You're Almost Certainly Overpaying For Your Skincare PART ONE
The Product Guide - work out what products you *actually* need in your routine
Before I say anything else
I am not here to tell you to give up a beloved product that you can afford, is giving you results that delight you and that you enjoy using.
I am here to tell you that you’re probably overpaying for your skincare. What you do with that information is up to you.
I spend more than the average person on butter.
I make an informed choice to buy stupidly expensive French butter with delicious salt crystals and every time I eat it, it fills my heart (and stomach) with joy1.
I would not thank you if you suggested that I change to Asda own-brand butter with this logic: they’re both yellow, made of cow’s milk and spread on toast, what’s the difference? 🤷♀️.
I am, however - indisputably - overpaying for my butter2. But it’s a conscious choice, based on my own preferences and JOY.
Skincare is the same. There may be another, comparable, cheaper product out there that functionally performs the same task as your HG3, but that doesn’t make your heart sing.
Anything that makes your heart sing is probably worth keeping in your life.
That said, I’ve had more conversations than I can count4 with women who’ve bought whatever was sold to them because they had no idea where to start.
So this is where to start:
Know your skin
If you don’t know what your skin type is, you are a skincare liability right now. You’re probably buying whatever you read about in a ‘best of’ list or an interview with a celebrity, or that thing that your friend uses - without having asked her what her skin type is - and then are just hoping for the best.
And that will work out for you sometimes, but you’ll likely make some unnecessary expensive mistakes along the way. I certainly did.
Head over here and figure a few things out before proceeding any further:
What skincare routine do you need?
The truthful answer may not delight you, but it’s this: one that will give you healthy skin that makes you smile.
And, if a lengthy routine isn’t your jam: the one that achieves the above in the fewest steps possible.
There is increasing concern that people are unwittingly damaging their skin barriers with too much skincare right now5. More is not better. Find the ingredients that work for you and stick to variants of these. Don’t overwhelm your skin.
Definitely don’t over-exfoliate your skin, then over-moisturise it to compensate. See how that can go?
Unless you are treating an underlying concern or condition (fine lines, acne, rosacea, eczema, etc) you don’t need more than:
Cleanser
Moisturiser
SPF6
Decide if you’re washing your face once or twice a day
If you wear makeup or sunscreen, you should wash this off at night to avoid congested skin overnight.
Unless you have a very heavy skincare routine at night (e.g. slugging) or a dermatologist has specifically instructed you to wash your face twice a day, you may not need to wash your face in the morning. Splash some water on it instead, then moisturise as usual and see how you feel afterwards.
You *can* wash your face twice a day if you like. Nothing is likely to fall off if you do7. But check that that’s what your skin needs if you don’t want to overpay for your skincare.
Whether you’re washing your face once or twice a day, you’ll also need to decide if you’re double-cleansing or not.
If you wear make-up and SPF, it’s probably worth it, once a day.
It’s unlikely to ever be worth it twice a day. If you currently double-cleanse twice a day, I just doubled the lifespan of your oil cleanser. Congrats!
Don’t go mad with actives
If you are treating an underlying skin condition or concern, understand which specific actives will help with your specific skin concern and suit your specific skin.
If you’re keen not to overpay for your skincare: start with the cheapest versions of the appropriate concentrations that you can find whilst researching this.
Once you’ve worked out which actives work well for you, you can absolutely shop around for a fancier version but there’s little point dropping £££ on something your skin might not respond well to. Even if that woman you follow on Insta swears by it.
Wait, WTF is an ‘active’ anyway?
You must be new here. I’ve got you (always).
Know your ingredients
Active skincare ingredients are not inherently very expensive. Some are dirt cheap.
To summarise:
Hyaluronic acid/glycerin
These are humectants that moisturise by locking in moisture pulled from above and below the surface of the skin. Marketing calls this skin-plumping.
Both are cheap. Glycerin almost comically so. If you’re so inclined, you can buy a litre of it for about £7 and make your own facial mist. You may not want to get all DIY about your skincare; my point is that you shouldn’t tolerate a cosmetic company charging you £££ for it.
Retinoids (vitamin A)
Promotes cell turnover and stimulates collagen production. This is the only topical skincare that’s proven to significantly reduce fine lines and wrinkles. It’s still not as effective as Botox, so if lines are your concern and yours are deep, consider spending your money on that instead of on skincare.
A retinoid is around £20 for a tube of cream that will last you around 3 months on private prescription in the UK. You can *only* get it on prescription. If you can get it via an NHS dermatologist or your GP, it’ll be at NHS prescription rate (currently under a tenner).
