So here’s my take on it…

Prime Forever is an interesting proposition. From a marketing point of view it’s targeting a demographic that’s beyond spots and starting to think about lines, but not quite reached anti-ageing. But it also makes sense for No7 to capitalise on the brand new ingredients they spent years — and a load of cash — developing. I’m talking about the peptides that form the basis of Future Renew, the range that the brand launched in April 2023. I wrote about it at the time and it was the first time in a long time that I’d been really excited about the science behind a range.

As you’ll know if you read my Honest Geekery newsletter,

I care less about whether something worked for me than about whether objectively you can show that it’s worked for 50 people who aren’t me. What I think becomes irrelevant if you’ve tried something on 50, 100, 200, 300 different women and have good clinical data showing that it’s effective

But not only did No7 have good clinical data, the Future Renew serum was also one of those products that people messaged me about saying. “I bought it because you rated it, but then I bought it again because it really worked.”

The same peptides that are in Future Renew are also in Prime Forever and in the same concentration that they showed worked in Future Renew. Those peptides are great at prompting the skin to produce more elastin and collagen. In Future Renew the patent-pending peptide combo was dubbed Pepticology. My eyes rolled so far back in my head when I heard that. It felt like the marketing department was trying to “science up” what was actually already really good science.

It reminded of that Maureen Lipman BT ad…

(Yeah, I know I’m showing my age 1988 FFS, but it’s a good ‘un.)

They’ve not dropped the ‘ologies for this new range either. Glaciology is the name they’ve given to the trademarked combination of antioxidants (vitamin C, vitamin E, plus extracts of camellia and myrtle leaf, and another one called Lipochroman) and peptides (the original ones from Future Renew plus another rice peptide) in the new range and honestly, I hate it. And I’m not the only one. While I was writing this newsletter, posted this note…

So yes, let’s get into it…

Let’s be clear, you can’t stop the ageing process. But, when it comes to skin, there are two different aspects to the ageing process. There’s extrinsic ageing — the stuff that is down to outside forces, such as the weather (not just UV, but cold, wind etc, but yeah, mostly UV), pollution and stress. Then there’s intrinsic ageing, the fact that whatever is going on on the outside, the cells in your body get older, and the processes get slower and less efficient. While there’s quite a lot you can do about extrinsic ageing, there’s not a lot you can do about intrinsic ageing. But, given that an estimated 80% of what we think of as skin ageing has been put down to UV, if you can affect that, you can affect quite a lot. I mean take a look at the difference between the skin on your face and the skin on your bum (assuming you don’t regularly sunbathe in a thong).

Now, the biggest problem with all this is that in order to show that a product is reducing the speed at which you age from your 30s, you kind of have to have people use it for a decent chunk of time and then show that the people who have used it have aged slower than the ones that didn’t. But brands can’t really afford to hang around for five years — or the 20 years they’re quoting in their promotional blurb — to prove that their science works and so for this range, they’ve leaned really heavily on extrapolating what seems to me to be good science. (It doesn’t automatically follow that their extrapolations are correct, but I broadly believe the science that they’re basing them on seems to be.)

When it comes to “actives” in the range, there are four main elements: the original Future Renew peptides, the new rice peptide, the antioxidants and the 5* SPF and it’s true that, there is decent evidence to show that all of them can help stave off the ageing process in various different ways.

The Future Renew peptides have been shown to boost levels of collagen and elastin which do diminish with age. Then there’s this new rice peptide that apparently helps inhibit the activity of an enzyme in the body, collagenase, that breaks down collagen. So yes, in theory both sets of peptides could be said to be theoretically slowing the rate of ageing, if you accept that ageing=less collagen and less elastin, so keeping levels of these proteins high=slower ageing.

Next up are the antioxidants. A quick recap on oxidative stress — those free radicals that you hear a lot about that antioxidants neutralise. Free radicals are basically unstable compounds that are generated by pollution, UV and also internally by the body through processes such as exercise. Unstable compounds have an innate desire to stabilise themselves and the way they normally do this is by nicking bits of other cells in the body (this is not the way a chemist or biologist would describe it but that’s the gist of it) and we think that this accelerates the ageing process. However if you introduce them to antioxidants, they nick bits of antioxidant instead.

And so the theory is that increasing the levels of antioxidants can reduce the level of oxidative stress and if you reduce the level of oxidative stress, you age slower. No7 have done the experiments to see if the antioxidant blend in their new serum does what it’s meant to do and their in vivo tests (which mean done on real people not just in a lab in a Petri dish or test tube) show that within 30 minutes of applying the serum, and longer-term, after 28 days, the skin has more antioxidant capacity than it did before. They’ve also been able to show that those antioxidants are doing what you’d want them to and measured levels of oxidative stress that are seven times lower than on skin that hadn’t applied the serum. So this is another of the ways in which they’re claiming that they can slow down skin ageing activity.

Finally there’s the 5* SPF 50 primer that forms part of the range. 5* means you’re getting a 1:1 ratio of UVA:SPF protection and is about as good as it gets in terms of UV protection and this is at the heart of what they’re claiming with that AI pic that seems to be bothering everyone (and I can totally understand why.)

As Jane (BBB) pointed out, “she looks fine in all of those pictures and if you asked me about the middle one, I would not be able to say that she has 70% less ageing signs than the last picture” which is what they are claiming.

To get that stat, No7 worked with a photobiologist (I know who and they’re really well respected but I don’t think that info is in the public domain and so I don’t think I can share it) who looked at the product and made a calculation based on applying 1mg/cm² (interestingly not the prescribed 2mg/cm² but something more realistic which I think is very interesting) on someone who works inside, and taking into account how it will wear during the day, and assuming no reapplication. According to Mike Bell, their head of science research, “This gets to about a reduction of 88% in UV radiation.” They then used that stat I quoted above that at least 80% of facial ageing is caused by sun exposure. “This means for 20 years of unprotected exposure, 16 of those [ageing years] will be caused by the sun. For 20 years of protection with Prime Forever, this would equate to 20 – (88% X 16) = approx. 6 years”

The images were put together with a company called HautAI who have a database of more than 3 million facial images and can use this information to simulate facial ageing.

Look, I get it. I get it from their point of view: “In a world of image-led communication where people are obsessed with before and afters, how do you showcase a product whose main aim is to make things look the same?” But I also get it from the consumer point of view. “We’re bombarded with AI images and filters, all we want is to see a real face.”

One of the DMs I was sent complained that “they only reference consumer trials so if there are clinical trials, it would be great to see the data from those.” For what it’s worth, I know they were doing (relatively) long-term clinicals (but not 20 year clinicals) so I’m hoping — for their sake — they will have some results they can talk about soon.

Bottom line, should you buy it? People I have spoken to (who are in their 30s) who have been testing it for a while rate it. And, on paper, a bunch of antioxidants, those Future Renew peptides, and a 5* SPF50 primer are A Good Thing (and probably won’t interfere with your tretinoin or whatever else you’re using.) I don’t think you need the whole range but, if you are going to dabble, I’d look at the serum and the SPF50 primer

Phew…. that was a looooooong one. Let me know if you have any more questions on any of this. Next week, a response from that PR mailer I called out in my Unearthed beauty geekery newsletter, and a response from Bioderma about Yuka, which I talked about in my Demonised ingredients geekery newsletter.

Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

I have a UV newsletter planned for the future as I have so much to say about sun protection: about the UV safety report I’ve been working (which has taught me so much), about a load of the new launches that are coming this year and about sun protection testing which I know a load of you are interested in. But because it looks like it’s going to be sunny in a lot of the UK this week, I wanted to include a bit of sun protection info in this one…

First up, Merit are extending the shade range of their tinted SPF, The Uniform. They started with 15 shades and as from tomorrow, you’ll be able to buy it in 20 different shades. The new shades are fairly evenly spaced across the range and, selfishly, I’m particularly excited to try one of the two new olive shades that they’re bringing in which will sit slap bang between the two I’ve been wearing (20 and 22). But other new shades — which have been introduced based on consumer feedback — include “a new cool neutral lightest shade and a new warm for the most sunburn-prone skin type, and a new cool shade to deliver on vibrancy for deep-tone consumers.”

Last year I tested a load of these kinds of SPF products for a piece for the Mail and Merit’s was one of the ones that I really rated. I talked about this type of SPF in more detail on a reel that I did on the day that feature came out…

In this reel I talk a bit about why I love these products so much and about the idea of meeting people where they are when it comes to sun protection. And this is something I feel really strongly about. Like I say, I’ve been working on this UV safety report which draws together huge amounts of oral and written evidence to make recommendations to the UK government about how to better protect people against UV and it’s really clear that sun protection is just one part of how you protect from UV damage. That’s why I think the Australian Slip, Slop, Slap, Seek, Slide! campaign was so good, because it’s NOT just about products, it’s about mindset, about covering up and spending time in the shade.

But sun protection products are clearly a huge part of the story and it has long infuriated me that they just don’t seem to be formulated in a way that makes sense to the consumer. I actually stood up at the Sun Protection Conference a few years ago and told the industry that they needed to do better: that every single other product on my bathroom shelf was created with a problem in mind and had been designed to make it as easy as possible for me to solve that problem. But sun protection products feel like they were created as a solution without any consultation with the consumer. We’re expected to put far more of a product on than feels normal to get the protection we need. And this is something I’ll go into in more detail another time but basically that 2mg/cm², or two finger’s full, or half a teaspoon or whatever is all based on the way that products had to be tested because the testing methods are so antiquated.

Anyway, in another reel that I filmed at about the same time, I explained that over the years I’ve changed my perspective on sun protection. I used to be all “you have to use a separate, dedicated SPF” and now I’m much more “you know what, if you’re using SPF in any form, that’s better than not using SPF.” (Although watching back this video reminded me of something that I’d forgotten which is that using a foundation or a moisturiser with an SPF is not the same as using a tinted SPF or a moisturising SPF. If you can’t be bothered to watch, the long and the short of it is that sun protection products have to have a certain amount of UVA protection in them (in the EU you’ll see that represented by a UVA sign in a circle) but if you’re using a foundation or moisturiser with SPF, there isn’t the same requirement. So pick a moisturising SPF rather than a moisturiser with SPF.)

So yeah, my philosophy now when it comes to daily sun protection is very much, slather on whatever works for you in terms of sun protection — whether that’s a sun protection primer and foundation with SPF in it, or a moisturising SPF and then a tinted SPF. And bear in mind, I don’t live in Australia or California where this sort of approach might not work as well. I live in the UK where the UV index rarely exceeds three between October and March (I wanted to check this so I downloaded all the Daily Maximum UV data for Reading (just to the West of London) for the whole of 2025 — you can get it here if you’re interested in that sort of thing — and made this pretty graph which does indeed show that last year, outside of the 1 April-30 September period, the maximum UV index in Reading exceeded 3, on just 10 days.)

Why, you might ask do you even need sun protection all year round if that’s the case. Habit. It’s as simple as that. Maybe you’re organised enough to switch your vitamin D supplement for daily sun protection on 1 April and switch back on 1 October. I’m not. I supplement vitamin D 365 days a year and I use sun protection on my face 365 days a year.

I have heard time and again that the best sun protection is the one that you wear. And, over the past few months, I’ve become acquainted with what I think is a truly wonderful study that was initially an investigation into how effective sun protection is at protecting against cancer, but actually is a study that tells us so much more than that.

Have you heard of the Nambour Trial? I hadn’t and I feel a bit like I should have done so maybe you know all about it already. Anyway, in the early 1990s, more than 1600 residents in Nambour, a small town in Queensland, Australia were enrolled in a study. Half of them were asked to wear broad spectrum SPF 15+ sun protection every single day (and to reapply after heavy sweating, bathing, or long sun exposure), while the other other half were asked to wear sunscreen in exactly the same way as they previously had, at their own discretion (which often meant using it rarely or never). I read a really interesting interview with one of the women involved in setting up the trial about how they had to use “their normal sun protection” as the control because it would have been unethical to give people dummy sun protection.

Anyway, four and half years later, dermatologists examined each of the participants for skin cancers. The incidence of squamous-cell carcinomas was reduced by 60% in the people using sun protection daily compared to whenever they felt like it. A follow-up study in 2011 found daily sunscreen use in these same participants had almost halved the rate of melanoma.

Now obviously this is a brilliant piece of landmark research because it proves what actually hadn’t been proved before — that sun protection does actually reduce the rate of skin cancer. But the bit that really wowed me was two-fold — one, they weren’t using SPF 50+ they were using SPF 15+ AND when the researchers looked at how much product those in the study were applying, they discovered on average that it was 0.79 mg/cm² — less than half of the 2mg/cm² they’d need to apply to get the amount of protection on the label.

There’s a vaguely linear correlation between amount and protection so if you apply 2mg/cm² of SPF 15, you get SPF 15 protection, but if you apply 1mg/cm² you get about SPF 7.5 so the people in this study were probably effectively getting SPF 6 and it was still protecting them from skin cancer. This blew my mind.

Anyway, let’s be honest, I largely wear sun protection not to prevent skin cancer but because I’m vain and I know that it helps keep you looking younger longer. And, as far as I know, nobody has done the research on the correlation between cancer protection and photoaging protection, so it may be that you do need to wear 2mg/cm² of SPF 50 and religiously reapply it every two hours to get those anti-ageing benefits but, for me, the Nambour Trial validates the idea that just using sun protection — any sun protection, in quantities that are manageable enough not to piss you off, and as frequently as you can — can only be a good thing.

The beauty of space

Between 6pm and 7pm (here in the UK) on Monday, I felt like there were two things going on that seemed to represent both the nadir and the zenith of humanity. On the one hand you had a(nother) press conference that seemed like a fever dream, where the US president used the word “amazing” 20 times, said he’s getting messages from a country under attack saying “Please keep bombing”, and threatened to take out all of Iran’s infrastructure, while Pete Hegseth compared the rescue of a US airman to the resurrection of Jesus. And, on the other you had the crew of Artemis II surpassing the record for the furthest that humans have ever travelled from the earth and passing behind the moon.

Space and space travel continue to absolutely blow my mind. And I’m so thrilled that I have two small children who already seem to share my excitement. Because thinking about the magnitude of space is one of the things that keeps me sane. And seeing humans manage to explore it in the way that we continue to really represents, for me, the pinnacle of the human appetite for knowledge, the human belief in science and so much more.

I know, I know, you’re wondering how all this relates to beauty. Well let me tell you about the number of brands and products I have been told “were first developed by NASA” or are “based on NASA technology.”

The one that immediately springs to mind is Crème de la Mer. The legend of this wonder cream is that it was developed by a NASA scientist, Max Huber, who created it to treat burns he’d suffered as the result of an experiment. Another part of the legend was that each batch of the mysterious seaweed-based Miracle Broth, that was at the heart of the cream, incorporated a sample of the previous broth, and was fermented to a soundtrack of the fermenting process to encourage the next batch to ferment. I mean let’s leave aside the idea of a scientist buying into the concept of fermentation requiring a soundtrack… the whole thing just didn’t seem credible to me. I’ve wanged on before about the piece I wrote about CDLM more than 15 years ago now but I kind of have a particular axe to grind about people hanging on to NASA’s coat-tails.

Because my Dad actually is a NASA scientist.

Years ago I asked Dad to help me get to the bottom of the Max Huber thing. I’d done a search on PubMed and failed to find anything but I asked my Dad to do literature search and see if he could find any reference to Huber at NASA. He found nothing.

Me: Does that mean he didn’t exist? Or didn’t work at NASA?
Dad: Put it this way, it would be very unusual for someone who was a NASA scientist to not have a single bit of published research to their name.

(This Elle piece from about 10 years ago addresses the Huber-NASA confusion — although I know, without question, that while NASA references might since have been scrubbed from the ELC website now, back in the late 90s and early noughties that was definitely the story they were telling. The feature also reveals the wild fact that Estée Lauder’s head of R&D apparently communicated with the late Huber via a psychic (?!), and suggests that the soundtrack thing might be grounded in science.)

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But CDLM is just the start. NASA is used a lot in the beauty industry as a by-word for cutting industry tech. And, naturally, the hope is that brands will bask in the reflected glory, regardless of how tenuous the connection. I just trawled through my inbox and I have…

• “a new LED face mask, with NASA technology”

• “specialist duvets incorporating NASA technology”

• “the same instrumentation that was used on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Rover was used by Pantene to better understand haircare product performance”

• “the first ever multivitamin developed from joint research with NASA”

• beauty technology with “NASA-accredited principles”

• a foundation that uses “NASA-inspired technology”

…the list goes on and on.

I don’t do it any more and even back then I was aware it made me a total twat, but for a while, whenever anyone told me that there was a NASA link to a beauty product, I went through a phase of saying “Oh really? That's fascinating, I'll have to ask my Dad about it.” And when they asked why, just casually responding, “Oh, he works for NASA” and watching the blood drain from their faces.

That’s not to say that NASA hasn’t been involved in projects that have been co-opted by the beauty industry. Some of the list above is legit. Although using NASA technology doesn’t automatically mean the products you create with it work, or are any better than your competitors.

For example, there is credible stuff behind LED masks (although obviously that doesn’t necessarily mean that all LED masks are credible) and behind a bacteria that could have a role to play in sun protection. I’m particularly fond of this last one as it involves a bacteria found at the Jet Propulsion Lab, where my Dad worked, plus some of his work involved planetary protection (ie making sure we don’t contaminate other planets on missions and vice versa.)

(By the way if you’re interested in a more accessible aspect of my Dad’s work, and/or you liked Matt Damon growing potatoes on Mars in The Martian, do have a read of this feature about how, in lockdown, he did a load of experiments in his kitchen with radishes that might pave the way to astronauts cultivating food on the Moon.)

But yeah — space and space exploration: brilliant. Beauty trying to spacewash: less brilliant.

