Skincare of the Week 11.10.15

No blog posts last week because I was unwell last Sunday and I simply couldn't face writing in the slightest.  I still kept up with my skincare routines though, because I do (occasionally) have standards ...  The routine above was a night-time one mid-week, from when I had a congested chin - complete with zit!  I haven't had a zit in a couple of years now!  Stupid hormones - I'll be reviewing the Pixi Skintreats Glow Mud Cleanser in full tomorrow, but I found that a mixture of the Overnight Glow Serum (a gel formula with 15% glycolic acid) on the congested areas and the Nourishing Sleep Mask (which contains lavender and hyaluronic acid) on everywhere else really, really helped.  The zit was only in place for a day or two, which was nice...

Another night-time routine later in the week had me trying these Elizabeth Arden Skin Illuminating Advanced Brightening Night Capsules, and I'm looking forward to using these a couple more times, as the texture of the formula is fabulous, and I was left with lovely velvety smooth skin in the morning.  Hopefully they'll be like that every time!

For more daytime routines, please join me after the jump.

Zelens Intense Defence Antioxidant Serum

 

I was chatting to a dermatologist recently, and she mentioned that the future of skincare lies in antioxidant products.  Now, as I was already trialling Zelens Intense Defense Antioxidant Serum, this pleased me somewhat, but left me realising that the only thing I really know about oxidisation is that it is what causes iron to rust, and, as I definitely don't want my face to rust, this has to be a good thing, right?

Joking aside, what Zelens Intense Defence is at heart is a protective serum, designed to save your skin from everyday pollutants in the air, and save your face from environmental stress. As someone who's face is almost always permanently red through sensitivity this recently released serum from Zelens - long one of my favourite skincare brands - interested me hugely. 

Pixi Skintreats Rose Oil Blend

 

There has been a lot of Pixi Skintreats love in the Lippie household recently, and the Rose Oil Blend is currently my favourite facial oil.  Based on a sweet almond oil base, with jojoba, dog-rosehip, geranium and damascene rose oils, it's a very light texture, so sinks into the skin easily, and doesn't make my combination-oily skin greasy.  It smells only gently of roses, and isn't perfumed artificially, it's great.

I find it really soothing, I've used it on skin that's been irritated by other products and it's helped a lot.  I find it really lovely to use it mixed in with a little foundation to give a glow to the skin.  I've also used it with ColorFX Custom Color Drops foundation (look out for a review of that soon), and it was very good, my favourite way to use it.  I also use it as a serum underneath my moisturiser

If you love oils as much as I do, you'll like this one a lot.   Best of all, Pixi Beauty are launching into Marks & Spencer, and their mid-price ranged skincare products are a real (cheapish) treat.  Pixi Skintreats Rose Oil Blend will cost you £26, and the rest of the range is priced similarly.  Look out for more Pixi Skintreats reviews soon.

The Fine Print: Gift.


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First Aid Beauty Facial Radiance Pads

If you've spent any time hanging around my instagram page, then you'll have seen these on my daily skincare routine posts a lot recently.  I do love a pre-soaked acid pad, they're usually thinner and more textured than a cotton wool pad, and so you get a good amount of toner on your skin, rather than soaked up by the cotton wool.

First Aid Beauty Facial Radiance Pads are a bargain compared to my usual preferred pads  of choice (Zelens  PHA+ Pads, for reference), costing around £22 for sixty, rather than £65, and they're good and tingly all the same.  Containing a blend of lactic and glycolic acids alongside licorice extract, hyaluronic acid and lemon peel oil, these offer a gentle daily exfoliation, and they're alcohol free.

To use them most effectively, you simply wipe them over freshly cleansed skin and this both helps remove any dead, flaky skin patches, and also helps prepare your skin for any serums or moisturisers that you apply afterwards.  Cleansers are generally alkaline, and washing your face strips away some of your natural acid mantle, so using an acid-based toner will help bring your skin back into balance and your skin will be more easily able to absorb the active ingredients in your skincare.  I love them for making my skin soft and smooth on a daily basis. These pads are quite wet, and I find that giving them a little squeeze before applying to the skin will stop them leaving your face soaking wet.

You must use a sunscreen on a daily basis when using any acidic skincare though, no ifs ands and buts about it.  The worst thing about First Aid Beauty Facial Radiance Pads is that they're a little difficult to get hold of, I had to get mine from Amazon.  Why aren't they in Boots and/or Superdrug?  I wish they were!


The Fine Print: Purchase


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Omorovicza Blue Diamond Eye Cream

  I have trouble with eyecreams, the area around my eyes is probably the most sensitive on my face, and many, many eyecreams sting as a result.  However, even if they don't sting, with most of them, I find little to no effect of using them, so I use them for a week or so then usually completely forget about using them at all.

However, I'm coming to the age now where the lines around my eyes are getting more and more noticeable, and less ignorable. Dehydration lines show up quickly, and leave slowly, and yes, I look a bit older than I used to as a result.  Now, I'm quite lucky in that I don't have particularly dark circles, and I don't have huge eye bags, but the lines themselves are beginning to become an issue for me, and I've definitely reached the point where I can't really ignore eye creams any more.  So I decided not to ignore this one, Blue Diamond Eye Cream, by Omorovicza when it arrived.

What's on my face this week? 27.09.15

I'm coming to the end of my "testing phase" with a few products right now, and to celebrate I'm going to be having a bit of a skincare week on the blog from tomorrow, so look out for some in-depth reviews from then.  In the meantime, here's some pictures of the routines I've been using.  Above is Monday's faceful, I'd dug out some old Aesop faithfuls from the stash, and you'll be seeing quite a bit more of these now we're heading into cooler weather.