It’s more expensive in the US, because of the US healthcare system, but it’s still a lot cheaper than luxe skincare.
Retinol
This is a lower-strength derivative of retinoid that is allowed to be sold for cosmetic use - i.e. without a prescription. If you’re over 35, don’t waste your time/money with this8. Get a retinoid, you’ve aged out.
It’s expensive vs results and compared to retinoid and it’s sold at whatever price a cosmetic company thinks it can get away with charging for it. Which works about at between £15/$10-£300/$3509
Vitamin C (ascorbic acid)
Ostensibly for skin brightening and hydration. Probably not worth the trouble. More expensive than the other actives - it’s more expensive to formulate because it’s not very stable10. You can eat an orange for about 50p. I’d suggest you do that instead.
Niacinamide
Provides penetrative hydration11, oil regulation/pore decongesting, plumping. Extremely cheap, you can buy 30ml for around fiver.
Azelaic acid
Provides the gentlest chemical exfoliation of the actives. Up to 10% is available cosmetically, 15% or 20% or available on prescription.
In the UK on prescription, it’s around £20 for a tube that should last for 3 months of daily use.
AHA (lactic acid, glycolic acid, malic acid, tartaric acid)
These provide stronger chemical exfoliation. Make sure you definitely need stronger before you introduce these to your routine. All of these12 are available for under £12/$10 cosmetically.
If you’ve just realised, reading this, that you’re using multiple AHAs across different products, pick a favourite and don’t repurchase the rest. More is not better13. If you’re using a product that’s specifically formulated to contain multiple AHAs (with or without BHA), this is ok from a cost perspective, but you don’t know which of these your skin is actually reacting well to.
Salicylic acid (aka BHA)
Clears pores spots/congested skin. You can buy 2% strength - which is the maximum concentration allowed to be sold for skincare use14 - for around a fiver
Benzoyl peroxide
I don’t have acne, but everything I read urges people to try retinoids/azelaic acid/BHAs instead of this. It’s here for completeness, but the internet is full of people who are very unhappy with the way that this strips the skin.
Emollients
These aren’t actives per se, but if you’re thinking about what’s going on your skin, emollient ingredients are important. As with everything in this list, they can be purchased very cheaply or very expensively, depending on who’s selling them to you.
Choose your own adventure
What actives a) does your skin tolerate well and thrive with b) treat your skin concerns/conditions
Buy those. Don’t buy the others. Even if someone else swears that they work miracles for them. It’s that simple.
Don’t buy complicated cocktails of multiple ingredients if your skin doesn’t need them/doesn’t respond well to them.
What texture do you prefer:
Oil? Gel? Mousse? Lotion? Cream? Butter? Serum? Spray? It’s all out there. Figure out what you prefer and spend your money on those formulations.
Perfume
Do you prefer scented or unscented products?
Is packaging important to you?
It’s absolutely ok if it is. Identifying what we find beautiful and surrounding ourselves with those things wherever/whenever possible is important. If it’s absolutely not important to you, you can save a lot of money by going with more utilitarian products.
Build your routine
Using your knowledge of the things that are unique to you:
Your skin type
Your skin concerns
The ingredients that can treat those concerns and are well-tolerated by your skin
Your preferences re texture/scent/packaging
How complex a routine you want to develop
You can go ahead and build out something that’s going to give you a better bang for your buck than throwing yourself at the mercy of a department store and hoping for the best.
It will probably look something like this, with the actives rotated in at the appropriate frequency.
Throw in the odd occlusive, an eye cream if those are your thing and maybe the odd deep treatment masks on the days that you feel like you want to zhuzh things up or something nasty unexpectedly happens that you need to treat, but this doesn't need to be complex or cost you a price beyond rubies to maintain
Per the inconvenient truths, you almost certainly don’t need a different nighttime moisturiser if your day moisturiser doesn’t contain SPF. You can buy one if you like, but you probably don’t need one.
A note on the hierarchy of skincare product spend
The rule of thumb is that there should be a direct relationship between the cost of a product and the amount of time it spends on your skin.
By this logic, cleansers should cost you the least and you should spend more on your humectants and emollients.
It’s a useful rule. But if a more expensive cleanser that you can afford makes you happy every time you use it, don’t trade it for something you like less -assuming you’ve tried others - just because of an arbitrary rule.
