No sneakers allowed.
There are so many skincare lines out there that in order for a new brand to find its niche, they have to be about a specific ingredient. Glow Recipe is about fruit, Verso is about Retinol, Caudelie is about grapes, Biossance is about squalane. Out of everything that Biossance could be about, squalane is not bad at all. It’s a great ingredient.
I’m going to give spoilers right off the bat: this brand is fantastic. Whatever the product, you can always rely on Paula’s Choice. And I’m not saying this because this is a hidden sponsored post (honestly, I wish) or because I’m trying to grab the brand’s attention (I’m aware of my irrelevancy), I’m saying this because Paula’s Choice is that good.
Medik8. Here’s a brand that I came to know and instantly related to their branding, their mission and their marketing. Also, the name is sort of pun-ny, so obviously they started off on the right foot with me.
Junoco is a Californian cosmetics brand that started in 2018 and has made sustainability and simplicity their main missions. They would fall into the spectrum of “clean beauty” brands, and I haven’t been shy about what I think of that term (usually just a marketing expression profiting off of fear mongering) but I have been proven wrong in the past with brands that market themselves as being “clean” while still caring about scientifically proven efficacy and ingredients being beneficial rather than just “natural”.
So when I was contacted by Junoco about trying a few of their products, and did a little research on the brand to learn what they were about and mostly, about their formulas, I got excited.
After La Mer, La Prairie, and other nicely smelling and heavily user-experience focused brands, there is a new type of luxury skincare in town: the one created by doctors. But the question remains: are they more effective? Scientific? Justified in being more expensive?… and are they made by doctors at all?
If you know about Avant, you’re probably a subscriber of a monthly beauty box. I don’t know anyone who has purchased directly from Avant, mainly due to the absurd price, but in case you’re considering getting a beauty box with an Avant product in it and you’re wondering if t’s any good, this post is for you. Avant: the luxury skincare brand that nobody ever paid full price for.
U Beauty’s philosophy revolves around streamlining and reducing the amount of skincare products one has to use day to day. It’s meant to reduce a 12 step routine into a 2 step one, I guess, because they only make 2 products for the face so far, and the price for both of those is enough to purchase a 12 step routine, two times over. At least.
Gender neutral, ingredient focused, inexpensive and TikTok famous. Sounds like The Ordinary good, right? Over the past few months, I’ve been testing out quite an assortment of The Inkey List’s skincare products to see if they can make my skin look as Gen Z as the audience they market to.
Ecooking is a Danish brand created by an Tina Søgaard, who was already working in the beauty industry before she started creating these products in her kitchen, bringing in raw ingredients from the laboratories she worked on (hence the name). These products have developed into an environmentally conscious, “clean” skincare brand. Uh oh.
StarSkin is a brand that focuses a lot on sheet masks. They also have other products but the masks are by far the most popular. It’s a relatively young brand (2015) and it’s a regular appearance on beauty boxes and advent calendars, which is where I got everything I ever had from them.
The brand claims to be inspired by South Korean skincare. They also claim to be 100% natural and clean beauty, which is usually a bad sign. Although “natural” and “clean” claims have no scientific foundation nor are they regulated terms, meaning any brand can claim to be natural and clean regardless of the ingredients they use, it usually is a sign that there will be a lot of essential oils in the formulations of that skincare brand, in detriment of actually good ingredients. Essential oils are mainly perfuming ingredients that commonly have the potential to irritate the skin.
So the first thing I did was focus on the ingredients list. And saying I was surprised is a f*cking understatement.