Tuesday's face was mainly blue - I brought my Serozinc back out of semi-retirement - and this was a nice routine.

Wednesday brought back Bioderma, no one does these soothing and healing sprays (especially good for skins prone to redness as mine is) like the French skincare brands.

More after the jump.

Ren Flash Rinse 1 Minute Facial

Ren is one of those brands I like, that I’m glad exists, that do nice products, but for some reason, I don’t really love them.  I can’t put my finger on why I don’t love them, but they lack a certain … USP for me. 

That they’re “clean” products is something I appreciate – their ingredient lists are on the small side, which is always a bonus – but they’re rather faceless to me, and I admit that I find their range a little bewildering as a result. It's a large offering, and I never know which products are meant to go together, or where to start looking for my particular skin concerns. 

I occasionally find myself reading Ren labels and thinking; "Ooh, that sounds all sciencey and stuff, but I wonder, what does it actually do?"  A body cream of theirs a few years ago, boasting of biosaccharides on the label, might be responsible for this mindset. I remember thinking when I picked it up: “Surely that’s just sugar?  Is that … good  … in a body cream I've bought because it smells of roses?”  There was no explanation of why it the sugar was even thought mentionable, never mind mentioning what a sugary body might be good for (and if you're not thinking that my mind has just headed straight into the gutter now, then you've not really been paying attention to the blog over the years, frankly). Sometimes, simple packaging can be too simple.  If you name a product after an ingredient (especially when it’s a common ingredient and you’re just using the scientific name for it), then jolly well tell me why it’s so important for you to have done so, plz.

Anyhoo, don't worry, there's a product review coming, I haven't forgotten:  Ren Flash Rinse One Minute Facial.  It’s not a rinse, so why call it one?  It’s also not that easy to rinse, so doubly confusing.  You do get to the rinse stage quickly, I guess, but surely “Flash Facial” or “One Minute Facial” would be better.  One Minute Facial  is a nice, soft textured, grainy aqua-shaded balm, which, when used as a mask, promises to leave you revitalised and rejuvenated.  You simply apply it to cleansed skin, dampen it down to activate the Vitamin C in the formula, leave it for a minute and then rinse it off and revel in your new lovely soft skin.  In theory, it sounds amazing, and so it could well be, but this product turned out to be just a little too revitalising and rejevenating in my case. It burnt my face!  It’s my fault, actually, I knew it probably wouldn’t suit my (actually much less than it used to be) sensitive skin just from reading the label, but I went and used it anyway. Buffoon, thy name is Lippie.

The product is a coconut oil balm base with added sugars for both chemical and physical exfoliation (it's a bit scratchy), ascorbic acid (vitamin C), frankincense and some plant-seed oils.  I’d read a few reviews mentioning the smell, but I didn’t find it unpleasant at all, I suspect most of the other users are reacting to the carrot-seed oil (which can smell a bit ferrous or earthy if you’re not expecting it), in my case, I thought it was rather light and apple-y, rather pleasant, actually.  It was easy to use, though I used a spray to activate the ascorbic acid, rather than my damp fingers as directed, because I didn’t want to move a sugar-scrub around my face too much – sugar can really be an irritatant to redness-prone skin – then rinsed as I would any other physical exfoliator (ie very carefully).

And, boy!  Was I impressed with the results?  Yes, I flipping was! My skin was smooth, even textured and not red in the slightest. Beautiful. My pores appeared to have disappeared (that’s an odd sentence construction, but I’m sure you know what I mean), and my skin, indeed, felt like velvet, I couldn't stop stroking it after, it was such a stonking result.  I thought that by following it with a dab of May Lindstrom Blue Cocoon Balm, knowing Flash Rinse to be a highly active product, all would be well.

But it wasn’t.  My lovely new, velvety and evenly textured, poreless beauty lasted around 20 minutes, when I began to think I was having a hot flash.  I was red. Very, very, very red.  So red I had to break out the Dermablend to cover up how red I was. I was redder than David Cameron being presented with a Danepak gift basket for services to bacon marketing.  Just perfect before a lunch-date with my beloved, no?  The red eventually died down after an hour or two (thank you, May Lindstrom), but worse was to come.  The following day, raised red spots on my cheeks followed, alongside intense itching, meaning I had to completely swap out my skincare to my emergency kit, which is essential oil-free, fragrance-free and bland, bland, bland.  It has subsided after a few days, but I won't be using this again for a while, if ever, tbh.

I want to make it clear that this was not the fault of the product. It does say, quite clearly on the packaging that it’s not suitable for the "most sensitive" of skins, but it has literally been years since I had a inflammation this bad. I’ve spent years acclimatising my face to AHAs, BHAs, Malic- Glycolic- and Lactic acids, not to even mention even retinol, so these days I wouldn’t even dream of thinking of my face as anything even slightly approaching the “most" sensitive any more.  Still, every day is a school day, and you live and learn, and a bunch of other cliches re making a silk purse out of a sows ear and that.  My skin is still sensitive, it's just not as reactive as it used to be.  Not a bad lesson to learn, but a very sore one, admittedly.

Ren Flash Rinse One Minute Facial is widely available and usually costs around £32.  If you have sensitive skin however, avoid it like the plague.  I tried it with a bunch of other people, and was the only one to have an adverse reaction.  It really wasn't the product, it was me ;)

The Fine Print: PR Sample

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