What are ‘cosmeceuticals’?

Cosmeceuticals are specialised effective skincare products which are halfway between cosmetic skincare and prescription pharmaceutical skincare, hence the name. And they come from brands such as Paula’s Choice, or Alpha H, or iS Clinical, NeoStrata, SkinBetter Science, SkinCeuticals or Medik8,

and they tend to be the kind of brands that you will find through specialist skin clinics. Sometimes they need to be given to you by a medical specialist, they’re often available online, but they tend not to be up and down the high-street.

What’s different about ‘cosmeceuticals’?

What makes this breed of products  different is that they contain therapeutic doses of really well established ingredients like Vitamin C for supporting collagen growth and brightening the skin, or glycolic acid for brightening the skin and exfoliating, or retinol, or one of the other retinoids, such as r-Retinoate or retinal, which will stimulate the turnover of new skin cells and clear pigmentation and do all the other things that it does in your skin to really renew it.

What are the characteristics of cosmeceuticals?

So, you’ve got therapeutic doses of well-established ingredients, put together in very thoughtful formulations that really will work. And then those are accelerated into the skin by a very sophisticated delivery system. So those ingredients get right into the skin which is where they need to be in order to go to work. So you’ve got all that put together and then these companies will very often put the finished products through clinical testing to show they work. The point about that is that you can have really great ingredients which come with a pedigree that shows that in a lab setting they will do this, that, the other to the skin. But what you don’t know is that when you mix them up with other ingredients in a formula, is the finished product is still going to work in the same way that that ingredient did way back down the chain. So, if the finished products are put through real life testing, that is when you know that they will really work and that’s what a lot of these companies do. So, that is why cosmeceuticals are so different, and that is why I like them so much as products.

Which are my favourite cosmeceuticals?

That’s a tough question, there are so many great ranges – but take a look on my website, you’ll find some of my top favourites in the shop on www.thetweakmentsguide.com