Some nonsense someone may try to tell you one day
If a skincare rep (be it in-store or in a clinic/salon) tells you that a range has been formulated so that all the products work best together, so you should buy them all, this is errant nonsense.
I invite you to remember the moment that I told you this, to call this page up on your phone and to show that person this:
If their products only work optimally in conjunction with one another15, they should have spent more time on the research phase before flinging this out on an unsuspecting public.
If you like them all, by all means buy them all, but you don’t need to.
Mixing across brands is ok, as long as the ingredients are complementary. You should be getting the best possible combination of products for you and your skin. It’s unlikely that one skincare research team hit the jackpot for every aspect of your skin’s needs. You are, after all, a unique jewel of a human.
And Finally
Never lose sight of how much skincare is marketing. Think about all those sample jars in every beauty hall you’ve ever been in, all disappearing at a loss. Think about the sheer volume of free shit that PR firms send out to influencers. Think about the fact that Estee Lauder’s gross profit margin fell to 70.3% last year16.
In my opinion, the current holy trinity of grossly over-priced skincare is: Augistinus Bader, Drunk Elephant and Creme de la Mer.
First off, the Augustinus Bader Rich cream. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever used before”.
Yeah, there’s a reason for that. The vast majority of moisturisers are made of oil suspended in water. The AB cream is water suspended in oil (aka an inverted emulsion).
The difference in texture is due to this, not the stem cells, amino acids nor the breathless PR claims about anti-ageing that there seems to be no clinical evidence for17. Those same breathless PRs also absolutely carpet-bombed influencers with free samples when Augustinus Bader launched.
You want an inverted emulsion for under $40? Here you go. Thank me later.
Drunk Elephant play a blinding marketing game: their packaging is adorable and they (like Augustinus Bader) pump out a relentless stream of freebies to influencers. That doesn’t make them bad people, but it does mean that their skincare is grossly overpriced for the ingredients and formulations that they’re peddling. There’s an entire section of the internet that’s dedicated to listing dupes for Drunk Elephant products at a fraction of the cost.
And Creme de la Mer, the OG skincare Emperor’s New Clothes. I’m pretty sure I don’t know a single person who went back to this product after stopping, even if they swore by it at the time.
The formulation and ingredients are still mired in secrecy and no clinical trials of its efficacy are available. What we do know is that they figured out the formulation used today by communing with its inventor via a medium. I’ve done my fair share of dabbling in the spiritual realm, but £££ for some undefined sea broth is not for me.
Even for those who are less obviously peddling money for old rope; at a point, you also have to work out why you’re spending large sums on skincare when treatments are becoming more effective and less expensive.
If any individual product that you’re using costs you more than £200,18 for the price of a year’s worth of that one product you could get microneedling or laser resurfacing or Profhilo, the effects of which take minutes to achieve, not months of consistent use. There’s also no risk that that treatment will expire on your bathroom shelf or that you don’t like the smell/texture.
Be smart - spend your money on tech, not tubs of cream. Similarly. a 21st-century facial should involve your practitioner working on your face with a machine, not smoothing soothing lotions into you whilst whales sing plaintively in the background.
As with all cosmetic work, research your practitioner thoroughly beforehand
and if you’re in the UK, remember that FAR TOO MUCH cosmetic work is unlicensed.
Next time: You're Almost Certainly Overpaying For Your Skincare: the brand guide. Which brands to try to buy your actives for less.
It may be instantly obvious that I’m currently in a country that is notably and alarmingly sans expensive French butter.
There’s a euphemism in here somewhere
Holy Grail - the beauty community’s highest accolade
And I know ALL of the big numbers.
I couldn't find an independent study confirming this, just a lot of breathless articles from beauty journalists that then list The 10 Products To Use To Not Overwhelm Your Skin Barrier 🤦♀️. The premise of it makes sense though.
And, look, if you’re in the UK and you don’t see daylight in winter and decide to skip SPF Nov-Feb as a result, I won’t tell anyone.
If something does fall off, desist.
Retinols are easier for the skin to tolerate, but this comes with much-reduced results. A retinoid, used responsibly and introduced slowly at low concentration, is safe and far more effective.
As usual, this is done on a like-for-like cost comparison basis for the same product and is not an FX of one price into another currency.
I already made the obvious joke in the standalone Vit C post
Fnaar
Tartaric and malic are harder to find as standalones.
This will go on my tombstone at this rate.
Which isn’t true in any case, it’s just marketing bullshit
‘Get a retinoid, you’ve aged out.’ 😂
Don’t even get me started on people who buy… margarine!