That’s all for this week. Next week, I’ll be digging into Drunk Elephant’s attempts to rehab its reputation and a whole lot more. Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

The Skin So Soft Myth / Legend

We’re about to have a load of work done on our house so I was having a big clearout at the weekend. While sorting through a load of beauty products, I unearthed two bottles of Avon Skin So Soft Dry Oil which I’d bought five years ago before a trip to Scotland, suckered in by the promise that they would ward off the biting midges. I’m sure you’ve heard the story? It’s been doing the rounds for years. This skin moisturising product that was never initially designed as an insect repellent but apparently had some magic powers when it came to stopping bugs from biting. There was even a story that it was used by the US military for this purpose.

It reminded me that back then I decided to research further into it. Not least because I am actual catnip for mosquitos (mosquitonip?). If someone is going to be bitten, it will be me. (Although increasingly I’m wondering if everyone gets bitten and it just bothers me more.) As a result, I would frequently use industrial strength DEET, desperately trying to ignore the fact that it melted watch straps and took the finish off leather, so quite what it was doing to my skin, I dared not think. No matter, the bugs stayed away.

However, as I was pregnant at the time of this trip, I wanted to countenance something slightly less toxic. (In the true sense of the word, not the chemophobic, “clean” beauty sense.) Although, it turned out that this is a classic example of internalised chemophobia (is that a thing? Like internalised misogyny, where it’s so ingrained that you don’t realise you’ve been conditioned by it until you start to unpick it?) Because when I actually looked into whether it was safe to use DEET while pregnant, not only is it safe, it’s actively recommended if you’re travelling to somewhere with Malaria, Zika or the like — obviously don’t just take my word for it, you can read official guidance from the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists, but the important bit is that “DEET up to 50% […] is safe in pregnant and breastfeeding women (and in infants and children over the age of 2 months)”

Anyway, I had already started my deep dive into Skin So Soft by this point, keen to work out whether the story about US troops was true, and here’s what I discovered…

The earliest reference in newspapers I could find was in a travel story from the Evening Standard from 1991 talking about sand flies in the Bahamas which contained the line “Some locals swear the most effective defence is a half-and-half concoction of water and an Avon bath oil called Skin So Soft.” I also came across a 2017 news story from The Scotsman saying that the UK’s Royal Marines who were based on the West coast of Scotland had started using it in 2005.

“It’s not official kit but nothing works better and the Marines are buying it themselves because the midges are so bad up there,” Neil Smith, a Royal Navy spokesman at HMS Clyde, near Helensburgh, apparently said.

But then, I stumbled across this — it’s a paper from the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association that dates back to 1991, and it details the results of an experiment carried out in Honduras that tested two U.S. military issue DEET repellent formulations (75% DEET liquid and 33% DEET lotion) against Avon Skin-So-Soft to see how effective they were against midges. The test subjects “were U.S. military personnel deployed to Honduras for training.”

Imagine my excitement! Proper concrete clinical trial evidence of how good this stuff was… except…. “The liquid and lotion formulations of DEET and Avon Skin-So-Soft provided 97.9%, 95.9% and 71.4% protection, respectively, compared with the untreated control.” Meaning that DEET, even at 33% was almost 25% more effective than Skin So Soft. Although it was more than 70% better than using nothing.

What I thought was really interesting was why the Avon stuff worked at all. Apparently it “provided protection by trapping the midges in the oily film and not by repelling the insects” in the way that DEET does. I’m still not entirely clear on whether the US army really uses this stuff, or whether they just got roped in to a clinical trial that showed that it was... just OK.

Midges are one thing, but when it comes to mosquitos, I’d probably stick with the DEET. Because that paper led me to another paper in the same journal that looked at how effective Skin So Soft was against mosquitos when compared to your usual mosquito repellents. “25% DEET provided greater than 8 hours protection, a controlled-release formulation containing 35% DEET provided greater than 10 hours protection, and the Avon product provided 0.64 hours protection [that’s less than 40 minutes protection] from bites.”

So yeah, one that I’ll be keeping in the shower to slather on wet skin as a foolproof and lazy moisturiser, but probably not what I’d choose as an insect repellent.

Fragrant stuff

One of the other products I found during my clearout was an old bottle of Hawaiian Tropic SPF 20 oil. I can’t tell you how old but suffice to say when I looked it up on the website to see if it still existed, they showed it had been repackaged and the one I have doesn’t even look like their “old” version.

I wouldn’t use it as sun protection now. Because although I am VERY gung ho with most things about use by dates / PAO recommendations (Period After Opening — that little picture of an open jar that says 6M or 12M on beauty products and is an indicator that the product is safe and stable for a minimum of six months or 12 months after opening) and generally have a rule of thumb that if it doesn’t smell funny or look funny, it’s probably fine, with sun protection, I do try to be reasonably good.

However I would totally use it as a body oil. (I think this might have been something I was first inspired to do by when I used to read her stuff on XOJane.com. She used to rave about using sun cream as body lotion all year round because it was super-moisturising and smelled so good. I mean sure, there are a load of people who are going to tell you that you shouldn’t do that because chemicals and toxic load, but they’re probably the ones getting Zika and Malaria because they’re not using proper insect repellent in the jungle.)

But I digress, yes the oil is moisturising, but the smell, the SMELL. I just love the smell. It takes me back to beaches and pools and hot days and even hotter nights, and that gorgeous smell that is hot skin and sun tan lotion and all that stuff. (Bobbi Brown’s Beach is the closest I’ve come to a synthetic incarnation of it.) And I KNOW, I KNOW, I’m not supposed to glamourise or fetishise sun tanning. (I’m currently writing a report for the UK Government on UV safety FFS) I wouldn’t do it now, but the fact that the smell can transport me to younger and more irresponsible times is a constant source of joy for me.

It’s one of the reasons I keep a plastic pot of what is basically scented Vaseline on my desk. I bought it almost 30 years ago from a supermarket in Les Deux Alpes. I was 18 and working there in the year before I went to university. As the snow melted, the sun blazed down, and there was less skiing to be done. So Paul, the chef of the hotel where I worked, and I, would slather ourselves in this SPF 0 emollient that we called “cow fat” — in homage to both the texture of the product and the design on the label — and baste on the terrace. Like I say, I was 18, it was the 1990s, I knew NOTHING about UV damage, melanoma, and the like. I wouldn’t do it now, but the smell, THE SMELL. I have no idea how it’s not gone rancid (it’s literally mineral oil, coconut, tahitian gardenia, shea butter and fragrance) but it hasn’t and one sniff and there I am, back on that terrace, probably smoking a Silk Cut Ultra and gossiping about who pulled who the night before in Smokey Joe’s.

I am obsessed with smell. Not in the way that is, I can’t tell you nearly as much about noses and notes, but I am fascinated by the relationship between the brain and smell. One of my favourite academics is a guy called Professor Tim Jacobs - he’s an emeritus professor at Cardiff University and he studies the psychophysiology of smell — basically the impact that fragrance has on our minds and bodies. And, once you start thinking about it, you can’t help but try to work out what’s behind the fragrances that you find in beauty products.

I’ve talked before how while some people — hi, Nadine Baggott — don’t think facial skincare should contain fragrance, I — possibly because I don’t tend to react to much when it comes to fragrance — don’t have an issue with it. Yes, when people have an allergy to a cosmetic product, it’s frequently because of the fragrance, And yet the number of people who have a fragrance allergy is estimated to be between 1.7% and 4.1%. So despite all the noise about fragrance-free, for the vast majority of people there’s simply no issue with it.

Of course you don’t have to have an allergy to the stuff to object to fragrance in skincare, it’s entirely possible you simply don’t like it, or don’t want multiple scents vying for olfactory attention. But to suggest that fragrance doesn’t have a place in cosmetics is to overlook some very important roles it can play.

When I was speaking to Liberty Angris, the cosmetic scientist from Grown Alchemist, the other day about their new body care products, we talked about the role of fragrance within the products, which are heavy on acids — lactic, glycolic, salicylic.

“Acids can smell a bit vinegary,” she told me. “We wanted a scent that was going to work with it, rather than fight it.” The result is a blend of bergamot, lemon and lemongrass — fresh and uplifting. And, that helps as well. As well as using fragrance to mask the unpleasant smell of raw ingredients, the smell of a product is also used to improve the experience, encourage people to use it — and signal something about who the product is for and what it’s meant to do.

AGES ago, I interviewed Dr Sian Morris who, at the time, was a principal scientist at Olay.

“A woman in her 40s may have more sophisticated tastes than a teen,” she told me. “A luxury night cream may have a sophisticated floral note while an invigorating day lotion may be more citrusy.”

In many ways that seems obvious — have you smelled the Sol de Janeiro scents that are all the rage with teens? Lashings of sugar and fruit that seem like a headache in a bottle to the rest of us. (Just me?) While a zesty lemon scent indicates it’s a product that’s going to pep us up, while lavender contains a compound that has sedative properties and is more suitable for a night product.

But what I find really fascinating is how sometimes the message that a fragrance sends is interpreted differently depending on where you are in the world. Because yes, there are some fragrances that we respond to because we’re evolutionarily conditioned to. Vanilla is one of them. One study found it was universally ranked as a pleasant and appealing scent, regardless of whether you’re a hunter-gatherer from a tropical rainforest in Malaysia or an urban dweller from North America. The theory is that because vanillin is found in breast milk, all humans associate it with comfort, safety and sustenance.

Other smells aren’t quite so universal. There’s a huge cultural element to what we think “clean” for example smells like — apparently while Americans think it’s pine, in Asia it’s lime. Anyway, to wilfully misquote The Fast Show, “Fragrance, brilliant!”

And finally…

Calling out PR mailers for being environmental abominations is the sort of thing I used to do a lot on Instagram and I sort of stopped doing it because it pretty much stopped happening. But then as I was writing this week’s newsletter, I got sent this:

I’ve blurred the brand as I don’t want to name and shame a specific PR or brand, because I don’t know whose idea it was (and I’ve already emailed the PR to flag my concerns). But while this is a particularly egregious example, it’s far from the only one.

And I realise that bitching about a PR mailer could sound like the very height of entitlement but I feel like it needs to be talked about. Because I get it, I do, you want coverage for your brand and one of the main ways you get that these days is on image-driven social media. And maybe the people who create this type of content that you want are so busy / lazy that you need to do the work for them. Not only do you need to grab their attention with something that looks different, you also need to give them a plastic drawer so they can ASMR tap their fingernails on it, or cosplay being a princess opening it. And maybe their audiences don’t care about the amount of packaging and plastic and wastage that brands send out…

But I think when they know about it, consumers broadly do care about these things. (I mean tell me, do you?) And this reflects SO badly on the brand. In this instance, this was a brand I actually rated and was interested to know more about (despite the fact that it apparently calls itself a “clean” brand 🙄 But also can we explore the massive irony in a brand that apparently cares about ingredients — hence “clean” — implicitly suggesting they don’t give a shit about resources and plastic? 🙄🙄)

I can’t tell if this is a brand problem or a content creator problem. But I think it is a problem that tells us a lot about the beauty industry at the moment. It seems to be about what stuff looks like rather than what it does, or how it does it. The press release that accompanied the products above? Less than 100 words on an A5 card that gave me information that was so topline it was virtually orbiting the moon. (But at least it was on a separate card. Don’t get started on 3D boxes that contain the salient information about a product “Where am I meant to store that? What’s wrong with a nice piece of A4?”)

Speaking to a PR for hair tools a few months ago I was asking about what moves the dial on TikTok shop for them “People showing the product and befores and afters of their hair,” she told me. “That’s it? So nothing about the technology that distinguishes you from competitors?” “Nope.” Where is the curiosity? Where is the desire to know more? I know, I know, it’s here, if you’re reading this I’m preaching to the converted. And I thank you for being here and making me feel like there is an appetite for beauty coverage that interrogates rather than just shows something looking pretty.

As ever, let me know your thoughts on any of the above in the comments below.

Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

A few weeks ago, I saw James Welsh flagging what I consider to be a massive issue with Bioderma…

Like James, I was previously a big fan of Bioderma. It’s a French brand that I’ve recommended in the past — it was one of the first micellar waters I used, they had some great sun protection and I even washed my kids in their oil wash. But no more. Because in this video, James points out that Bioderma have started quoting their Yuka score on their website.

For those of you whose lives are — as yet — unbesmirched by Yuka, let me explain. Launched in France in 2017, Yuka claims to be a “100% independent app that scans food and cosmetic products in order to know their impact on your health.” The idea is that you scan a product and based on the ingredients — each of which “is assigned a risk level according to its potential effects on health or the environment” — you get the Yuka score out of 100 for it, and a traffic-light coded assessment: Bad (red) less than 20; 20-50, Poor (orange), 50-75 Good (green) and 75+ Excellent (dark green).

Their cosmetics ingredient database contains almost 13,000 ingredients and this page explains the scoring system in detail.

is a toxicologist. It’s literally her job to assess whether a beauty product is safe and the way that that is done is far more complicated than looking at a single ingredient in isolation. I really liked her Instagram post on the topic that really spelled it out…

But Yuka — and other apps like the Think Dirty app have serious sway. Yuka say they refuse to partner with brands and so make most of their money — more than $7million in 2024 — from paid subscriptions, which means a significant proportion of their estimated 70 million users (who include Robert F Kennedy Jr, President Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, and the brains behind the “Make America Healthy Again” movement) are not only using the app, but paying to use it.

And the app is changing the way that shoppers behave. According to this Washington Post piece, Yuka says survey data suggests 94 percent of its users put products back on the shelf after the app shows them low scores. As a result, it’s changing the way that products are formulated. In France, where apparently 1 in 3 people have downloaded the app since launch, Intermarché, one of the big supermarket chains, has reformulated more than 2,300 private-label products to improve their scores in food.

And now this seems to be happening in the world of beauty too. I don’t know enough about the food side of the app to make a judgement call on whether helping people buy products that are less processed and lower in sugar is as good as it seems (although instinctively it seems too simplistic), but I know for sure that when it comes to beauty, judging a product based on a single ingredient is a recipe for disaster.

Iris Smit, founder of Australian brands Quick Flick and Quick Faced commented on James’ post saying “As a brand founder, we’ve been going back and forth with Yuka for years. We even offered to disclose our ingredient percentages to demonstrate that everything is used within safe, toxicologist-recommended levels. They refused, and openly acknowledged that their rating system doesn’t take ingredient percentages into account at all. The lack of willingness to engage with the science or have a genuine discussion is honestly pretty unbelievable.”

So far, so crappy pseudoscience. But for me what’s really problematic, for a number of reasons, is beauty brands rolling over and effectively endorsing crappy pseudoscience. As anyone who knows me knows, science is my religion. And whether “clean” (such a problematic word) brands like to admit it or not, beauty products are science. Products are formulated by cosmetic scientists, they are tested using scientific methodology to ensure that they won’t harm users, or deteriorate, if they work, it’s because scientists have evaluated the concentration of the ingredient that has a biological impact on the skin. I don’t know how many more ways I can demonstrate that science is fundamental to the beauty industry and the products that we use.

That’s why I get so infuriated when companies and individuals either undermine the science of beauty products, or betray it. The reason I liked and trusted Bioderma is because of the science behind it. But when a brand who has historically used science to sell its products shows that it’s bending to bullshit pseudoscience, I’m out. I kind of feel like you live by the science and you die by the science. You can’t just pick up “science” and use it as a marketing tool when it suits you and then drop it when it doesn’t.

It’s one of the reasons that I stopped talking about The Inkey List. Back in 2020, they suddenly started suggesting that we should be wary about parabens (more on parabens below) and as I wrote in an email to the PR at the time, “I feel really let down that a brand that says it’s about science and education would continue to perpetrate the idea that one needs to be cautious about parabens. As far as I’m concerned they’ve totally shot themselves in the foot with this one. What were they thinking?” They back-pedalled, but for me the damage was done. This was a brand that I’d championed, in part because they were science-backed and then suddenly they weren’t.

In 2021, after another social media-based kerfuffle (kerfuffle seems the right word, it wasn’t anywhere as significant as a scandal) involving the same company, I talked a bit about this in what was then called an IGTV. It’s a long video but I’ve linked it below because I think the comments on it are really interesting. In the video I talk about the fact that we as consumers (and also as journalists) have emotional relationships with brands and why we feel so betrayed when what we thought were shared values turn out not to be.

Or, perhaps more accurately, appear to be values that can be dropped if it’s going to sell more product. I have no idea if The Inkey List’s apparent change of tack back in 2020 was in any way related to the fact that Sephora went big on the whole clean beauty thing and being in Sephora, one of the world’s biggest beauty retailers, is something any young beauty brand would aspire to.

Look, I’m not naive. I know that the beauty industry is essentially a capitalist endeavour. Brands, whatever their back story (and I have a lot to say on origin stories but that’s for another time) exist to sell product and make money. I can only assume that Bioderma felt they’d sell more product by embracing Yuka than by sticking to the science, because pseudoscience and fearmongering sells.

And me saying I won’t cover a brand because I feel they’ve sold out probably makes very little difference to their bottom line but I think it’s important to call out this bullshit, and to talk about what’s really driving it. Because, as I commented on James’ post, “when the tail wags the dog, we’re fucked.”

Let me explain a bit what I meant by that. Consumers are largely not experts. Consumers are largely not cosmetic chemists or toxicologists. I’m not saying consumers should sit down, shut up and blindly believe in “Big Beauty”. I think consumers should have the right to make informed decisions. But what worries me is that — thanks to pseudoscience, misinformation, social media, and a whole load of other things — consumers aren’t making informed decisions, they’re making scared decisions that are forcing brands to make poor decisions.

Take parabens.

First a quick explainer from brand founder, Sam Farmer:

“Paraben esters are found in plants and fruits such as blueberries, they are part of our natural world. We have been using them in cosmetics for nearly one hundred years without an issue and they are an incredibly effective and safe preservative, preventing the spoiling of products. We have been giving liquid paracetamol products to our infant children for decades, most of which are preserved with paraben esters. If it's scientifically proven that paraben esters are safe for infant ingestion then where is the evidence it is not safe for topical application?”

