5 Important Beauty Tips We Learnt From Clinical Scientists
Sadaf Razi is Adore Beauty's Senior Beauty Editor.
She's a former fashion editor (who worked at various glossy mags) and stylist-turned digital beauty and lifestyle writer. She has been in the lifestyle/media industry for over 10 years and her work has also been featured on international covers like Elle France and Vanity Fair Mexico.
Some of her fave Adore Beauty products include Cicaplast B5, CeraVe Cleansing Oil and Lancôme Renergie Triple Serum.
Raise your hand if after using your serum for a few weeks you’ve noticed some crusty bits starting to form at the top or, the texture and colour is starting to look a little…off?
Well, that’s called oxidation friends, and it may be happening for a few reasons.
This is just one of the many things we recently learnt from the clinical research scientists at The Ordinary (these people know skin science!).
When visiting their clinical research labs, we asked the very important people in white coats and clear glasses some of the best ways to maintain the integrity of our beauty products.
Here are a few quick and easy beauty tips they gave us:
1. Don’t Keep Your Beauty Products in Humid Or Sunlit Areas.
Guilty!
I used to keep my skincare tray on the bathroom sink which happens to live next to my shower.
While I can’t change the design of my bathroom, I can change where I store my beauty products.
Small, stuffy bathrooms or other humid and warm areas like window sills are not ideal environments for your skincare products.
The steamy air can lead to your products going off or becoming unstable and as a result, not doing their job as effectively because they've been exposed to that stuffy air.
Not to mention the havoc UV exposure can wreak on our beloved actives - the windowsill ain’t the place for your skincare, ok?
Tip: Store your beauty products inside your bathroom cupboards to keep them away from direct contact with steam or sunlight.
If you’re running low on storage space, then try and keep them in a cooler/darker area or room.
2. Buy a Smaller-Sized Mascara to Avoid Bacteria Overgrowth.
Every time you pump your mascara in and out, you also let in air which is not ideal for the integrity of your mascara (ever noticed how it goes dry and crumbly after a while?).
Additionally, sometimes touching the opening with dirty fingers can cause contamination, and our eyes themselves can be responsible for us transferring bacteria back into the mascara formula.
One way to combat this (and a great beauty tip from the scientists at The Ordinary) is buying mini mascaras that are 2 - 4g in volume.
This way, you're buying them more regularly but will go through them quicker and avoid longer expiration dates which can mean more time to have yucky stuff get in.
In fact, this is why mascaras and lip products are usually packaged in very small tubes.
Tip: And another one to add to your ‘mascara tips’, a friendly reminder to please not share your mascaras or keep them past their expiration date.
It’s a big no no and can become a haven for bacteria build-up as well eye irritations.
You don't want to be ‘that’ friend that gave someone conjunctivitis do you?
For more expert tips including the best Ordinary products and how to use them, check out the podcast episode below:
3. Avoid Applying Products On Broken Skin.
When it comes to skin care tips, this seems like a pretty obvious one, but we know the temptation is there.
Applying serums or other skincare products on a weeping pimple or open wound can not only irritate your skin (ouch!) you also run the risk of transferring bacteria back into your products, and also transferring bacteria from your hands onto the broken skin.
It’s wise to again remember the cautionary tale we gave earlier about bacteria-infested products.
Tip: Look for products with droppers so you can disperse product onto your hands then on your skin to avoid the transfer of any bacteria.
4. Best Packaging for Skin Care Products.
Skincare packaging is also something that’s important when it comes to the integrity and stability of your beauty products.
The Ordinary skincare fans, have you noticed some of your serums come housed in frosted or amber-coloured packaging?
There’s a few reasons you'll see some of your fave The Ordinary products packaged in brown/amber glass.
Firstly, glass packaging doesn’t react with the formula of your products.
Amber glass also protects the product from UV rays!
Like we mentioned before, if your beauty products are exposed to a lot of direct sunlight, they can become unstable.
Tip: Amber packaging helps protect your products from changes or degradation, but remember to always keep that lid screwed on tight, and still store your products in a cool, dark place.
5. Don’t Hold On to Beauty Products You’ve Had for a Long Time.
(Even if you’ve spent lots of $$ on them).
I’ve definitely been guilty of keeping products way longer than I should.
One fancy cream blush I owned (for way too long) faded in colour and formed a bit of a weird smell.
I used it once after that, grossed myself out and tossed it in the bin along with some tears.
But it was better to cry over my wasted dollars than over a skin irritation.
We hope these beauty care tips from the experts at The Ordinary were helpful.
Now, send this to a friend who needs a little nudge to throw out their old mascara or lippie!
Check out what we got up to when we visited The Ordinary's headquarters in Toronto, Canada!
Want more skincare tips and tricks? Check out these BIQ articles below:
