No matter where you look, skin care products promise to help you glow, eliminate wrinkles, and even skin tone.
What those key words often mean, according to esthetician Emily Trampetti, is it’s likely to contain a retinoid. This active ingredient will increase cell turnover to give those desired benefits.
“It’s basically just beta carotene and then it’s synthesized, you know, chemically through different procedures all the way up to like, we’ll call it tretinoin or even Accutane, which is isotretinoin. It’s all spectrums of like vitamin A derivative. But you can have kind of different strengths and aggression levels, we’ll call it,” Trampetti said.
She says the goal should be to find the lowest dosage your skin can tolerate and benefit from.
“A little goes a long way with skin care. I think a lot of us overdo it, which can ironically cause more skin issues later on,” she said.
She says most over-the-counter strengths will be safe for most skin types and contain less than 1% of the ingredient.
Among the strongest OTC brands is Differin gel, which may help patients with cystic acne. More severe cases of acne may need a pharmaceutical strength.
The problem is, you’ll never truly know how much of what ingredients are inside since that formula is proprietary information.
And price isn’t much of an indication about which is “better” or “worse.”
“We’re not going to always know what percentage of retinol is and something we’re not going to know if it’s really high quality. It could be a company that is spending a lot of money on marketing and packaging,” Trampetti said.
Therefore, it might be a trial and error to find the right one.
Trampetti’s advice is to try one for 30 days, because it takes time for skin to adjust. If it provides good results in 30 days, that’s your best one. If you don’t like it at the 30-day mark, find a new one.