And yet parabens became demonised after a much-criticised 2004 study suggested a relationship between them and breast cancer. Despite the fact that the vast weight of evidence suggested that the parabens used to preserve beauty products are entirely safe when used in the quantities found in beauty products, this insidious lie took hold and, aided and abetted by high profile proponents — hi there, Gwyneth Paltrow — social media, chemophobia, the fact that fear sells, and a growing mistrust of authority, and brands suddenly began dropping parabens like an embarrassing uncle that’s brought shame on the family.

And yet products still needed a preservative system. So what happened? What happened was either that inferior preservative systems were adopted, that protect products for a shorter period of time, and against fewer microbes, and/or preservative systems, such as methylisothiazolinone (MI) that cause contact allergies were introduced.

Basically in the rush to get away from using perfectly harmless parabens, brands started using an ingredient that had the potential to cause dermatitis. The result? Dermatologists saw a huge increase in incidents of MI-related dermatitis — in the UK and beyond — which led to changes in EU regulations, banning its use as a preservative in leave-on products and restricting the concentration that could be used in rinse off products. (If you’re interested in a deeper dive into this, ’s Washington Post feature from 2022 is a great read on the topic.)

And THAT’S why I say if brands allow fear and pseudoscience to dictate formulation we’re fucked. As I say, I get it. In 2017, I was at the launch of a huge brand’s new “botanicals” haircare range. Needless to say it was “paraben-free” and when I asked the chief scientist why they weren’t using parabens when they knew they were safe, they told me “that battle is lost.” But it was lost because the very companies that make money from science refused to stand up for it.

I could — and will — bang this drum for a really long time, but I’ll stop there for now. Please let me know in the comments if you have any comments or questions and I’ll do my best to answer them (or find someone who can.)

Should you put this hand cream on your face?

I didn’t expect to be writing about body products again quite so soon but this week Deciem announced that they were bringing back one of the very first brands that the company launched, way back in 2013: The Chemistry Brand (which was shut down in 2022), and specifically the hand cream, Hand Chemistry.

Back then the late founder Brandon Truaxe had left Indeed Labs and was bound by a non-compete that prevented him from making any facial skincare products for three years. As a result, the first brands that Deciem launched were Inhibitif, a hair reduction serum; Fountain, an ahead-of-its-time supplements brand; Grow Gorgeous haircare — and The Chemistry Brand, which was all about hand and body products.

Hand Chemistry, the brand’s hand cream, launched into Boots in November 2013 and within two weeks was outselling every hand and body product in the store. And it wasn’t surprising. Boasting a “19.5% active complex” that included a bunch of ingredients that back then were rarely found in face creams, let alone hand creams — think copper peptides (known to boost collagen and elastin), pseudoalteromonas ferment extract (a fermented bacteria that is meant to have collagen-boosting properties as well as an ability to help protect the skin from dryness and redness), and plantago lanceolata (a plant extract that has antioxidant, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties). The brand promised the cream could target firmness, elasticity, density, evenness, brightness, texture, smoothness and hydration, giving visible results in just ten days.

Those who knew about the non-compete, such as Kirsty Lewis (then heading up PR in the UK at Deciem, now head of PR at Huda Beauty) and started using it on their faces with — unsurprisingly, given the punchy ingredients — impressive results (Jane wrote about it here.)

The reason I have a fondness for it is because it was a very good hand cream, yes, but also because it formed part of another of my favourite stories — where I compared a number of face creams to the hand creams in the same ranges…

This might be the only one of my features that’s ever been discussed on the Today programme (for non-UK readers that’s the serious news and politics show that’s on Radio 4, a very serious radio station). It also apparently led to a 182% spike in day-on-day sales of Hand Chemistry.

According to Business of Fashion who broke the story, the relaunch of Hand Chemistry is just the start…“Further additions to the line are planned for the year, both relaunched formulas from its original 10 year-run as well as net new products.”

In many ways, it’s a total no-brainer for them to be bringing back this range. I wrote last week about how body care with actives is proving to be a really strong category within beauty and even though (assuming the formula has stayed the same) Hand Chemistry is more than ten years old and you might have expected formulations to have moved on since then, it was so forward-thinking at the time, that I still think it can compete against many of the body products out there today.

Will I be putting it on my face? Probably not now that I use prescription tretinoin and azelaic acid, but I wouldn’t blame you if you did. (And if you do, please let me know.) (No link — affiliate or otherwise — as it doesn’t go on sale for another week or so.)

The results are in…

In last week’s newsletter I talked A LOT about affiliate links — thanks to those of you that voted in my poll and left such thoughtful comments / DMed me on the topic. The results are below, so the affiliate links stay for now. But as I always say in my little post at the bottom, nothing is set in stone and I am very much open to alternative views.

That’s all for this week, until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

I am so pleased to see body care finally getting the same sort of attention that facial care has had for years. Although it’s taken a while for it to become properly mainstream. While researching this piece I found an email to a commissioning editor that I wrote in 2018 that included the following pitch:

“Not sure if this is any more than a cols off [newspaper speak for a short feature that will sit alongside a spread] but I think finally beauty brands are getting the message that women want decent actives in their body care too. DCL have a Vitamin C body cream and REN just launched an AHA body cream - maybe looking at the key actives we know work - incl retinol, and niacinamide etc and finding the products that have them in.”

And it was a year after that that I finally got the piece commissioned. So in a way it’s wild that the best part of a decade later, I’m still wanging on about it.

But as I’m seeing more and more body products out there — and interestingly, body products that have been tested in the way that I always harp on about skincare products being tested, but more on that later — I thought it was worth dwelling on.

A friend of mine asked me YEARS ago why actives, such as retinoids and AHAs weren’t in body products and back then the only reason I could think of was that it would make them really expensive. In 2019 when I spoke to Prudvi Kaka, beauty brand Deciem’s chief scientific officer, she pointed out (in a way that tells you quite why I have loved Deciem for so long — these people speak my language): ‘the average surface area of the body is 15670cm² and requires 7.82g of product a day, whereas, for face, the average skin surface area is 565cm² only and requires 1.54g of product a day.’

So yes, you’re going to need a bigger tube, and more of the active ingredient, but it also means you’re getting a bigger dose of active ingredients and if, for example, you’re pregnant, you might want to avoid using a retinol-based body cream because of the theoretical risks of vitamin A on the foetus. (Large doses of vitamin A have been linked with birth defects, but there’s no evidence that using a retinoid topically does the same but it’s usually avoided during pregnancy out of an abundance of caution.) But generally, I feel like actives in bodycare are, for most people, a good thing.

I recently spoke to Dr Eleanor Bradley from No7 about them extending the Future Renew franchise into bodycare — and she made the point that there was both consumer demand for this, and that there’s a scientific argument around it too: if you want to tackle signs of ageing and sun damage, why would you limit yourself to just those on the face when they are also apparent elsewhere.

The thing that I’ve found really interesting is seeing brands that I would normally have thought of as just creating “nice to use” body products really seizing the opportunity that bodycare with actives is offering, and almost relaunching themselves and repositioning themselves in the process.

Take Bronnley for example. You think of Bronnley and you think of royal warrants and nice soaps that your grandma used to use, right? English Fern, Lavender, Lily of the Valley, and that gorgeous, zesty Lemon one, the exact shape and size of an actual lemon. I’m fairly sure my grandma used to keep them in her underwear drawer “to keep my smalls smelling nice.” Anyway, I had completely forgotten about them until their PR sent me the Lemon collection, which includes a hand cream. I tried it, and it felt like a nice hand cream — you don’t need much as there’s glycerin, apricot oil and shea butter in there that do a good job of moisturising and it has that lovely uplifting, slightly powdery, lemony scent.

But then I saw that it wasn’t just a hand cream. Oh no this was a Brightening Hand Balm (£17) that contains 5% niacinamide. Now this is a concentration that has been shown to be effective at improving a number of skin parameters including fine lines and wrinkles, hyperpigmentation, blotchiness, sallowness and elasticity. Already I’m sitting up and noticing because I was not expecting Bronnley to be jumping on a) the actives bandwagon and b) the percentages bandwagon.

But they have. And they’ve also jumped on the trial bandwagon. I KNOW. Admittedly this is a consumer trial (“people tried it and we asked them what they thought” rather than a controlled clinical trial “some people tried it, some people didn’t and we asked instruments / experts who didn’t know who had tried it and who hadn’t what they thought.” And while I think consumer trials are important — what’s the point in showing something has changed under a microscope if you can’t see with your own eyes that it’s changed? — I also think that unlike instruments or blinded experts, people who are being studied may be swayed into thinking they see improvements because they like the product / the brand / the researchers and results can also be skewed by the way in which questions are asked. All that said, I know controlled clinical trials are expensive so I get why, if you’re a bodycare brand whose entire focus isn’t science, you might just ask an independent company to carry out a consumer trial. Which is what Bronnley did.

51 people aged 20-60 — approx 50% Fitzpatrick skin type I-III and 50% Fitzpatrick skin type IV-VI — using the product for four weeks, at least three times a day. Let’s ignore the results for softening and moisturising because honestly if you’re a hand cream that’s literally the least I expect of you. But apparently 94% felt that their hands looked, healthier, brighter and more even in tone after the trial, and 92% thought the product had visibly improved the radiance of their hands more than any other they had used. But the result that I was really interested in was the one that looked at “20-30% of the participants who had visible hyperpigmentation on their hands” — now, bearing in mind that there were only 51 people in the whole study, 20-30% is roughly 10-15 people so a relatively low number. But 92% of them agreed that their hyperpigmentation and dull areas were less visible.

It’s not a perfect trial, but the fact that BRONNLEY are talking actives and percentages and trials at all is fascinating to me. And it’s not just Bronnley using bodycare to reinvent themselves a bit, there’s also Grown Alchemist.

Full disclosure, I’ve done some consulting work for Grown Alchemist in the past and so I know that they have a lot more science behind them than you might think at first glance. But before I worked with them I’d kind of put them in the “posh bodycare” box — y’know, along with the Aesops and the Malin+Goetzes of this world — super aspirational, smell divine, I’ll happily have that stuff in the shower making my bathroom look and smell good but probably wouldn’t use their skincare if I actually wanted to get shit done.

But since Anna Teal (ex No7, Aromatherapy Associates) took over in 2023, there’s been a really concerted effort to reposition the brand as a more science-led proposition. Their latest launches, two body products — a Resurfacing Targeted Body Cleanser and Resurfacing Targeted Body Lotion — both have, among other ingredients, a blend of acids in them and are basically designed to be the sort of all-round, exfoliating-yet-gentle-enough-to-use-daily good eggs that will do everything from helpin g with spots, ingrown hairs, and keratosis pilaris (that sort of chicken skin you often see on the backs of arms) to improving skin texture, tone and moisturisation.

And they’ve done the tests to show it — both consumer trials and clinical trials. They also tested each product separately so you don’t have to buy both to see the effects that they are claiming. Admittedly the clinical trials didn’t have a control and were quite small. 33 people for the body wash and 36 for the lotion — a range of skin types (Fitzpatrick I-VI) and around two-thirds of the testers had sensitive skin — but the results, based on being used once a day for four weeks, are good — particularly for the body lotion.

After four weeks of using the body lotion daily:

• skin texture had improved by an average of 22%, and almost all testers (97%) showed some improvement in their skin texture;

• skin hyperpigmentation improved by an average of 15%, and 75% showed improvement in their skin tone evenness;

• blemishes were reduced by 22% and every single person who took part (100%) showed some reduction in their skin imperfections.

I’m sure there are products out there that could give better results but kudos to Grown Alchemist for doing the research and creating body products that look good, feel good, smell good (read more on that next week) and clearly perform.

I’m so bad at using body cream that I have to leave it in the shower and apply on wet skin (not such. terrible thing as the occlusive ingredients can help trap more moisture on the skin) or I just don’t do it. The first time I used these two, I was idly caressing my arm later that night wondering why it felt so soft and then I remembered. But who cares what I think? Their clinical trial shows it’s effective when n=30+ not just 1.

The affiliate conundrum

Loads of people restacked this post (also linked below) last week that riffed off a New York Magazine article where a Fashion Substacker said she made $127,000 a year from subscriptions and $148,300 from brand partnerships.

Total Rec

The Fashion Newsletter Playbook

Yesterday there was a New York Magazine article listing the salaries of various people living in New York: wedding photographers, swim instructors, baristas, venture capitalists…

Read more

2 months ago · 321 likes · 79 comments · Totally Recommend

The post is a brilliant analysis of what I see happening a lot — not just on Substack but on other platforms too. People appear to be successful and then promise to tell you how to be successful (which involves you paying to find out how they are successful and thus making them more successful) and it all just feels like a pyramid selling scheme.

Anyway I thought it was — in many cases — bang on, but it also made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Do have a read of it (and then come back here.) So why did it make me squirm a bit. Well, I can promise you that it’s not because when it comes to BeautyGeekery, “eventually the goal is for it to feel less like a newsletter and more like a retail environment.” But because I use affiliate links. And I’ve never been entirely sure that that’s the right thing to do. Until I started my newsletter, I had never used affiliate links. (For the uninitiated, affiliate links are embedded links that take you to a product or a page. If you go on to buy something, it won’t cost you any more but the person who created the affiliate link gets a small percentage of it.) Now, my background is in newspaper journalism. I strongly believe that line attributed to George Orwell, that “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” I never saw it as my job to play nice with beauty brands, as far as I am concerned, my loyalty lies with the person who is putting their hand in their pocket to buy a newspaper, or more recently, has trusted me enough to follow me on Instagram.

As a result, for a very long time, I was utterly resistant to the idea of anything that looked like advertising, sponsorship or endorsement. When I launched my Patreon, I even made a virtue of it being #NoAds #NoSpon. As ever, no shade on those that do this, some of my best friends etc etc. But it was of paramount importance to me not only that my opinion could not be bought, but that it could not appear to be bought. How, I wondered, could I honestly take money from a brand for a partnership, even if broadly speaking I liked the brand, and then slag off their launch if I didn’t think it was any good? (I mean this is all VERY hypothetical, I can count on less than half a hand the number of brands that have approached me about partnerships.)

So what changed? Well, when last year, it became apparent that full-time journalism wasn’t going to be a viable career option going forward, I started to think seriously about what I was going to do instead, and started talking to all sorts of people about my options.

And the one thing they said — almost without exception — was that I’d be crazy not to use affiliate links. They told me that literally everyone does it, that as long as you’re transparent about it, nobody cares, and that it was never going to make me millions but if someone bought something because I recommended it, why shouldn’t the brand tip me as it were? And so I started to use affiliate links.

And even though I know what my boundaries and personal code of conduct are — I’ll never recommend a product I don’t rate, I’ll always make it clear that links are affiliate links and, as I say in the footer of every email, I’m not wedded to the idea of using them so if people hate them, tell me and I’ll ditch them — I can see how it could be seen as the sort of slippery slope that that post I referenced above talks about. The platform that I use for the affiliates shows creators the brands offering the highest rates of commission — as much as 66% in some cases (for reference, the highest commission rate any of my affiliates is 21% and most are somewhere between 6% and 15%) — I can see how someone not wildly scrupulous could be lured into promoting products for cash. (For the record, since I started using affiliate links in December, I have made $34 from them. This is not my route to riches.)

As for the other steps in the playbook that that post references, I can tell you I’m vehemently against the sort of stealth ads that it talks about. And I can’t imagine it’s ever going to happen, but if a brand wants to pay to be in one of my newsletters, I will never pass it off as editorial. I get riled enough by the advertising-posing-as-editorial that I see All. The. Time. on Instagram. As for the idea that I would sell BeautyGeekery’s mailing list to the highest bidder? Nah, never going to happen.

All that said I did also see this take on it — see below — which I thought was equally interesting, and made me think about the way that there seems to be a lot of shame attached to women who express a desire to earn money — especially in the creative industries.

THE LOVE LIST

The Anonymous Fashion Substacker and Her Audacity to Succeed

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2 months ago · 235 likes · 64 comments · Jess Graves

But I digress… what do you think? You’re the person I’m writing this newsletter for. I know that I say every week in the little bit at the bottom, “if you don’t like it, let me know” but I figure I should make it easier for you. So the poll is below, let me know what you think. Maybe you don’t care, maybe you trust me, maybe you actually like the idea that I get a tiny bit of Big Beauty’s cash when you buy something I’ve recommended. But on the other hand maybe, despite everything I’ve said, you think it muddies the waters, and makes my recommendations less credible. Either way, let me know your thoughts… results in next week’s newsletter. Until then…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

How important is what I look like to you? Do you feel that I need to look a certain way to be an authority in the beauty industry? This has been something that has been preoccupying me for a while but it sort of came into sharp focus this week in various different ways.

Last week, I wrote about The Lipstick Lesbians new venture, Leaked Labs, and also flagged it, commenting that “Inexplicably, Reddit is not happy.” I asked her why and she told me “They don’t like the way they apply their own make up, apparently 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄”

A couple of days later, I sat down with who had offered me a social media audit (if you’re interested in how you show up online, you should definitely subscribe to her newsletter) and we were talking about my Instagram. One of the things she told me was that my face should be on every post. “What? I can’t just post my features any more?” “You can,” she said, “but do it with a green screen so your feature is behind you and you’re talking about it.”

And she’s right, I know she’s right, I know the algorithm rewards real people and real faces and I know that people want to do business with a person they can relate to rather than just a faceless entity. But, but, but… I never went into this business (journalism, initially and more recently, consultancy, rather than beauty) because I wanted to be the story. I never really wanted it to be about me. I want it to be about the people that I meet, about what they know. My skills are not theirs.

I can’t apply makeup like Bobbi Brown; I can’t do nails like Marian Newman; I can’t do hair like Sam McKnight. I can’t diagnose skin conditions like Emma Craythorne; I can’t inject Botox like Wassim Taktouk; I can’t formulate products like Nausheen Qureshi; I can’t do scientific research like Mike Bell.

