A little disclaimer before we get started: Despite the fact that my job involves testing hundreds of beauty products each year to decipher which ones are genuinely good and which are a case of the emperor’s new clothes, I am still not immune to the buzz surrounding a trending beauty product. In fact, one of the biggest joys of my job is getting to test out the most talked-about new beauty launches—you know, the ones that are currently saturating your Instagram feed—to find out whether they actually work. However, while there are plenty of beauty products that are, undoubtedly, worth the hype (Drunk Elephant’s T.L.C. Sukari Babyfacial, I’m looking at you), there are plenty more instances when a new release turns out to be a whole lot of nice packaging and not much else.
If you ask any dermatologist which buzzy beauty products you should be incorporating into your skincare routine, they’ll be pretty unanimous in their response—forget them. Instead, there are a whole host of basic products that skin experts consistently recommend for healthy skin. Yes, they might seem a little boring in comparison to the glittery face masks and colourful under-eye patches dominating your TikTok feed, but trust me. These products always work.
