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59 evidence-led explainers on skincare ingredients, formulation and routines — newest first · page 4 of 5.
Most skincare advice assumes a barrier that works. Eczema-prone skin doesn't have one, which means the usual playbook — layer actives, try new things, optimise your routine — can actively make things worse.
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Stacking retinol, acids and everything else at once tends to end the same way — a barrier that can't tolerate any of them. Recovery is slower than the damage, and rushing it is how people end up back here.
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Slugging isn't the miracle TikTok made it out to be, and it isn't the pore-clogging disaster its critics warn about either — it's ordinary occlusion, with genuine upsides for some skin and real downsides for others.
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'Microbiome-friendly' has no regulatory definition, and most products trading on the word are capitalising on genuine scientific interest rather than delivering proven microbiome benefits. Here's what the research actually supports.
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Vitamin C is one of the most researched skincare ingredients — and one of the most confusing.
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Not all retinoids are created equal. The term covers a family of vitamin A derivatives with vastly different potencies, evidence bases, and effects on skin.
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Growth factor serums can cost hundreds of pounds on the promise of cellular regeneration. They're not peptides — they're much larger proteins facing much bigger delivery problems, and the evidence hasn't caught up with the price tag.
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Of all the peptides sold on anti-ageing claims, copper peptides (GHK-Cu) have the strongest research behind them — genuine wound-healing evidence, and cosmetic trial data that's real but more modest than the marketing suggests.
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A vitamin C serum that's oxidised still looks like a vitamin C serum. Degradation in skincare is mostly invisible, which means the product doing nothing useful in your cabinet might still look perfectly fine.
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A serum, a cream and an oil containing the same active aren't the same product wearing different textures — they deliver different amounts, to different depths, on different timelines. The format is doing more work than the ingredient list lets on.
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'Apply thin to thick' is the standard layering advice, but it's really a proxy for something more specific: which ingredients dissolve in water and which dissolve in oil. Understanding solubility explains why routines pill, why some products don't absorb, and how to fix both.
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The same active ingredient can work brilliantly or do almost nothing depending on the pH it's formulated at — a distinction most product labels never mention.
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