But what I can do is ask them questions about the work they do to make it easier for people who don’t do what they do to understand it. I can write what they tell me in a way that — hopefully — makes it comprehensible for the lay person. I can work out what might be an interesting and new angle on a story. I can identify what aspects of a story might appeal to different audiences. I can pull together multiple different stories and ideas and make connections between them in a way that someone else might not have done. I can sniff out when something isn’t quite adding up and I can dig down into it. I know who to ask about different aspects of the industry, who might know the thing I want to know that I don’t. Or at least the person who might know the thing if they don’t.

And I always thought that those were the skills I needed as a journalist. But a few years ago, journalism changed. And maybe it wasn’t just journalism, maybe it was everything, but that’s my industry and so that’s where I noticed it. And maybe it was the arrival of social media, or maybe it would have happened anyway, but gradually journalism became about the individual writer. Of course, there had always been columnists writing about their own experiences, and what an old editor of mine called “the jumping out the plane girl” — someone who goes to try things out and writes about it, but that was some of the offering, not all of it.

But then magazines like Elle stopped using models for fashion features and started using their staff instead. And beauty features shifted from showing what trends looked like on a model to showing what they looked like on the people who were writing them. And confessional journalism became the way young female journalists got a hold in the industry (or took leaps and bounds forwards) — by writing about their divorces, and miscarriages, and heartbreaks, and addictions, and shame — rather than writing about other people’s. And editors started saying things to me like:

“Could you write something like ‘As a knackered mother of two kids who never sleep, I’ll take any beauty shortcuts I can’ into the introduction, and maybe give us your feedback on the changes you’ve noticed in your own skin over the last few months using it?”

when I filed pieces about the science behind a night cream. Even though I’d never pitched it as a personal piece. And my kids do mostly sleep. And I’d only had the lab sample for less than a week.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for these personal pieces, for the GRWM videos, for the demo-ing on yourself. But the more of that sort of journalism there is, the more it feels like that’s what we all have to be doing. And I don’t like that. I don’t like it broadly, because it feels regressive. It feels like valuing women (and let’s be honest, it is women. I don’t see young male journalists plundering their lives for copy, or being asked to model clothes) for what they look like rather than what they have to say. It feels like it sends a message that journalists also need to be models.

I also don’t like it personally because I never thought what I looked like was the most interesting thing about me. But I increasingly feel like I have to stick my face online. And that to be credible, that face has to be made up, and my hair has to look presentable. And we can pull apart whether that’s internalised misogyny, imaginary pressure or reality, but it is very much how I feel. And that makes me uncomfortable because a) all of this titivating takes up time when I could be writing or researching b) I’m not wildly confident in my own abilities when it comes to doing my hair and makeup and c) as a result I worry that the credibility of what I say is undermined by what I look like. So I’d rather hide behind my words.

Anyway, I’d love to know what you think about all of this. And this isn’t thirst posting looking for reassurance about the way I look or how I do my makeup or hair. I’m genuinely interested in whether you see it in other industries, and if it’s part of a bigger shift that is about personal branding and showing up online, whether you’re a lawyer or an accountant or a medic. I want to know if you’ve noticed that change in journalism, whether you take more notice of people whose faces you see, whether — consciously or otherwise — you trust beauty journalists more if they look more attractive (and can make a decent fist of their own hair and makeup). No judgement here. My own mother once said when discussing two beauty columnists who shall remain nameless “I mean XXXX is no beauty but at least she makes the most of herself. But XXXXX? There’s nothing about her at all that’s aspirational. Why would I care what she has to say?”

(Maybe we’ve got to the root of why this bothers me so much. Eat your heart out, Sigmund Freud.)

A melasma update

I think I’m particularly conscious of how I look at the moment because I think my melasma looks particularly bad. And that’s on me. I’ve had Prof Firas Al-Niami, one of the best dermatologists in the world treating it and prescribing products for me to use, but my compliance with a home routine has been diabolical. Cyspera, which I was originally meant to be using, is a brilliant and effective product with great evidence behind it. But it requires you to put it on and leave it on for 15 minutes before you wash it off. And by the time I’m stumbling into bed, it’s all I can do to wash my face. So I ‘fessed up and we discussed my options and I started using a combination of Skin Rocks The Hyperpigmentation Serum, La Roche Posay Mela B3, and Eucerin Anti-Pigment Day Cream and Night Cream. And honestly the combination, alongside broad spectrum, SPF 50, which is literally the only thing I can guarantee will be on my face every single day, was really effective.

But I ran out of one and didn’t manage to re-purchase, and then I ran out of another, and then I started working out first thing and not always changing and doing skincare straight after and… and… and… and the thing that slipped was my skincare. And even writing this, I caught myself starting to think I was making excuses and that what I should be doing was thinking of ways in which I could change my schedule, and rethink things, and habit stack… And that got me thinking about this post that I’d seen on Instagram the other day from Elizabeth Davies (@thiswomanlifts) who was reading a section from her forthcoming book and talking about some recent research

She said: “I think we are missing a key part of the puzzle if we keep telling overstretched, under-supported women to habit stack and movement snack and magic hack, rather than addressing why women are so overstretched in the first place and why they don’t feel able to claim some time for themselves. Personally I don’t want to do a quick set of squats and push-ups while also preparing everyone’s dinner. And just because I can successfully multi-stack doesn’t mean I should always have to.”

So maybe this is all a wake up call. And I need to rethink my priorities and start making exercise — and my skincare regime — a priority.

Gender politics

But I think another reason I’m conscious of how I look and increasingly conscious of the politics of beauty (do read ’s The Hot Girl Arms Race which I mentioned last week if you haven’t already as it very much got me thinking) is because I have two small children who watch me putting makeup on and ask questions about it. And there is nothing that makes you question the validity of cosmetics like having to explain them to a child.

“What’s that?” “It’s a cream called foundation” “Why are you putting it on your face?” “Because I think it makes me look less tired.” “What’s that?” “It’s called bronzer.” “Why are you putting it on your face?” “Because I think it makes me look healthy, like I’ve been in the sun.” “What’s that?” “Mascara, I put it on my eyelashes to make them look longer and make me look more awake.” Etc etc etc. Pared down to the bare bones in a way that a three year old can understand it makes it all sounds totally mad, right?

And nothing makes you question the amount of time you spend getting ready compared to the amount of time your husband spends getting ready like a small child asking “Do all womans [sic] wear make up?” “Not all of them.” “Daddy doesn’t wear makeup.” “No, Daddy doesn’t want to but he could if he wanted to. Anyone — man or woman — who wants to wear makeup can.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love make up. I love being a woman who can transform the way I look using the magical power of cosmetics. Putting on makeup and doing my hair not only makes me feel more presentable but actually makes me happier with the way I look. I can’t tell you if that’s social conditioning or something more innate, but it does. I just wish it didn’t take me so damn long to do it so averagely.

Le supermarché sweep

To end on a less existential and more positive note, a quick trip to France reminded me just what great beauty products you can pick up in even the smallest supermarket. Maybe it’s just me fetishising French beauty but I think these are often beautifully packaged, very efficient and/or smell amazing, and not expensive. I’ve previously talked about my love for Le Petit Marseillais Olive Oil Hand Soap and there is very little from Le Petit Marseillais that I don’t love but if you are heading to France for Easter or doing a quick dash to Paris, here are a couple of products to keep an eye out for…

Mixa bébé 2 en 1, €8.50
I buy this in bulk in France and use this slightly citrussy scented all-in-one hair and body wash on my kids. I have no problem using fragranced products on my children (they seem fairly resilient to them) and I love that this is a bit different. I also love that they list all the ingredients and their functions on the back of it:

Le Petit Olivier Savon Extra Doux Lavande, €2.75
These beautifully-wrapped soaps from a brand that is a bit like a competitor to Le Petit Marseillais come in a range of fragrances including lavender and a zesty verveine. Buy three different ones, tie them up with a ribbon and they make a gorgeous gift.

Sanex Protection XXL, €4.99
If you have sensitive skin that needs a bit of extra care, this is what you want, and this monster bottle — 900ml — will last forever. It’s pH neutral, promises 12 hours of hydration, and contains lactic acid, a very gentle exfoliator, and inulin, which is meant to help the skin microbiome.

Le Petit Marseillais Gommant, €7.25
Despite what dermatologists say about how acids are better than gritty scrubs for a more uniform and less damaging exfoliation, I love an old-fashioned scrub. This one blends shea butter, argan oil and crushed almond and feels really satisfying while still leaving skin really soft and moisturised.

Christian Lenart Eau Aromatisée de Roses, €3.99
Again it’s the vintage design of this that draws the eye. Honestly, would I normally recommend an old-school toner (which is effectively what this is)? Probably not, no, if you’re going to add in a step like this to your routine, I think there are many more effective products that you can use. But if you want to role play a grand-mère called Jeanne or Marguerite, this rose-scented water is irresistible.

Mixa Eau Micellaire Apaisante, €2.99
Micellar water isn’t my first choice of cleanser but if you’re lazy / in a hurry / in a fix then micellar water and a cotton wool pad is a FAR better option than a wipe. I really like this one. In France it’s cheaper than the Garnier one, and I slightly prefer the pump to the hole in the top.

Do let me know what you plunder French supermarkets for, your thoughts on my various beauty-related existential crises, and anything else you’d like to see in this newsletter in the comments. But that’s all for now, until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

So I promised you this a few weeks ago and I finally pinned down hair stylist Michael Douglas to talk to him about something that he mentioned to me aeons ago, way before the recent launch of his hair styling range, The Numbers. He had pointed out that everyone is au fait with skincare ingredients but — apart from silicones — nobody really talks about what’s in hair styling products. And if they did, they might buy better products / get better results from them. So I decided to get him talking on what’s in hair styling products…

We started off by setting the record straight about shampoos.

“For me, shampoo is just like mild detergent,” says Michael. “It cleans your hair. That’s what it does. Stop expecting it to do all the other things.”

I mean, I’m kind of with him. Although I’d go even further and say it’s largely for cleaning your scalp and your hair gets cleaned to the extent that it needs cleaning when you rinse the shampoo off your scalp. Anyway, he went on to say that that is why he is more interested in hair styling and ingredients that create volume and body — “none of that is in shampoo no matter what they say.”

Michael then explained that, to his mind, there are two types of ingredient in hairstyling:

“At one end of the spectrum you have the oil- or silicone-based products, that make hair feel soft and shiny, supple and smooth. But there’s no hold in that, no volume in that, it doesn’t give the longevity. Then, at the other end of the scale, you’ve got these things called co-polymers or resins — VP/VA copolymers [a variety of combinations of polyvinylpyrrolidone and vinyl acetate] — polyquaternium-37 is another of them. These are the things that people often find can make their hair go crispy, hard and stiff.”

According to Michael, where you want your hair to be is bang in the middle of the two. So you have hold and longevity but also hair that’s shiny, frizz-free and feels like hair, rather than straw.

The silicone question

A quick aside…the sort of thing where I feel like this platform doesn’t do quite what I want it to do. Because in print this would be a box on the page, but here it’s either got to go in the middle like this, kind of as a quote, or stranded at the end when you’ve forgotten that we talked about silicones all those paragraphs ago. Anyway…

Me: What do you think about silicones?

MD: I don’t have any problem with silicones at all. When people say “Is it silicone-free?” I’m like “Why are you bothered?” And they might be bothered about the environment or plastics in the ocean. But they’re all water soluble so they break down with water. There’s nothing in them that can’t be dissolved away. And the amount of them is so minuscule that I think there are millions of other things you should worry about. And hair silicones like dimethicones are brilliant. They do a brilliant job and nobody’s stumbled across better versions of them since they first started being used in hair styling products in 1989.

These two different types of ingredient are why Michael says that whenever you style your hair, for a really good style that’s going to last, and look good, you want two products, because they need to do two different things at different points in the styling process, and they can’t be stabilised within the same formulation.

“This is how I approach everyone’s hair,” he says. “I tend to layer them. I’ll put the oily one on first, and then the resin-based product that seals in the oily bit, and forms a flexible film over the hair, drying to create a barrier between the atmosphere and the hair.”

Moisture is the enemy of all hairstyles, Michael tells me. And now he’s speaking my language. I can have the most beautiful smooth professional blow-dry, and then step outside into the slightest humidity and it’s a frizzy, curly mess within minutes.

For Michael, the answer to my problems is a heat-activated polymer that’s applied before drying or tonging. “The heat of the tong makes the water evaporate, extracting moisture from the hair, and then it moulds the film onto the hair. When the hair cools, the strand should be shinier, more protected and will hold its shape better.”

Obviously I asked him if there are certain oils or silicones that he’d recommend for different hair types, but unfortunately it’s not as simple as that.

“Oils and silicones do the same thing, but some formulations are heavier than others. For some people that’s great. If you’ve got thick, bushy hair, you want something heavy that will hold it down. But if you’ve got really fine hair, and put the same thing on it, it will just look greasy.”

And sadly the same ingredients can behave very differently.

“There are two different products that I’ve used in the past that have exactly the same ingredients — in a slightly different order. With one of them the hair didn’t feel remotely oily or greasy, with the other I got a really greasy result. So it’s not just about the ingredients, it’s about the amount of them — and the amount of product that you put on the hair. And how wet your hair is when you apply the product as that will dilute the formulation a bit.”

That’s why, according to Michael, it’s so easy to get products wrong

“The product doesn’t factor in the user and it doesn’t factor in the hair type,” he says. “It’s just a product. It can’t adjust itself. I feel that there are no bad products out there, there’s just the wrong hair type, or someone using the wrong amount. And the problem is people often don’t know themselves what it is their hair needs.”

Essentially there are lots of variables, even before you factor in human error and people’s expectations — which can also vary.

“People often say ‘I’ve been using this product for a while but it’s stopped working.’ But perhaps the habits of the person using it have changed. Perhaps their expectations have changed. This idea that your hair gets used to certain ingredients is just not true. But psychologically you can get used to a product, and be disappointed when it hasn’t performed in the way that you expect it to.”

This conversation led on to me bemoaning the fact that I kind of wanted to be a curly girl method girl but that there did seem to be so many variables, both in terms of product, and the way that you apply it and it seemed to require so much more trial and error in a way I just — honestly — can’t be arsed with. “Why is hair SO much trickier than skin?” I asked “Or is it just me?”

Turns out, it’s not just me.

“Every time you walk into a room, the moisture content in that room is different,” says Michael. “Every time you walk outside from one day to the next, the atmosphere is completely different. Whether it’s a bit damp or even a bit warm or cold or dry, all of that is a problem for your hair.”

And so, I ask, is it just that skin is some how more resilient to these fluctuation in a way that your hair isn’t?

“Yes! And the reason for that is that your skin is alive, and is in this kind of homeostatic state. It can adjust. So your body can go ‘ooh, it’s cold, I’m just going to allow the skin to shrink a bit’ or ‘it’s very warm so we’ll sweat a bit so that will cool us down.’ But your hair is dead. It’s not connected to your biology at all. It’s slowly getting older, and drier, and worse, but it can’t adjust itself.”

(And, yes it’s a bit more complicated than that — as anyone whose scalp / hair has changed during puberty/pregnancy/menopause can tell you, but ultimately, the lengths of your hair are biologically useless, in a way that your skin isn’t.)

That was my “OMG wow” moment. The line I was thinking about when a few weeks ago I posted a little note about this interview…

Maybe it’s not a wow moment for you. Maybe you’re like “how the actual f*ck have you been writing about beauty for more than 20 years and this really obvious thing had not occurred to you?” In my defence I thought — as I often do, it turns out (yup, it’s that same Taylor lyric again) — I was the problem, and that I just got lucky with relatively well-behaved skin and unlucky being a cack-handed loser with a hairdryer and brush who just couldn’t master her problem hair.

But no, it’s biology and the difference between dead hair and live skin.

Anyway, the tl;dr version of this is: for a good hairstyle that lasts you need at least two products, one with oil or silicones (look for ingredients that have the letters “cone” or
“oxane” in them) for shine and slip and silkiness. And the other with copolymer ingredients (that probably have the letters “vinyl” or “poly” in them) for hold and volume. The bad news is, those products will differ depending on what your hair is like and what you want to achieve (and from my POV the weather and the whims of the gods) and you may have to experiment to get it right. (And if, for whatever it’s worth, you want some examples of my favourite styling products, stay tuned, I’ve got a hair-styling empties post incoming soon.)

I like these people, you might too…

Part of the reason that I wanted to start writing a newsletter was because I didn’t feel I had the opportunity to write the sort of beauty features that I wanted to in more traditional media. What I had entirely naively underestimated was how this platform would serve me the sort of beauty features that I really want to read and hadn’t realised existed (mostly because I hadn’t been looking for them here.)

I’ve really had a couple of proper “ah, I have found my people” moments on here recently and, working on the assumption that if you’re reading this newsletter, you might share my interests, I wanted to flag a handful of discoveries that I’ve made over the last few weeks…

is one of those people whose work I’ve known about and admired for a while. And if you’re a beauty geek, you probably know her too. She’s a freelance beauty journalist who’s written for Business of Fashion, New York Times, Vox, FT, Allure and many more, and her newsletter is (which as she put it “ I like that when you see the words all mushed together, it can be read as “Good For You Rage.”) and I think if you’re Gen X and into no-bullshit beauty, you’ll like her.

Through Cheryl, I’ve discovered and and I very much enjoyed her deep dive into the Byredo story. Also, and this is worth saying, they are both journalists writing informative, funny shit. Because there are a handful of other really smart beauty industry people I’m finding on here but their stuff reads like it’s been AI generated. And maybe it hasn’t and maybe we’re all just writing more like AI now. (If THIS interests you then you should definitely check out on here because she writes and reposts a lot of interesting stuff on that topic and it was via her that I came across this paper about how AI is influencing language.)

