I’ve been asked many times whether I think it’s worth spending money on expensive skincare products.
In a way I can’t answer that because it depends on your individual priorities: for some people, skin care is a higher priority than it is for other people.
I can answer the underlying question though: do expensive skincare products do the things they promise?
Read on for the answer.
What you spend depends on your priorities
How much you want to spend on skin care depends on how much looking good is worth to you or what your other financial priorities are.
Personally, I like to look good but there are more important things too, that limit how much I’ll spend on my appearance. I’ll stretch the budget to an occasional nice pair of shoes, but I’m just not willing to make big sacrifices in other areas to buy prettily-packaged potions like the one in the picture.
What I can help you answer is whether these potions will make much different to your skin.
Do expensive skincare products work?
In my experience, they don’t. I’ve tried a few expensive brands and none delivered the transformative results promised in their ads. Some were marginally better than the cheap stuff I normally use, but I won’t pay 5x the price for 10% extra benefit. For some people, that extra benefit would be well worth the money though.
However, my experience is influenced by the type of skin I have: sensitive, oily and with allergies to some commonly-used ingredients. Products that promise dramatic results usually leave me covered in spots or with an oil-slick across my face — and that’s never worth the money.
The right strategy for my skin is to do as little as possible that might upset it. I wash it with cheap sensitive skin products, use the gentlest makeup wipes I can find and moisturise with a light spray so I’m not adding more oil. I also use Clinique Super City Block
What experts say about expensive skincare
But to get back to answering the question, let’s see what the experts say about expensive skincare products:
Women’s magazines are the main source of information about these products, and their beauty editors often rave about expensive brands, saying they’re the best thing they’ve ever used — and their job involves testing beauty products all day. If we take their comments at face value, then it would seem these products do work.
There are a few factors that undermine beauty editors’ credibility though. Firstly, their salaries are indirectly paid by the cosmetics companies that advertise in their mag. Sure, if they annoy enough readers, the magazine’s circulation will drop eventually — but if they annoy their biggest advertisers profits can drop significantly overnight. That’s got to make it harder to say “this stuff is crap”, even if it is. Secondly, beauty editors get their products for free. That means they never have to think about whether they want a pot of Creme de la Mer or a month’s food, so they don’t really have to question how much the possible improvement to their skin is actually worth. Thirdly, there’s a high chance that anyone who become a beauty editor liked beauty products before they got the job. Would any magazine hire a big skeptic like me to talk up beauty products? I doubt it.
So I recommend that you take anything a beauty editor says with a big pinch of salt.
By contrast, very few doctors recommend expensive skincare — and those who do are usually paid for their endorsement. Doctors are trained to demand a high standard of proof that an ingredient or formulation will work before they recommend it to their patients; usually a randomised double-blind study published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Cosmetics companies have the money to commission this research into the effects of their products if they want to, but they rarely do. Read into that what you will.
Heather Brannon, MD from About Dermatology says:
The cost of a skin care product or cosmetic is absolutely NOT an indicator of effectiveness. The cosmetics industry would like people to believe that an expensive product has some special ingredient in it that makes it more effective. However, there are many products in every category that are effective and don
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Lynn said,
August 30, 2006 @ 12:25 pm
I have sensitive, flushed skin. My color has gone down tremendously since I started using Oil of Olay face wipes, which go completely against my usual habits. That plus Complex 15 moisturizer and I’m good to go. My skin’s never looked better and it couldn’t be cheaper or more widely available (in the US).