Fashion

Marian Keyes: The skin creams I swear by at this time of year

Sudden Wild Enthusiasms: Skinceuticals

Marian Keyes
Sat Dec 8 2018 - 06:00

There are always new anti-ageing creams coming on the market, every one of them flinging about vague scientific terms (peptides, anyone?) and hinting at all kinds of unprovable miracles (“63 per cent of a sample of 27 women saw a ‘decrease’ in fine lines” etc).

I embrace all of them with delight. If you put a gun to my head (please don’t, though), I’d admit I don’t believe any cream can turn back time. I force myself to be deliberately gullible because I want the magic promises to be true.

However – and this is what I find interesting – I rarely buy something twice. No matter how thrilling the packaging, delightful the fragrance, and heartening the effect, there’s always another product I haven’t yet tried, that might be better. I am a hoor for the “pastures new”.

Except when it comes to Skinceuticals, there are three of their products that I’ve purchased repeatedly: The CE Ferulic, a skin brightener, a subject for another column, Resveratrol BE, an antioxidant (ditto) and Triple Lipid Restore 2:4:2.

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Triple Lipid Restore is a moisturiser for day or night and the “lipid” bit of the title is what interests me. “Lipid” means fat, and this cream includes three different lipids: ceramides, cholesterol and fatty acids.

So basically, every time I use it, I’m rubbing fat on my face which, at this time of year, is exactly what I want. It works as a brilliant barrier cream, protecting my dry skin from wind and rain and other Wintery whatnot.

The cream makes further claims, though – that it plumps skin-cells, reduces pore size and increases radiance. Such assertions belong to that class of unprovable results that I talked about above. However, all I can say is that after a couple of weeks of starting using it again, I’m “fairly certain” my desiccated, shrunken skull-head looks bouncier, brighter and happier.

The cream is so unctuous and rich that the first time I used it, I worried that it might summon to the surface, the malign cluster of spots which lurk on my chin, just below the waterline. But no, the little fecks stayed away. Also, another good thing, a little goes a long way.

The one stumbling block with this lovely, lovely cream – and it’s a big one – is the price. It’s very spendy and I wish that wasn’t the case. I feel like a heel recommending the dear stuff and in fairness, Joanna Lumley swears by Astral Cream, which costs half nothing.

But the heart wants what the heart wants and my heart wants this.

Available from Skinceuticals.co.uk