Moving on. Via this week I discover ’s long but very worth reading exploration of The Hot Girl Arms Race which struck a LOT of chords with me and maybe I’ll dive into my feelings around feminisim, beauty, hypocrisy and responsibility in more detail another time. But that essay, in turn, put Nina Pool on my radar (which given how many followers she has on TikTok and Instagram it’s a bit embarrasing that she wasn’t on it before.) She talks a lot about dupes — again something I have a lot to say about, but that’s for another time — but seems generally ingredient and industry savvy.

looks at the industry from a very different standpoint. And, regardless on your views on Medicube’s products, (I have quite a lot but am still forming others) I found her newsletter on their social media approach interesting and instructive.

And finally, while I’m on intros. You know , The Lipstick Lesbians, right? (Also on Instagram) who excitingly this week announced that they are launching a brand. Leaked Labs will bring manufacturing samples to market and tweak according to feedback before distributing or ditching them. It’s a really new and different business model and their first product — flexible powder — has got me really excited about the concept.

I am sure I will continue to discover and enjoy more new like-minded types (as well as people who I knew before, such as , and . And people like whose scathing (in a good way) takes on the UK beauty and PR industry I’ve been enjoying. And who’s an old school blogger and posts an incredible volume of stuff on newness and much more besides) and I’ll continue to let you know about them too.

Oh and this isn’t a newsletter but OMFG, this about what’s in / not in counterfeit beauty products from NYT’s Wirecutter is a) jaw-dropping and b) exactly the sort of thing that UK newspapers used to do and just don’t any more, which is sad.

Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

Years ago when I first started working in journalism I remember having a conversation with an editor about why you never saw bad reviews of travel places or spa treatments and her explanation was that if something wasn’t any good, it just didn’t get the oxygen of publicity, people simply didn’t write about it. As far as she was concerned, why would you dedicate pages of a newspaper to something that wasn’t any good, why waste time telling someone something was crap?

And bear in mind, this was newspapers, that at the time really did write whatever they wanted to, not magazines that had more complicated relationships with advertisers that sometimes compelled them to include positive editorial about certain products. (Weirdly restaurant critics and arts critics generally didn’t seem to have the same code of ethics back then, but then maybe that’s partly because their title gave them license to be critical in the way that a beauty writer’s or travel writer’s doesn’t.) Back then I was commissioned to write a piece about what really goes into Creme de la Mer and if it’s worth the pricetag. You can read it here — I’m pretty proud of it still. I’m also fairly sure that, as a result, I —officially or otherwise — ended up on an Estee Lauder blacklist as for years I didn’t hear anything from most of their brands.

Now I feel as if the media landscape has changed. Brands pay content creators for advertising that looks like editorial. Some content creators declare it as advertising. Not all do. (Come on, we all know this, we all know that they’re meant to, anyone who is on social media and plugged into this sort of thing can name a handful of those that don’t disclose it as they’re meant to.) The balance of power of advertisers in print media has shifted significantly and so I feel that actually saying nothing isn’t an option any more.

And yet... what if it’s me? What if, Taylor-style, I’m the problem? Because a few weeks ago I got invited to go for a treatment. It was a hair treatment that sounded different and interesting, and promised long-term results using innovative technology. So I pitched it to a few of the publications I write for regularly, one wasn’t keen, another had already commissioned someone to try it. I thought I’d just go along and try it out with a view to — at the very least — including it in this newsletter.

And so I went along and I had the treatment and I interviewed the stylist about it and I took loads of pictures and at the end yeah my hair looked great but then my hair always looks *relatively* great after a professional blow dry so for me the proof of the pudding was in how it looked after I’d washed it. And, honestly, it didn’t look any different. It was still frizzy and flyaway and not doing what I wanted it to, which was the exact opposite of what the treatment promised.

But I know other journalists who have had it and seem to have loved it. So what do I do? Do I write about it here and say it’s a waste of time and money just because it didn’t work for me? Or do I just accept that it might not have worked for me but it does appear to have worked for other people so I’m not going to write about it but I’m not going to badmouth it either? Instinctively, I’ve landed on the latter. I’d be interested to know if you agree.

The whole thing kind of brings me back to the one thing that I bang on about constantly. Clinical trials. Because if this brand had come to me with credible and convincing clinical trials on the treatment then I could have considered writing about it and the fact that maybe my experience wasn’t representative. This for me is a classic example of why I write about beauty in the way that I do. I always say I care less about whether something worked for me than about whether objectively you can show that it’s worked for 50 people who aren’t me. What I think becomes irrelevant if you’ve tried something on 50, 100, 200, 300 different women and have good clinical data showing that it’s effective (and that they can see it’s effective — I do agree that there’s no point showing you’ve achieved something at a cellular level if a woman looks in the mirror and can’t see that change with her own eyes.)

So yeah, the moral of this story? Do clinicals. (And if you’re a brand and you don’t know where to start, I can help you with that.)

Makeup empties

I am not blind to the out-and-out irony of writing what I’ve written above about not caring what one person thinks and whether it works on one person and then diving straight into a post which is essentially all about me and what I’ve tried and liked.

Even as I was putting this newsletter together I wondered whether I should avoid having an empties post alongside that one. Does it make me a hypocrite? I think the reality is that if it’s an empties post I’ve liked the product enough to finish it so can usually find something positive to say about it. But it still doesn’t get us away from the fact that I care less about whether I liked it and more about whether loads of people liked it. So please, if you’ve tried any of these products, do share your thoughts — positive and negative — below. I am always keen to know what other people think of what I liked and loathed. (I despised a recent concealer launch and couldn’t understand why it seemed drying and cakey on me when everyone else was raving about how hydrating it was…)

Anyway as I mentioned when I did my post on hair empties, I personally am fascinated by empties content. In part because I genuinely don’t know how some people can possibly get through the amount of product that they do unless they’re showering and cleansing and reapplying makeup four times a day. Or maybe that’s normal and I’m — as I have frequently said — just really lazy. So lazy that I’ve been collecting empties for years with the intention of doing an empties post and am gradually, thanks to this newsletter, getting round to it.

I’m also a bit squeamish when it comes to posting empties content myself, especially makeup stuff, because it makes me feel a bit like I’m suggesting that I am in any way aspirational. And, while I don’t suffer from dysmorphia, I also know I’m neither the most naturally beautiful beauty editor on the block, nor the most skilled at makeup. I guess I am possibly one of the most honest though, so there’s that.

Again, who knows exactly how long it took me to make my way through this little lot and honestly, I have a gazillion mascaras sitting on my dressing table that are probably 90% empty but I never quite get round to relegating to the empty pile so this just makes me look like I’m brow obsessed. Or, perhaps more accurately, as if there are very few products that I actually like and use on a regular enough basis that they run out. Let’s get stuck in…

First up brow pencils….

Kosas Brow Pop Nano in Taupe, £20
If you are the sort of person who can be bothered to draw in individual lines, you will love this brow pencil. The tip is super fine and it’s got a spoolie at the other end. On the days when I had more than 10 seconds to do my brows, I loved it. What I didn’t love was the price for the amount that you get — it’s 0.03g and didn’t last very long.

Paul & Joe Eyebrow Liner in 02, £16.15
You definitely get more bang for your buck with this one — a third more, it’s 0.04g — and fractions of a millimetre wider than the Kosas one. As with all these mega thin liners, they tend to snap very easily so only ever twist out the smallest amount otherwise you just end up wasting it.

Trish McEvoy Precision Brow Shaper in Natural Brunette, £24
Despite the price, I did like this — like the Kosas one, the integrated spoolie at the other end endeared it to me — as did the fact that more £££ actually did give me more product — a massive 1g. The only thing was that I found this very hard and had to press quite firmly to leave a mark. But when it was there it didn’t budge.

Benefit Goof Proof Brow Pencil in 4, £26
Is it just me or is Benefit looking a bit dated now? The packaging looks a bit weird rather than kitsch. I don’t necessarily hate what’s in it but it just feels a bit naff. But maybe I’m just too old for it. This is definitely goof proof, it’s a kind of triangular pencil point so you can use the pointy bit to define and the wider bit to fill. I liked it because it was softer than the others, but I also ran more of a risk of ending up with what was once called a Scouse Brow — but I feel like that’s not the sort of thing you should say any more. If you’re a Scouser let me know. (If you don’t live in the UK, a Scouser is a colloquial term for someone from Liverpool.)

BUT… having reviewed four brow liners, I’m not really sure I actually want to use ones like this again. Partly because of the plastic — it’s all tiny bits of single use plastic which are really hard to recycle and although I am not at all greener-than-thou, when you could just buy a wooden pencil that biodegrades, I find that quite hard to justify. But also, I was intrigued by how much product actually got left behind inside when you think that they’re “empty” and in some cases, quite a lot it turns out. Obviously the way that they’re made it feels like a little bit is collateral damage but the Paul & Joe one wouldn’t twist up any more and when I pulled it apart it still had masses inside. Anyway if you’ve tried a wooden brow pencil you love, let me know.

Moving on from liners which I use when I have time to brow mascaras I use when I don’t…

Trish McEvoy Brow Mascara in Natural Brunette
This appears not to exist any more so I’m not sure there’s any point me telling you that I liked it — which I did. I really did. It had good colour and hold for the brows that were there and bonus little fibres that helped conceal any gaps. RIP. But if you like that sort of thing, despite the ick that the packaging gives me, I would recommend the Benefit Gimme Brow+ (£26, or test drive it with the smaller version for £14.50) which has the similar colour plus fibres plus hold thing. I rediscovered it in an old makeup bag recently and it was like Kellogs’ Cornflakes, I’d forgotten how good it tasted. (That was a joke for old people. Obviously don’t eat it.)

Glossier Boy Brow, £22
This is one of the products that made me fall in love with Glossier back in the day when it first launched. Along with the mascara, it felt like it nailed the no makeup makeup thing, giving you colour and definition without looking actually made up. It’s based on moustache pomade apparently and does a really good job of giving colour and holding brows in place without feeling crispy.

Merit Volumising Pomade in Brown, £21
If you like the Glossier one, you’ll love this. It’s got a bigger brush than the Glossier one and you get a bit more product for your cash — 4.5g rather than 3.8g — but it does the same non-waxy, non-crispy thing. When Merit launched I tried to pitch some stories around it being the Glossier for grown-ups — that idea that I feel like Glossier started with and have since moved away from, that you don’t have to think, you don’t need loads of brushes and loads of time, you can just slap it on with your fingers in five minutes.

Charlotte Tilbury Legendary Brows in Dark Brown, £26
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I’m a CT girl when it comes to makeup — that’s not to say I don’t love a load of the products, but when I was looking up the price on this one I realised it’s meant to be step two of a three-step brow system (fill with a pencil, then put on tinted gel then fix it with another product) — I am barely a one-step brow person. This has a teeny brush which is great for precision application (again not really my style) and the formula did give a really natural look on me so not to be sniffed at. Would I buy it again in preference to any of the others? Probably not.

A couple of mascaras…

Maybelline Colossal Curl Bounce Mascara, £12.99
I adore High Street mascaras. I just think they’re great. I have yet to find a premium mascara that I would buy in preference to a High Street one because I felt the price justified the extra performance. I’ve written previously about my latest crush: L’Oreal’s Extensionist (currently just £11.19 if you haven’t already tried it) and while this one didn’t give the length that that does, if you want curl without clump, this Maybelline one did it for me.

L’Oreal Paris Air Volume Water Proof Mega Mascara, £7.99
I got given the waterproof version of this and liked it so much that I went out and bought the regular one — it’s difficult to explain how it’s so lightweight and yet still gives length and volume. Anyway it does all that — and both the waterproof one and the regular one are currently just £7.99 on Amazon.

And finally a concealer and a few bases…

Maybelline Instant Anti-Ager Eraser Concealer, £7.99
A while back I tried 26 different concealers for a story for the Mail and this one was up there with the Nars one that is almost four times the price. I love the fact that it has a sponge applicator (we’ve already established I am very much not a brush girl most of the time, although I KNOW makeup looks better when you use brushes) although I cannot explain what witchery they have used so that applicator doesn’t go gunky and mouldy. Just that it’s a million times better and more robust that the Charlotte Tilbury one that’s similar. And also it seems to have one of the most efficient dispensing systems out there — there’s almost nothing left in there.

Estee Lauder DoubleWear Cushion Stick in Shell Beige 4N1
This is aeons old — I’m not sure how many aeons but they definitely don’t do DoubleWear in a cushion stick any more and more is the pity, it was like a massive version of that Maybelline concealer. I love DoubleWear. A friend of mine who used to work on TV sold me on it saying that it’s literally the only thing that she could put on first thing in the morning, go and do interviews in the rain and then come back and be in the studio under the lights and it wouldn’t budge yet didn’t feel cakey and drying. Apparently they’ve reformulated it recently but maybe I’m still on an ELC shitlist as I’ve not been sent any info on it. But for longwear foundation I love it. (Although if you’re on a budget I tried this Maybelline one in a head to head test with it and it fared pretty well.)

L’Oreal True Match Nude Plumping Tinted Serum in 4-5 Medium, £14.99
I had forgotten until I started writing this how much I ADORED this serum foundation. Did it plump? Not noticeably but then what really does? It’s blendable, sheer, and yet gives good coverage and is glowy and dewy and all the things you kind of want your skin to be. It was skin tint before everyone started doing skin tint and it’s still a really good one. One thing I should say is that the thing that TRANSFORMED this product for me was switching out the dropper for a pump I bought from Amazon — gamechanger. My white t-shirts are grateful.

Lumene Invisible Illumination Instant Glow Beauty Serum in Universal Medium, £34.50 (although if you know your shade shop around as both the Lumene website and Sephora have it half price but each has several shades out of stock.)
I feel like Lumene is a brand I need to get my head round a bit more — it’s Nordic and does skincare and I vaguely recall liking one of their vitamin C products but it’s all very vague…Anyway, I do remember liking this for all the same reasons that I liked the L’Oreal one. Would I buy it at full price instead of the L’Oreal one? Nope.

Trinny London BFF De-Stress Serum in Binky, £41
I don’t recall this product noticeably alleviating signs of stress from my face, I do remember it being a nice lightweight tinted moisturiser type product. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it at all. It contains hyaluronic acid and is nicely hydrating. I’d still pick the L’Oreal one over this one if I was spending my own money.

Color Wow Root Cover-Up in Medium Brown, £29.50
I’m not sure how this ended up in the makeup empties pic rather than the hair one — but in an emergency, I have used this as both brow definer and eyeliner to create a smokey eye and it did a decent job. But where it really excels is in its intended role as a root cover up. I use a far bigger brush than the one provided but it’s brilliant for covering greys or regrowth, doesn’t budge, has a depth of colour that looks natural — and is also great on the scalp for filling in wider partings or areas where you have a bit of recession. Even though I got the hump with them years ago for changing the amount of product from 3.0g to 2.1g and keeping the price the same, I haven’t found anything that’s anywhere close to as good as this.

Do please share your thoughts on any of these products, on my existential crises, on whether you love or loathe empties posts. I want to hear it all.

Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

And when I was first introduced to the Skin & Me doser that you twist until it clicks so you get exactly the right amount of your prescription formula, I thought it was genius. I thought it was even more genius when they used a similar design (and research that included measuring the average size of a person’s face, which I loved for its dedication to geekery) with their Daily Moisturiser with SPF50 to ensure that you’re getting the amount of product you need to get the SPF 50 protection stated on the label — forget two fingers, or a teaspoon, they’ve done all the work for you.

But mostly we don’t think about packaging in the way that brands do. Because beauty packaging is more than just a container. It has to have space for essential information as well keeping the product free from contamination. It has to protect the product in every day use, and dispense it in a way that makes sense — a great mascara is only great if the wand and package are also great; changing the packaging of a sun protection product can potentially change it’s efficacy. And a product has to work from a transport point of view — it’s why bottles with a round footprint are so often packed in square boxes — and from a point of sale perspective.

But aside from the actual container, how much notice do you take of what is printed on it? In my case I pretty much always squint at the ingredients listing when I first get it, but I rarely read the instructions and you’ve got to be a proper geek to look at the registered addresses (although I admit I sometimes do). That’s why some of what I think as the cleverest packaging innovation I’ve seen in recent years has come from reimagining how that existing packaging could be used. This is the stuff that’s made me think “that’s BRILLIANT, and so obvious, why has nobody ever done this before?”

One of the first brands that I had this reaction to was Skin Rocks. (If you haven’t tried it, well where have you been? But my favourites are The Hyperpigmentation Serum and The Gel Cleanser.) On the top of every product is a circle telling you how much to use. Sure, with pumps you can calibrate it more easily — I like Dr Sam’s cleanser (it’s a really great, simple but effective formula and one of the few products I have to re-purchase because my husband steals it) which tells you use one pump in the morning and two pumps at night — and we’ve all read “a pea-sized amount” or whatever, but how much easier is it to have a little circle drawn out telling you “use this much”? Like I said, so simple yet so damn clever.

I felt the same when I went to the launch of The Numbers last week, Michael Douglas’ new haircare range. The man is, I believe, an underrated genius — and a secret geek. Expect to see more from him in this newsletter in a few weeks time. I can’t report back in any great detail about the efficacy of the products just yet as I haven’t properly road-tested them. Although I tried The 5 Voluminous Texture, the volumising spray the other day and it was so impressive that I actually had to brush a bit out because my hair was SO big.

But what really wowed me was the QR code on the front. I know, I know, QR codes on beauty products aren’t new, but very often they’re hidden on the back of the product and they just take you to a website. This is different. The QR codes on these products are par tof the design, front and centre: zap it with your phone and it takes you to a WhatsApp chat where you can learn about the ingredients in the product and how to use it. You can describe your hair and ask how to use the product in a routine and, eventually, you’ll be able to upload an image of your hair. Yes, it’s a chatbot, or AI or whatever you want to call it, but it’s powered by Michael’s knowledge, in his voice, and it’s done in a really intuitive and user-friendly way. So simple, so clever, so obvious, but nobody’s done it before. More brilliant consumer-focused thinking like this, please, beauty brands, thanks.

Not sure if you saw — because I banged on about it *quite* a lot on social media — but I was speaking at The Ordinary pop-up last week. I made a little video about it if you’re interested...

But one of the things that I loved was how engaged the audience were with the subject of skincare and what it can and can’t do. Afterwards I was talking to someone in the audience and the subject of pores came up. Pores fascinate me — 20 years ago they just weren’t a thing. But now they most definitely are. At a certain point in time, people started to worry about them and they haven’t stopped. And guess what? Beauty brands are only too happy for you to worry about them so they can sell you a problem to fix them.

Just last month Benefit released a new product the Porefessional Degunker (which personally I’m a little bit upset about because I’ve been using “degunk” for years to describe what salicylic acid does to pores and now it sounds like I stole it from them). It’s a clay mask that’s meant to soften skin before you use the attached palette knife — sorry, extraction tool — to scrape over the skin. The idea is that you remove blackheads and clear out pores. I haven’t tried it but the reviews are mixed to say the least. I think the temptation is to scrape too hard damaging the skin. Then there’s the super-pricey Shark FacialPro Glow multi-tasking gadget that launched at the end of last year which promises to give you — among many other things — some form of pore extraction that “minimise pores for a clear, smooth skin texture.” Personally I don’t have time for this kind of shenanigans (10.47pm and I’m editing the newsletter that will be in your inbox at 7.30am) but I can see the appeal of all these things — that visible stuff is very satisfying.

My concern is that you’re actually removing sebaceous filaments rather than blackheads and the dirt, and sebaceous filaments are an essential part of your skin and critical to its function and health. (They basically line the pore and provide a way for oil to get out. I recently saw an analogy that I really liked that said you should think of sebaceous filaments as the motorway and blackheads as a traffic jam.) My other concern is that we’re all human and the temptation to do it more aggressively and more frequently than the makers ever intended means that even if tools like this might be effective, we’ll probably overdo it.

Back in 2021, I wrote about pores for my Patreon and, given that conversation at the weekend, and these (I don’t want to say gimmicky but you get the vibe) launches, it felt like a good opportunity to revisit that piece because honestly, five years on, nothing has changed. People still want to talk to me about pores, making pores smaller — or at least appear smaller — so if you’re one of those people, here’s what you need to know.

I think there are two very distinct demographics obsessing about their pores, for very different reasons. At the younger end of the market, there are women preoccupied by filtered images on social media and trends like “glass skin” that airbrush out pores entirely, and at the other end, are older women who can become obsessed with pores for a very different reason, as I discovered when I interviewed Dr Galyna Selezneva, a for a piece about midlife body dysmorphia (which never actually saw the light of day).

“As women get older, they worry about having hairs on their chin or upper lip, and many buy magnifying mirrors specifically for the purpose of being able to see these hairs and pluck them out,” she told me. “But when you’re looking for a hair, you cannot avoid looking at your wrinkles and pores, and certain women can find themselves obsessing about these things in a way that is unhealthy.”

Sound familiar? I know it totally does to me. I’m 100% guilty of seeing something in a magnifying mirror that looks ginormous but is actually imperceptible to the human eye. So what is the truth about pores?

Well, (apart from the fact that you’re probably worrying unnecessarily), to a certain extent, you get what you’re given. The dryer your skin, the smaller your pores are likely to appear, and keeping your pores (and your skin) clean means the eye isn’t drawn to them, so they can appear smaller.

So yes, you can try Benefit’s Degunker combo, or the Shark skin vacuum, or those old school Bioré Pore Strips. You know the ones — you wet them and glue them to your nose and then rip them off taking with them a layer of dead skin, and any gunk blocking the pores. But the alternative, and the one most dermatologists will recommend is regular use of salicylic acid to stop sebum building up in your pores and oxidising, or forming blackheads. (I like the Paula’s Choice one and it comes in a little 30ml bottle so you can see if you like it before buying the big one.)

This is all about appearance because, realistically, there isn’t a huge amount you can do to functionally change the size of your pores. Back in 2021 I was on a Zoom with dermatologist Dr Andrew Markey when he was asked about pores. At the time he said:

“Pores are a structural component of skin, with grease glands and follicles all together. They’re supported by collagen and elastin and, as we age these structures start to break down so pores can look more open as we get older.” So, sorry older women with magnifying mirrors I did you a bit of a disservice, you might be obsessing about your pores for a reason.

His suggestion for skincare that helps?

“What’s great for pores is preventing the breakdown of the structures that support them and, as we know that sun damage damages collagen and elastin, broad spectrum sun protection is a must-have. The ingredients that are best for promoting production of collagen and elastin are retinoids, and niacinamide has some ability to clean out pores a bit and improve skin optics, so retinoids at night, niacinamide in the morning, and SPF every day.”

I know, I know, it’s not flashy, it’s not exciting, it’s not a wonder product that is going to transform your skin overnight, but it’s science-based, and it will work, and that’s what you come here for right?

Oh, alright then, if you want an instant miracle, use a primer — primers won’t physically change the shape of your pores, but they will temporarily fill them in to give you a smooth canvas so that foundation will sit in an even layer across the top of your skin. L’Oreal Paris have a 24HR Pore Minimiser Primer that I quite like because not only does it do all those filling / blurring things that most primers do, but it also has an acid complex in it so that over time it’s gently resurfacing the skin and degunking the pores. Just a flag that like many primers, the ingredients that are doing the work are silicones — personally I don’t have an issue with silicones in skincare and for stuff like this I think they’re mega efficient. But I know that some people aren’t fans. My one caveat is that if you are going to use a primer, make sure you cleanse well in the evenings — after all they are designed to stick to your skin.

Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

I love it when I realise that science has just explained something that’s been bugging me for ages. And I sound like I’m talking about something really deep, but in this instance I’m talking about why a couple of bottles of handwash that I’d refilled just looked super manky. Bear with me…

Now I love a refill option and handwash is one of the products that, given the chance, I will always refill (and I’m not that bothered whether I’m refilling it with the original or something that was on offer / smells similar / I’ve been sent.) Maybe I’m just a slattern but it never really occurred to me to do anything more than a cursory rinse of the bottle. Sometimes, I’ve been known to not even do that, just pour the new stuff on top of the old. Most of the time this is just fine, but there have been occasions where it looks like the new one doesn’t mix properly with the old. Usually I assume that eventually the old stuff will get pumped out and the new stuff will settle but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it looks scummy, and stays scummy. And now I know why…

A few weeks ago Caroline Hirons posted a link to a post by a professor of epidemiology. He was talking about some research that looked at bacterial contamination of refillable bottles. Do have a look at the reel as I think it’s really interesting but, if you can’t be bothered… He basically talks about two different studies that have been done: one where researchers checked into 20 hotels, took samples from the shampoo, soap etc bottles and tested them. More than three quarters contained levels of bacteria that the FDA would not find acceptable in cosmetic products. The other looked at how bacteria gets into products like this.

And it’s not good news for those of us who use standard pump bottles of handwash because it’s all down to the way in which bacteria can get in through the top of the pump and then form biofilms — essentially a bunch of bacteria hanging out together that have produced a slimy layer of gunk (not a scientific word) to protect themselves. That slimy feel you get on the inside of vase once you take the flowers out? Biofilm. The slippery coating on the top of rocks in streams? Biofilm. That weird scummy layer on the top of my hand soap? Biofilm. Gross.

Maybe there are a load of you out there thinking “well duh”, maybe I’m the only one that hadn’t really cottoned on to the idea that just because soap can be used to get rid of bacteria, doesn’t mean bacteria can’t form within it. I mean the slight horror is that I was only aware of it in bottles that are clear. I kind of dread to think what’s going on in the opaque bottles.

Am I going to stop refilling my soap bottles? No, I’m not. The studies didn’t link any contamination with any infection, and as well as saving you money, buying a refill in flexible plastic or a larger container compared to buying and re-buying a small bottle and pump again can save an estimated 75 per cent of the plastic. But what I am going to start doing is properly washing the bottles and pumps (well, putting them through the dishwasher), and drying them out before I refill them.

Some of my favourite refill options include: Marks & Spencer’s Warmth (£9.50) which smells a lot like Le Labo’s Santal 33; L’Occitane Verbena (£22.10) a burst of citrus sunshine; Wild’s Amber & Oud (£5.50) — I didn’t know the deodorant brand did body wash too but turns out they do and I like this one, which isn’t too oud-y if you’re worried about that. And, of course, Le Petit Marseillais Olive Oil (£3.98, but you’ll spend a fortune on postage and you’re better picking up a load from Carrefour for 99 cents each — about 85p — when you’re in France.)

(Oh, and when it comes to handwash and shower gel, I’m fairly indiscriminate. If I love the smell of a handwash — Aesop Resurrection (£33) for example — I’ll buy it and use it as my shower gel. And if I’ve run out of handwash and have a glut of shower gel, I’ll refill the soap dispensers with that. In one of her Style beauty columns last year, wrote:

For some reason the one thing I really resent spending money on is stuff to wash with in the shower. I think it’s because the briefness of the relationship is made so explicit — you literally watch whatever you’ve used go down the plughole within minutes.

Whereas I feel quite the opposite. I genuinely think there is nothing more wonderful than a joy-giving shower wash. It’s a moment of solitude before the day begins, it’s a daily indulgence that just makes me happy, hence why I think it’s worth spending a bit of money on if you find something you love.)

There’s an old adage in journalism which says that if there’s a question in a headline the answer is invariably “No.” You know the sort of thing. “Could your beauty regime be giving you cancer?” “Will this one-minute hack revolutionise your life?” etc etc. But when I spotted a headline on Cosmetics Business asking “Is ‘longevity washing’ beauty’s next big issue?” I thought “YES!” Or maybe more accurately “Yes! Someone has finally articulated the thing that has been churning around my brain for a while.” Because I feel like longevity washing is already a thing.

I’ve been talking a lot recently about the evolution of the beauty industry — how it’s moved from being very superficial to an understanding that beauty is more than what we see on the surface, it’s more holistic, more aligned with wellbeing and self-care, mental health and physical health. Now I have a LOT of thoughts about this — most of them fairly cynical — that I might dig into another time. But in many ways it’s not surprising that the term “longevity”, which is a huge focus in the health and wellness sphere at the moment, has infiltrated the beauty space.

Beauty marketing is rife with pseudoscience, and has an ignominious history of glomming on to the latest scientific news in a bid to bask in its reflected glory, whether or not the products being marketed actually use the same technology. In the last two decades alone I’ve seen topical products boasting laser technology, drone technology, stem cell technology, genomics, epigenetics and more. So quel surprise that the minute that longevity becomes a buzzword, we see a load of products promising to help skin’s “longevity.”

First things first, just because that’s the marketing spin, it doesn’t mean that the products themselves aren’t any good, that’s not the issue. What I have a problem with is the idea that whacking the word of the moment in there suggests that a product is doing something that existing products aren’t.

I was sent a press release with the following quote from Dr Alexis Granite, a consultant dermatologist and founder of body care brand, Joonbyrd. (Love her, love her brand, this isn’t about her, I genuinely think she was trying to explain the trend.) She says:

“The term “longevity” in skincare often refers to protecting the skin from premature ageing, maintaining a resilient barrier and supporting cellular processes that slow down with time.”

To me that sounds a lot like anti-ageing skincare. And I think that’s exactly what’s happened here.

In many circles, the term “anti-ageing” has become taboo. Since Allure decreed back in 2017 that they wouldn’t use the phrase any more, we’ve seen more and more brands and individuals take a similar stance. The theory is that we shouldn’t be against ageing, we should be pro it, the alternative is death, why are we being negative about a natural process yada yada yada. Personally, it’s not something that I can really get exercised about. Outside of the beauty echo chamber, people are still happily calling products “anti-ageing”, that’s the search term they’re using, and — believe me — they still want to get rid of their wrinkles.

So how, as a brand, that wants to carry on selling anti-ageing products (because that’s what makes money) do you do that without using the dreaded AA phrase? Well thank goodness “longevity” popped up when it did. Because it sounds so much more positive than anti-ageing. Longevity is about health, aspiration, living well for longer.

When I went to the launch of the Paula’s Choice CellularYouth Longevity Serum the other day, it was explained to me that anti-ageing was about correcting stuff and longevity was about prevention, protection, maintaining the status quo. In a release I got about Beau Domaine skincare — which, incidentally, to me looks a lot like Caudalie with the addition of Brad Pitt — I was told “Beau Domaine embodies a new generation of skincare: ‘Slow Aging’ innovation that boosts skin longevity.”

And maybe it’s me, I’m the problem. Because I long ago gave up believing that any skincare is going to transform my skin in some amazing, miraculous, unrecognisable before-and-after fashion (except maybe something that is an anti-pigmentation powerhouse) and honestly, that’s largely not why I use skincare. With the exception of my pigmentation, I generally — touch wood — have well-behaved skin. And the reason that I use tretinoin and look after my barrier, and wear broad spectrum sun protection and all the rest of it is not because of how it’s going to look tomorrow, or in a week’s time, or a month’s time, but because I firmly believe that in ten years time, my skin will look better and perform better than if I hadn’t.

I saw the other day mention thiswomanlifts on Instagram, a trainer whose tagline is “Training for my old lady body” — the idea is that she’s not lifting weights to get fit for today but to stay fit for the future. And that’s kind of how I feel. My skincare today is for the face I want in 10, 20, 30 years time. The skin I have today is the legacy of what I’ve been doing for the last 10, 20 years.

It’s boring, it’s not flashy, it’s the tortoise when all social media wants is the hare. It’s the change you don’t see rather than the change you do. And you can call it slow ageing, or anti-ageing, or longevity, or whatever you want, but let’s not pretend that just because you’ve changed the label that what’s in the bottle is doing anything different.

I’ve been doing a lot of chatting on panels recently and I’ve really been enjoying it. I love the fact that it forces me to put makeup on, leave the house, talk to other people and wing it a bit. It’s the complete opposite of the writing I normally do (solo, barefaced, reworked and revised). I love that it keeps me on my toes and lets me interact with people IRL and hear the questions that people have about what I do. So hello if you saw me with Dr Marwa Ali at The Beauty Triangle Festival last month or earlier this week at White City House with Jenni Falconer, Olivia Falcon and Lavina Mehta.

If you fancy seeing more of me talking with interesting people, I’m going to be at The Ordinary pop-up in East London this Saturday discussing active ingredients with one of their scientists, Rita Silva — it’s free but you need to book your tickets in advance. Hope to see you there.

Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

Can we talk about limited edition colours of beauty tools and whether they really generate sales or are just another way to keep a brand or a product relevant? And when I say can we talk, I do mean we. Because I’m really aware of my own biases, limitations, whatever you want to call them, but basically my singular and myopic view of beauty and what I care about when it comes to beauty and, I’ll be brutally honest, limited edition colour ways are not one of them.

I don’t care if my hairdryer matches my bedroom decor (decor is a very loose term given the amount of makeup / clothing / outgrown kids clothing that is meant to be going to charity / shoes that don’t quite have a home etc that litter every surface). I’m not bothered if a pair of straighteners come in whatever Pantone has dictated to be the colour of the year.

Yes, if they’re all the same price, I’ll choose a colour I prefer (for example, when I bought a Suri toothbrush the other day, I picked the blue one — I mean Morning Waves shade — because I liked it better than the others, but if they’d only had it in green — sorry Winter Fern — or if the white — Sea Mist — one had been cheaper, that would have swayed my decision, not the colour. The verdict is still out on that toothbrush by the way, but if you are thinking of buying one has a code — CRILLY — that gets you a further 20% off even off sale prices.)

But that’s just me. And so I’m non-plussed when, for example, ghd comes out with their straightener in Cherry Chic, a sort of maroon shade. And last week, when at an event Dyson said that “by popular demand” they’d brought back their Red Velvet and gold range, I thought “well it’s nice enough but that’s not the thing that’s going to make me spend between £400 and £600 on a hair tool”. But when they talked about it being perfect for Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year, I thought “oh, OK, you just want to make sure that when a magazine is doing a Valentine’s / CNY beauty roundup (which let’s be honest is pretty spurious but happens) you want something that will look pretty on the page and make sure your product remains within the collective consciousness.” (Does ANYONE actually BUY beauty products for Valentine’s Day? PRs certainly hope they do — see my inbox below — but do real people actually do this? Or is it just another weird and pointless media/marketing thing?)

Tell me I’m wrong. Seriously, I know I’m cynical. Are you a person who has been swayed into buying a product because it’s a nice colour? No shade. (Pun kind of intended), I’m just super keen to know whether this is genuinely a thing that consumers want, or just marketing BS to keep a product relevant when there has been no new product development? And if that’s the case well then I guess it worked, because here am I talking about — although maybe not in the way that Dyson would have wanted…

What are your thoughts on empties posts? Personally I am ALWAYS fascinated by what beauty editors, who get sent so much stuff, actually use to the last drop. Because although I know that, from an environmental point of view, I should use every product until it’s gone, and I do try. But sometimes, when using a product feels like a chore, and I don’t feel like I’m getting results, the temptation to set it to one side and play with the new, shiny thing is sometimes overwhelming.

As a result I have a huge box of empty bottles and tubes and so on that I’ve been keeping because I was going to do an empties post at some point. I can’t tell you over what period of time I’ve used these products — it’s probably years, and it’s probably not complete — but it’s a start… Anyway, I’m kicking off with haircare — not styling stuff, but the stuff that I use in the shower…

Philip Kingsley Flaky/Itchy Scalp Shampoo (from £14)

My number one, prise-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands hair product. While I wouldn’t say I was a regular client, I did go to see the late Philip Kingsley once about a gazillion years ago (actually I just looked it up and it was 2010, so sixteen, rather than a gazillion) when my scalp felt like it was accumulating great wodges of flaky skin (apologies for the graphic detail). I had tried all the dandruff shampoos from cheap as chips to seriously swanky, but nothing had worked. He diagnosed seborrheic dermatitis, prescribed his shampoo, it worked like magic, and it’s the only shampoo I’ve been faithful to since. In the early years I flirted with others (and Nizoral was effective but not nearly as gentle on my actual hair) but these days it’s all I use. I buy it by the litre from LookFantastic who always seem to have that size on offer. (The PK website do it cheaper if you subscribe to a delivery every three months but there’s no way I get through a litre of shampoo in three months.) For the geeks, the active ingredient in the PK shampoo is Piroctone Olamine, an anti-fungal active — in Nizoral it’s an anti-fungal called ketoconazole. (Seborrheic dermatitis and dandruff are both caused by a fungus that lives on the scalp called Malassezia. The fungus produces irritating (genuinely irritating / inflammatory, not just annoying) byproducts and that’s what causes the itching / flakes.) By the way, if you’re using any scalp shampoo, the longer it’s in contact with your scalp the better. I tend to apply shampoo as soon as I get in the shower and then wash while it gets to work. And consultant dermatologist, Ophelia Veraitch recommends that clients using Nizoral actually leave it on their scalps for 20 minutes, rather than the 3-5 minutes that the label suggests.

Josh Wood Colour Miracle Mask (£19)

You can tell how long it is that I’ve been waiting to do this empties post — this is the old packaging for the Miracle Mask FKA the Everything Mask. And honestly, it’s one of the best conditioners I think I’ve ever used. If you’ve ever home coloured your hair and fallen in love with the conditioner that was in the box which seemed to leave your hair feeling softer, shinier and glossier than ever before. This is it. You’re meant to leave it on for five minutes but even when I didn’t have time for that, it still seemed to work a bit of magic. I am so pleased that they’ve changed the packaging because I always felt like I didn’t get every last drop out of this pump, but it now comes in a tube that, if you’re obsessive like me you can even cut open and scrape out when you’ve squeezed it to the limit. I just wish they did it in a bigger size. (By the way, I haven’t tried the Miracle Conditioner (£16) so I don’t know how it compares. If you have tried both, please let me know your thoughts.

Virtue Labs Recovery Conditioner (£42)

I want to love Virtue Labs, really I do. The products contain a protein that is meant to selectively bind to damaged bits of hair in a way that nothing else on the market does. But there’s a part of me that’s never really got my head around the science. And another part of me that felt that although it did a decent job, the changes that I saw were really not seismic enough for me to think it was so much better than any other conditioner. But then although my hair is prone to frizz, maybe it’s not damaged enough for me to really see the difference. If you have, and you love it, please let me know, but for me the cost:benefit ratio when it costs £42 for 200ml just wasn’t good enough. Sorry.

It’s A 10 Miracle Daily Conditioner (£22)

Ugh the brand name is so naff and the weirdly-shaped bottle is kind of weird but OM actual G, this stuff is staggeringly brilliant. I’d forgotten about this product until I started writing this piece but it was just a brilliant, brilliant conditioner. So brilliant that I seemed to be going through it faster than I went through any other conditioner. And I was, but only because my husband was also using it. And he literally never steals my conditioner because I like super heavy ones and he doesn’t like anything that weighs his hair down. Anyway, this is the Goldilocks of conditioners, it seems — just right for pretty much everyone. I feel like their distribution was better when I was using this as I could only find it on Amazon and a bunch of random sites that I’ve not used before. Anyway, if you want to take my word for it, I’ve just seen that Amazon do a 1l bottle for £29.75 which is less than £8 for a bottle that’s more than three times the size of the £22 (295ml). If you buy it and hate it, I’ll buy it off you.

Davines OI Liquid Luster (from £19)

This was one of a load of “hair waters” that I tried and tested when I wrote a feature on them for the Daily Mail. You might remember them, unlike thick conditioners they’re super thin liquids that heat on contact with the hair/water and managed to detangle in eight seconds flat. I loved using them — all of them. Because I’ll be honest although the most expensive (this one) was more than seven times the price of the cheapest, I genuinely couldn’t see or feel a difference. I recently rediscovered an Elvive one and remembered how good they were. (Caveat, make sure you use enough — when I first tried them I used enough to get the instant detangling but it wasn’t until I read the instructions and saw exactly how much you are meant to use — a lot, you’re lucky if you get five uses out of a single bottle if you use it as recommended — that I saw the results in the final blow dry.)
But I don’t think you need to spend £19 to get the effect. The cheapest ones I tried were the Garnier Hair Drinks (£4.99) and honestly if, when blinded, you could tell the difference between the results given by the Garnier one and the Davines one, you’re a better person than me. I do still stand by my advice to decant them into a spray bottle though - trying to pour the right amount through that tiny nozzle onto all your hair under a running shower requires prowess I don’t have.

dp Hue Apple Cider Vinegar Scal Scrub (£37)

A product that definitely falls into the “very nice and effective but no way in a million years could I justify spending my own money on this one” category. When it comes to scrubs I am a beauty rebel. I have spoken to the dermatologists, I know that they all prefer chemical exfoliants because you’re less likely to damage your skin through micro-tears and you get more even exfoliation. And yet, and yet… I can’t resist a really good gritty scrub — body rather than face, although — whisper it, Dermalogica’s Daily Microfoliant will always have a place in my heart, as will a flannel. (As an aside, I am delighted not to be the only beauty editor rebel on this front, in her latest newsletter, recommended a scrub, used in tandem with a cleansing balm which I imagine mitigates any scratchy damage but STILL.) Anyway I digress. Loved this, loved the fact that it felt gritty and scrubby and refreshing but when the top three ingredients are salt, water and apple cider vinegar, you can’t help feeling a bit WTAF when you see the price tag. tldr: if someone gives it to you, use it, don’t spend your own money on it unless you just won Euromillions.

Sometimes this newsletter seems to have a mind of its own. I hadn’t intended this to be all about hair — I’d normally say I’m not that interested in hair. But here we are… straight-haired people you might want to skip this bit as I just don’t think you’re going to get it. (Or read it and sympathise / feel smug you don’t have this issue). I am on a constant quest to embrace my curls. Especially when the weather is like this (if you don’t live in London it feels like it’s been grey, wet and rainy for about 40 days and 40 nights and as any moisture makes my hair rebel, there’s no point straightening it.)

I have naturally curly hair but I’ve always felt that I either have to blow-dry it smooth or tong it to get anything that looks vaguely presentable and professional. And that might be part of the problem — part of what I struggle with is the fact that my curls don’t seem even but then by heat styling them I probably make the curl even less even….

Back in lockdown, I dug deep into the curly girl method when I had no kids and no social life and all the time in the world. And even then it all felt like it took too much time. I’m impatient, I feel like I don’t have time to experiment with various proportions and combinations of products to find my perfect prescription.

But then I look back on the pictures of me in lockdown on the days when I felt like I’d nailed the perfect combo of Cantu Define & Shine Custard (£6.50) Living Proof Curl Definer (£33), and Living Proof Curl Enhancer (£33) (which seems to be out of stock everywhere) — which do subtly different things but for the life of me I can’t think what — and I want that hair again.

I mean LOOK…

And yet, I have to remind myself that this was in the days when I didn’t go anywhere, didn’t have anything to do and could do a morning workout, wash my hair, chuck on a million different styling products and just let it dry naturally. (Although all too often I used too much product and while it looked great on day one, it needed washing the next day as it just felt greasy.)

These days when time is a luxury I don’t have (and it’s this cold), I feel like I need to blow dry and while loads of curly-haired people wang on about the brilliance of diffusers, I’ve never managed to get one to work properly with my curls. I always felt like they just gave me flyaways and not the result I wanted. But the new diffuser from ghd might be the answer to my prayers — and then again it might not and as it’s a £30 diffuser that goes with ghd’s new £299 hair dryer, the ghd Speed, until I’ve done a bit more research, I’m not going to urge you to rush out and buy it just yet.

But, based on my limited mucking around with it so far, it seems less “blowy” on the lowest fan setting and so you can use a super low fan and quite high heat to try to set the curls in the same way that natural drying in a hot, dry country (where I swear my hair always looks its best) does. I will persist and report back.

Anyway, if you’ve tried any AMAZING curl products that would be ideal for a low maintenance / lazy curl haired girl, please let me know. And, if you’re similarly curl-obsessed, I must recommend Regina Roth’s Instagram feed for seemingly miraculous curl makeovers and generally an insight into the joy that good hair can give.

Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

First up if you don’t know Dewberry, you likely weren’t a teen girl in the 1990s. It’s almost impossible to describe the “beauty scene” of that time because there just wasn’t one in the way that there is today. It seems kind of inconceivable in the era of “Sephora kids” where 13 year olds are au fait with Drunk Elephant and Sol de Janeiro, but these were more innocent times. It would never have occurred to me to go and get colour-matched for a swanky foundation in a department store (that was where mums and grandmas with money bought their beauty stuff) — instead I bought Rimmel’s Hide The Blemish stick in one of the two colours they had in Boots and semaphored my spots by plastering them in the shiny orange “concealer”. I used the shampoo and conditioner mum bought in the supermarket shop and, not for me the sophistication of Summer Fridays or Rhode lip glosses, I had a Kiwi Lip Balm from The Body Shop — a much-loved Christmas stocking filler.

Because as a teen girl in the 1990s, The Body Shop was the height of sophistication. It was THE place you went to buy birthday presents and, if you knew which of The Body Shop’s core fragrances — White Musk, Fuzzy Peach, Ananya, Vanilla, Dewberry — your friend wore, it made life easy. I was Fuzzy Peach, my sister was White Musk, but one of my best friends, Gabrielle, wore Dewberry. So, for her birthday, she inevitably got a small basket filled with green shredded paper and miniatures of the Dewberry shower gel, body cream or whatever. And BATH PEARLS. Capsules made from a hardened gelatine that contained scented bath oil, they were designed to dissolve in hot water, flooding your bath with scented oil that never really drained away with the water, making it a death trap for whoever stepped into it next. (Of course I didn’t clean the bath afterwards, I was a teenage girl.) Where did bath pearls go? I wouldn’t rule out a comeback. When I went to The Body Shop’s Dewberry launch last week, I spoke to Victor Sabbe and Shimon Kalichman of their marketing team and I know they have been watching and listening to the social media response to Dewberry and the nostalgia it’s provoked and thinking about what other iconic products they might revisit.

I think there’s a really interesting conversation to be had about how, as a brand, when you bring back old favourites you manage to do it in a way that’s successful. I know that there are going to be a lot of millennials and Gen Xers who are going to want to dabble in Dewberry — and the prices (see below) are accessible enough that you can buy something as an in-joke for an old friend, or to douse yourself in 1994 for the night. But are these women, now in their 40s, actually going to re-purchase? And crucially, despite the 90s trends that Gen Z and Gen Alpha seem to be loving, are they going to buy the same stuff that their mums are buying?

For those of you that didn’t smell it first time around, I’ll do my best… it’s a real explosion of dark fruits (a dewberry if you didn’t know — and I didn’t — is a close relative of the blackberry) — there are also some greener notes and a bit of eucalyptus to give it a bit more of a fresher edge . Then there are the florals — jasmine, freesia and white lily — with a base of cedarwood and musk. But what really hits you is the floral / berry combo. (It’s not the exact same formulation, it’s been updated inline with modern regulations, but the notes are the same, and, to my amateur nose anyway, it’s indistinguishable from the original.)

There’s the Perfume Oil (£20), in exactly the same bottle with exactly the same little plastic applicator that was always a bit useless towards the end of the bottle and seems vaguely unsanitary (as borne out by the fact that the more you used, the cloudier the oil became, presumably thanks to the transfer of skin cells into it - urgh); a Fragrance Mist (£14), designed to lure in the teens obsessed with Sol de Janeiro body sprays; the Bath & Shower Gel (from £3.50), the Body Butter — naturally (from £7); the Hand Balm (£7); and the Body Yoghurt (£14), which I think is probably the most interesting in terms of texture — it’s somewhere between a cream and a lotion, absorbs really quickly and leaves skin feeling less greasy than the Body Butter.

My worry is that, for all they’ve gone hard on interesting textures and youth-trapping formulations, it’s not sweet enough for Gen Z who go ga-ga for gourmande scents but that it’s going to be too sweet for the people who wore it first time around. I’ll be honest, it’s not my bag, but if it was yours and you want to wear it with a 40-something twist, I do think there’s a way that you can do it.

I am not a scent expert like or , but I do like to experiment with perfume and one of the ways I do this is to layer it up. I have two favourites that I each adore worn alone, but layered together, they deliver in a way that is more than the sum of their parts. I think people can get too precious about this sort of thing. For all that I have huge respect for the noses that create fragrance, I think it’s a) really personal and b) can just be fun. So my immediate instinct when I smelled Dewberry was that to make it wearable for me it would need to have something zestier, citrussy in there — I love Dior’s Escale a Portofino, all bergamot and lemon, but I’ve run out so I layered it with Zara’s Fleur D’Oranger which I found in my beauty cupboard. It’s more orangey than lemon, and more floral, but it did exactly what I wanted it to, tempering the sweeter notes in the Dewberry and giving it more bite. You could still get the iconic berry but it felt more modern, more me.

Anyway those are my thoughts on the Dewberry comeback. Please let me know yours. Did you wear it? Will you buy it? I want to hear all about your Proustian rushes… Oh and Fuzzy Peach fans, while I am campaigning for that to be the next revival, the closest I’ve found which isn’t quite it but has the same juicy fruity with an edge vibe is Jo Love’s Mango Thai Lime (from £10 for a 2ml tester).

I feel like it’s quite a teen themed newsletter this week because the other thing I wanted to tell you about was my meeting with Tiffany Salmon-Mills, the founder of Glow Hub, a teen-focused brand you might have heard of, and Creative Director of Amelia Knight, a company you’re less likely to have heard of because they’re private label cosmetics manufacturers who make beauty products for everyone from Asda and Primark through to high end brands whose names you will definitely have heard of but who I can’t mention (sorry) because brands like that don’t like you to think that they’re paying a third party to come up with formulations, manufacture them and package them.

Anyway, we had a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion about a load of things — one of my favourite things was her introducing me to a term for ingredients that are included at a level that isn’t significant enough for them to actually be doing anything but because they’re present, you can mention them on the packaging, in press releases etc. In the past I’ve heard ingredients like this referred to as “fictives” or “factives” — fictitious actives so eg. everyone will be talking about charcoal, so a brand will bring out a scalp-clearing shampoo with charcoal. The consumer sees the word “charcoal”, has read everywhere that charcoal can detox, and so assumes that that’s what’s doing the heavy lifting when in fact it’s a bunch of more prosaic, but less trendy, ingredients. Anyway, Tiffany called these “story level” actives, which tickled me.

We also talked about one of the products that is going gangbusters for them at the moment which kind of surprised me at first, but actually makes perfect sense — their Cleansing Hand Mist. (How crazy that something almost nobody used pre-pandemic has become a beauty staple? But it has. In the US — which immediately makes it desirable in the UK — people are going crazy for the Touchland brand that you’ll have seen all over Insta.)

It sounds ridiculous, but Glow Hub’s version actually hits so many teen (& older?) touch points. First up it comes with a keychain style clip, tapping into the bag charm trend that is going nowhere. It also comes with a sheet of stickers making it customisable. Unlike many hand sanitisers it’s got glycerin which makes it less drying, and it comes in three fragrances that don’t smell like hand sanitiser — the one above is Dopamine, a sort of spicy floral combination. (BTW if you’re looking for other hand sanitisers that don’t smell like hand sanitiser, I hard recommend SoapSmith’s Brick Lane Rinse Free Handwash (£8) and Bower Refillable Hand Sanitiser Gel with Grapefruit and Lemongrass Essential Oils (£7.99 — although the refill which is four times the size is just £9.99) Then, have a look at their marketing — I mean it slightly gives me a headache, but then it’s not for me, and if I were a teen girl, I’d be all over it…

Anyway, for me, it’s always interesting to see a product doing really well and then do a bit of a forensic breakdown of it to work out why it’s such a success. If there are any other products you’d like me to dive into in this way, let me know, by leaving a comment below…

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Finally, a little insight into how my mind works… one of the stickers on the Glow Hub sanitiser sticker sheet is a lava lamp, and I saw one at the Dewberry press event last week. With the whole 90s revival, I wondered if there was a boom in lava lamps so I had a look at Google trends to see if interest in them was on the up. I definitely saw a pattern, just not the one I expected to…

Every one of those spikes? That’s late November, early December — apparently lava lamps are great Christmas presents — who knew?

That’s pretty much all for this week. Upcoming subjects that seem to be of interest over on Instagram include collagen (I wrote a piece on it for Saga magazine but I have a LOT of thoughts that I will share in a newsletter at some point) and electric toothbrushes (Suri v Oral B v Philips) — people have VIEWS. If you have thoughts or views on either of these — or anything else you’d like to see in Beauty Geekery, do comment below.

Oh, and I’m hosting a panel discussion on beauty and longevity with Olivia Falcon, Jenni Falconer and Lavina Mehta at White City House on 9th February — you have to be a Soho House member to come along (although I do get a guest list so if you’re interested in hearing what we have to say, let me know and I can see if I can hook you up.)

Until next time…

Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

It’s crap for multiple reasons, but not least because I’ve not been out and about so haven’t met interesting beauty people whose knowledge I can share with you. As a result I hope you’ll forgive me for plundering the archives for this week’s newsletter.

If there’s one thing that people ask me about time and time again, it’s eyelash serums. Back in 2021 I did a deep dive into them for my Patreon because I had had a load of questions about them. And since then I have cut and pasted that deep dive numerous times because friends, family, and friends of friends have asked about them.

As I said at the time, while I can try and test a load of mascaras for you, I don’t have enough eyes, or enough time, to try a bunch of lash growth serums, which can take months to take effect, so I’m going to try to inform you as best I can. This is the updated version of that original deep dive. Buckle up…

Eyelash serums initially came about because patients using a certain glaucoma drug found that one of the side effects was longer lashes. The drug is a drug called bimatoprost and in the US it’s available as a lash serum under the brand name Latisse, while in the UK, the same product is known as Lumigan.

It’s a prescription product so you can’t get it over the counter, and there are some pretty well-documented potential side effects which include eye irritation, but also the potential for extra hair growth around the eye (not just your lashes), darkening of the skin around the eyelid, darkening of the iris and even fat loss around the eye, leading to your eye looking sunken. These changes won’t necessarily happen to everyone, and they’re less likely to happen when you use a brush to apply the product to the roots of your lashes, rather than the eye drops that were originally used when it was a glaucoma treatment, but if they do happen, they may be permanent. It’s kind of down to you to make the call on whether the promise of longer, darker, thicker, fuller lashes is worth that sort of side effect (assuming you can find a doctor to prescribe it.)

But if you want an over the counter option, there are loads of them out there, and while you might assume that they don’t have the same side effects, they often contain ingredients that work in the same way as bimatoprost.

(I’ll try not to get too geeky but bimatoprost is known as a prostaglandin analogue. That means it works in the same way as prostaglandin, a hormone that occurs naturally in the body. Every hair follicle on your body has growth phase, a shedding phase, and a resting phase and prostaglandin’s role in hair growth seems to be that it has an ability to kick hairs out of their resting phase and into their growth phase, and keep them in the growth phase for longer, resulting in more, longer lashes.)

These ingredients might be at a lower concentration, or they might be weaker, so you should be less likely to get the sort of side effects that you’d get with the prescription drug, but it’s still a possibility — however hypothetical.

When you look at the ingredients that the leading lash serum brands talk about, there’s a lot of focus on things like panthenol and biotin (forms of vitamin B) and various peptides and oils — all of which will undoubtedly help to condition and strengthen lashes, which means they will be less likely to break — a bit like conditioning the hair on your head. But if you look at the ingredients listing and see “prost” in amongst there, that’s probably a prostaglandin analogue. In RevitaLash, it’s Dechloro Dihydroxy Difluoro Ethylcloprostenolamide, in RapidLash, Grande Lash MD and Lancer Lash Serum Intense, it’s lsopropyl Cloprostenate etc etc.

After all that, you still want a recommendation don’t you? Personally I’ve tried both RapidLash (£27) and Revitalash (from £59) in the past and found them both pretty effective, with no side effects, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find the same. As with everything, consistency counts. I used to leave them by my bed and do it last thing at night before I turned off the light.

If the scare story above put you off and you don’t want anything with “prost” in it, then @beauty_unplugged (a medic with an interest in skincare) on Instagram suggested that active ingredients that aren’t prostaglandin analogues include Swertia Japonica, Red Clover (listed as trifolium pratense), and Sympeptide (which you’ll find on the ingredients listing as myristoyl pentapeptide-17 and myristoyl hexapeptide-16).

As far as I can tell, from looking at the ingredient listing, the following products are free of prostaglandin analogs, although I haven’t tried them so can’t vouch for their efficacy: Sweed Eyelash Growth Serum (£42) and The Ordinary’s Multi-Peptide Lash and Brow Serum (£14.20) use peptides, Olaplex’s Lashbond Building Serum (£64) and Kosas GrowPotion Fluffy Lash and Brow Boosting Serum (£40) use a combination of the peptides and red clover. And in this post, from @beauty_unplugged, on the 9th slide, she recommends a number of other products that don’t contain prostaglandin analogs and are thus considered safe, as far as we know. Although as Michelle Wong points out in this video, there is less research on these ingredients so we don’t know for sure. So, whatever lash serum you’re using, it makes sense to be keeping an eye out for any unwanted changes around your eye.

If you’ve got any lash serums — or anything else — you want me to take a look at, just let me know.

That’s pretty much all for this week — although do learn from my cold-related mistakes: Otrivine (£3.74) and Lemsip Day & Night (£4.99) are wildly effective at clearing congestion because they contain decongestant ingredients such as phenylephrine and pseudoephedrine. These are vasoconstrictors ie they shrink blood vessels, but if you use them too much, they can cause something called rebound congestion where the vessels swell once you stop using them. I’ve no idea if that’s happened to me but because I didn’t have sinus pain when I started out, I just had a blocked nose, and I developed sinus pain that made the whole right hand side of my face ache, I’ve ditched them just in case. (I then tried pretty much every form of sinus drainage massage I could find on Insta and now don’t know if my face hurts because my sinuses are blocked or because I’ve bruised it with so much massage — this one was a good one though.)

BUT if you want a tried and tested combo for being able to sleep and breathe that doesn’t involve vasoconstrictors, the following worked for me: a bath with Aromatherapy Associates Support Breathe Bath Oil (currently £48.75 with 25% off at LookFantastic — it is expensive but you don’t need much and it really lasts and works. They’ve also just brought out a Shower Mist (£38) which I will be putting to the test asap) followed by Vick’s Vaporub (£5.06) on chest and back, sluicing my nose with Sterimar Hayfever & Allergy Spray (£6), a quick spritz of Beconase Nasal Spray (£11) (a steroid which doesn’t cause rebound congestion) and Breathe Right Congestion Relief Nasal Strips (£13.99) — I was really sceptical about these and the evidence base is mixed but I tried them in desperation when I was pregnant when you can’t take anything except paracetamol (TOTALLY FINE TO TAKE IN PREGNANCY) and was surprised and impressed.

I topped all that off with some Tylenol PM that I bought in the States when I was over there (it’s basically paracetamol and an antihistamine that causes drowsiness) and, for good measure, some melatonin I also bought when I was over there. It gave me a good uninterrupted 7 hours of sleep and then another couple of hours dozing. I was going to say that’s not to be sniffed at but sniffing and coughing is literally all I can do right now.

Until next time…

Note: I only write about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

Sadly I didn’t make it out to Vegas myself — maybe one day — but, from a bit of virtual digging, here are what I think are some of the most interesting beauty technologies that were showcased there…

The next generation hair tool

L’Oréal’s Light Straight + Multi-styler uses glass plates and near infra-red light to straighten hair at temperatures that don’t exceed 160C. According to their tests, it means three times faster straightening and leaves hair twice as smooth when compared to “leading premium hair stylers”. You’d better believe as soon as I can get my hands on a prototype — probably not until 2027 sadly — that I’ll be putting it head to head with my ghds and the Dyson Corrale.

The smart manicure

According to iPolish, these digital stick on acrylic nails make changing your nail colour “as easy as changing the song on your playlist.” By the looks of things they’re tiny e-ink screens that are applied to each nail and the colour can be changed by using a “wand” (connected to an app) that delivers a certain electronic message that changes the colour of the nail. Change them all to match your outfit — or have each one a different colour. This is the sort of tech that The Jetsons would have had — but you can get your hands on it from June this year. My slight concerns are that the nails look insanely long and that unless they’re reusable or easily recyclable, they’re massively un-environmentally-friendly. But also HOW COOL?!

The upgraded everything shower

Take two bottles into the shower? Nope, if you’ve got Ceragem’s Balance AI Shower Rejuvenation System, you just look in the mirror and get your shower water bespoke to your skin’s needs. Apparently the mirror assesses hydration, oil levels, elasticity, and pigmentation, then the system adjusts the pH of your shower water and adds in the necessary vitamins and skin actives you need that day.

While I quite like the idea of stumbling bleary-eyed into the shower and having someone else decide what my skin needs that day, this feels a bit gimmicky. Would you really notice the difference in your skin? (Because I cannot believe the pH is going to fluctuate that much) and the mirror needs to be REALLY good (previous “smart mirrors” like this have been a bit of a damp squib.)

The ageing predictor patch

How your skin is going to age is largely down to what you do every day so Korean big hitters, Amore Pacific have worked with MIT to track exactly that using Skinsight. It uses a sensor that can be worn for 24 hours and is used to track UV/blue light, temperature, moisture, and mechanical deformation (or how your skin and face move). AI then uses this information to work out which aspects are going to contribute most to that individual’s skin ageing and can then recommend targeted products based on this.

I mean I am a data NUT and would 100% geek out over this information but I’m still not convinced that this sort of individualised prescription will give better results than say, a retinoid plus daily broad spectrum sun protection. What it might do is encourage people who need a gentle nudge to prioritise one aspect of skincare over another, so maybe it’s the psychology of personalisation that will make a difference rather than the bespoke regime.

The no needle injection system

Skinbooster JET is an interesting one because it’s a technology that L’Oréal, the company behind it, says allows them to deliver active ingredients into the skin via “high velocity micro-atomisation”, so kind of like a high pressure jet wash of tiny particles. They say clinical trials show improvements of between 30% and 100% (which is quite a wide range) in radiance, transparency, evenness, plumpness, and smoothness compared to just applying to skin without this gadget — and that benefits can last up to 8 hours. It’s aimed at the professional beauty space and promises, “medical-grade efficacy through safe, non-invasive cosmetic technology”. I’m fascinated by L’Oréal looking like they want to play in the clinic space as it doesn’t feel like their natural home. But I can very much see this sort of thing having a role in red carpet facials etc.

The new UV wearable

UV wearables aren’t brand new — L’Oréal’s My Skin Track UV sensor came out in 2019 — but what I like about this battery-powered pendant from a startup called Loox, is that it is really focusing on incidental UV exposure, so the stuff you get when you’re sitting by a window, sitting by a lamp (yup), or driving a car. I also like that it’s got a more nuanced approach to UV, recognising the importance of getting enough UV eg to synthesise vitamin D and regulate your circadian rhythm, so it’s not just about demonising the sun. Interested in finding out more? Take a look at the website where you can also sign up to be the first to buy (at a discounted rate of $179 — about £133 — when it launches later this year.)

I promised every issue would have at least one recommendation so, in case you missed it on my notes…

Since we met I have been encouraging my husband to wear daily sun protection (or as he prefers to call it, “moisturiser with SPF”). His favourite to date has been La Roche-Posay’s HyaluB5 Aquagel SPF30 (and TBH if it was an SPF50 it would be my favourite as well, it’s got a dreamy texture that melts into the skin and leaves no trace) BUT it’s £40 (!) so I had high hopes (for a cheaper dupe, let’s be honest) when another brand from the L’Oréal stable, Garnier, brought out Hyaluron Daily UV Invisible SPF 50+ which is a much more pocket-friendly £12.99. It’s not quite as pleasing texture-wise but it’s still light and non-greasy, and crucially, he liked it enough that when I was away last week, that he went out and bought one for himself as he’d run out of moisturiser. So if you’re looking for man-friendly (for which, read “non-sticky, non-greasy, easily absorbed”) daily SPF, I hard recommend these two.

Also on my notes this week was my love of Apple AirTags - one in my suitcase saved my sanity when I waited FOR EVER for my suitcase to appear at Heathrow, at least I knew it was somewhere in the airport. The best deal I’ve found on them is four for £85 at Amazon, which makes them £21.25 each as opposed to £35 on the Apple website. Come for the beauty geekery, stay for the tech bargains, I say.

That’s all for now. As ever, let me know your thoughts. Have you tried these SPFs? Do any of these future tech gadgets excite you? Do you have a beauty tech dream that you’d like to see a reality? Let me know in the comments. Until next time…

Note: I only write about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.

This is something I know quite a lot about, because there is very little I won’t sacrifice to get some time on skis. The mountains, especially in winter, are my happy place. Even if the result has, in the past, been scaly shins, cracked heels, a chapped chin, and horribly painful splits in the skin on my thumb near the nail. But after years of trial and error I’ve found what I think are the best ways to keep skin from being ravaged by the cold.

First up, what is it about cold weather that is so bad for the skin? It’s partly that cold air has the capacity to hold less moisture than warm air, but this is exacerbated by the fact that when we heat the cold air in our homes without adding moisture to it, it has the capacity to hold more moisture than when it was cold and so tries to leach moisture from wherever it can i.e. our skin.

Add moisture to your environment

That’s why my first cold weather skin preservation tip is not product related, it’s about trying to boost moisture levels in your home. Do whatever works for you. You don’t need a fancy humidifier — I bought the expensive Vicks ones for the kids’ rooms for when they have colds but TBH I think a cheapo Amazon one (I bought this £14.95 one seven years ago and it’s still going strong) is just as effective. And if you are going to get one, get the biggest capacity one you can so it doesn’t conk out after a couple of hours. But another option — and this is what I tend to do when I’m travelling — is a wet towel on a radiator or even hanging on a hook somewhere in the room — not dripping-on-the-floor-sopping-wet but wet-and-wrung-out. It helps add moisture to the room and helps me sleep better. A bowl of water by the radiator is an equally good solution.

Consider ditching certain actives

If I’m only away for a week (or if the cold snap is short-lived), I ditch any actives that could make my skin more sensitive — when it’s cold, it’s all about skin barrier preservation and even though my skin is pretty tough, from bitter experience, I’ve realised that leaving out my prescription tretinoin is the best thing for my skin. If I do that, I know it can handle my daily vitamin C and pretty much anything else. For you that might be about dropping your retinoid or an AHA for a few days. That doesn’t mean I’m not using any actives, I’m just focusing on those that address my melasma without causing any irritation — at the moment that’s any combo of La Roche-Posay Mela B3 Dark Spot Serum (£48), Eucerin’s Anti-Pigment Night Cream (£34), and Skin Rocks The Hyperpigmentation Serum (£85) — more on all these in this feature I wrote for the Mail.

Swap gels for oils and balms

When it’s this cold, everything I do — from cleansing onwards — is about adding more moisture into my skin, and locking it in there. (Humectant ingredients — such as hyaluronic acid and glycerin — draw moisture to the skin, and occlusive ingredients — oils and butters — help lock that moisture in.)

I love oil and balm cleansers at any time — mostly as I’m lazy and I want a one-and-done way to get rid of makeup and sun protection, but when it’s cold, they’re absolutely non-negotiable for me. I’m generally not picky. I know some people don’t like fragrance in their cleansers, but my skin generally isn’t sensitive to fragrance so I don’t have a problem with it. As long as they emulsify nicely and cleanse effectively, I’m happy.

I’ve talked before about my love for Erborian’s Centella Cleansing Oil (£17.60) but I also really like e.l.f cosmetics Holy Hydration! Makeup Melting Cleansing Balm (£12) — my only beef is that it’s quite a small pot. The one I’m currently using is Elizabeth Arden Ceramide Replenishing Cleansing Oil (£30) — honestly, I’m not convinced that a cleansing oil is in contact with my skin long enough to replenish ceramides (ceramides are an essential part of a healthy skin barrier and more on them later) but it’s a gentle and effective cleanser. When it’s not so cold, I’ll often use a gel cleanser after a balm or oil to remove the oily layer that can be left behind as I think that can be a barrier to whatever actives you use after. But when my priority is moisture and skin barrier repair, I don’t bother.

Layer on moisture

After cleansing at night and using one or more of my melasma serums, I’ll slather on various moisturising products. Elizabeth Arden was doing ceramides way before they got trendy (and TBH I think it’s a crying shame that they didn’t do a better job of owning that space.) The capsules are brilliant for travelling and there are various versions but I am a fan of the original Ceramide Capsules (£40). Once I’ve used a capsule, I slather Aestura Atobarrier 365 Cream (£19.09) liberally over the top. This ceramide-packed cream (yep, more ceramides) is a recent discovery but when I was researching a K-beauty piece, loads of people told me how much they loved it. It’s moisturising without being too greasy and I wake up in the morning and my skin feels great.

Sun protection = non-negotiable

If I only put one thing on in the mornings, it’s always broad-spectrum SPF50 and I’m particularly careful when I’m in the mountains where the sun is reflected off the snow. I’m not super picky about which I use, but I tend to layer up different types of sun protection to ensure that I’m putting on enough, and I will normally include a tinted one as it means that it contains iron oxide which is particularly useful for melasma. I’m currently using the La Roche-Posay Anthelios Anti Dark Spot Fluid (£22) which contains the same Melasyl anti-pigment ingredient that’s in the Mela B3 serum I use at night. And then Avene SPF50+ Tinted Fluid (£22) on top. (Plus the Vichy Idéal Soleil Sun Protection Stick SPF50+ (£11) for lips.)

Don’t forget your body

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m lazy but when it comes to body care I’m even lazier which is why, especially in winter, I will always try to opt for a shower oil rather than a shower gel. I used to love the Neutrogena Shower Oil but it’s not easy to get your hands on these days. I use the Bioderma Atoderm Shower Gel on my kids — it’s £16.50 but that’s for a litre bottle that lasts for ever. I prefer something fragranced and L’Occitane Almond Shower Oil (£22) is one of my long-time loves, but I’ve also tried and liked Naturium’s The Glow Getter Multi Oil Hydrating Body Wash (£19) and Soap and Glory Perfect Zen Nourishing Bath & Shower Oil (£9.75). My other big tip is to keep your body oil or moisturiser in the shower and slather it onto wet skin before you get out. It traps in the moisture (and in my case means you actually put it on).

I don’t know about you but when it’s cold my hands and feet need extra love — I slather on any and every hand cream — currently rotating Gatineau Aromatique Hand Balm (£35), La Roche-Posay Cicaplast Hand Cream (£9) and CQ Gardens Celery Seed Hand Salve (£24.50) — I can find at every possible opportunity. (The Gatineau is lovely but I had no idea it was so expensive until I wrote this — for a less expensive option, I love Heath London Hand Salve (£10))

As for feet, CCS is not a sexy brand but my goodness it works. The Cracked Heel Repair (£8.75) is packed with urea and lactic acid which exfoliates and moisturises. My feet were wrecked before I even got here and I’ve used it three nights in a row and it’s already transformed my trotters.

Emergency repairs

I feel like following this regime mostly means I don’t end up with sore, chapped skin but if I do, my go-tos for repair are La Roche-Posay Cicaplast Balm (from £11), Avène Cicalfate Cream (from £10) and CeraVe Advanced Repair Ointment (£11.50). The first two are also the ones I’d use on any random bit of inflamed skin, on me or my kids, while the CeraVe one is a bit greasier and so it’s the one that I use on those cracks you get in fingers and feet.

Anyway, that’s how I’m trying to look after my skin during the cold snap. Any gems you think I’ve missed, I’d love to know. Until next time…

Note: I only write about products I really rate. I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.