Best beauty skincare products review: Ultra moisturisers and serums

Using life-changing beauty products is as important as a
healthy eating beauty detox diet. Ultra Beauty review and
reveal the best products below that are worth shelling out for..

There are SO many beauty products out there, and researching ingredients and trialling them is either very boring or very expensive. How do you know which ones actually work? Whether you want to lift, tone, tighten or smooth, there are thousands of choices of beauty elixirs promising to give you dream skin. 

In these product blog posts, you can find out which products are effective and worth investing in.  I am so sorry about the bad photos that I took – I tried to do some cool arty photos with the mirrors but it didn’t work.  Serious respect for packshot photographers!

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A quick note on the cost of these products… I always get a 'Yowzers!' moment when I turn over the box and see the price. Some of these are surely are expensive, but you don’t have to buy all of them – even using one or two of the most effective ones will show a result.  Try and get your beauty supplies from a shop where you get loyalty points like Sephora or Boots. My Boots Advantage card always has loads of points on it for me to spend, although that probably says more about my skincare budget than it does about the generosity of the Boots corporation... 

Ok, lets look at those top products.

1.             My favourite eye creams: Clinique All About Eyes and Perricone Cold Plasma

The best eye creams reviewed below

The skin around the eyes is the thinnest and the most prone to wrinkling.  In fact you can tell someone’s age just by looking at their eyes, because the eye area is such a giveaway of your lifestyle, diet and products you use.

Clinique All About Eyes actually works to lift the bags and brighten the area – I always notice a marked improvement when I use it in the morning and afternoon too (if I remember).  I see the Clinique more as an immediate fix, and like to use a different cream at night to guard against future wrinkles.  For this, I use Dr. Perricone Cold Plasma which has a patented delivery system of the most effective anti-ageing ingredients of all of his range. I like to think that Dr. Perricone is not only about looking good today, but preventing future wrinkles and sagging occur. He has done loads of published scientific research on which ingredients are the best, believe me, I’ve read it all, so I trust his products a lot more than other brands.

2.             The BEST winter day cream: Boots Botanics SPF15 Shine Away Mattifying Day Cream

Much to the amusement of my husband, I slap on sunscreen before leaving the house into a rainstorm, and even while sitting in a sunny room in the house.  Why?  The sun’s rays get through even the greyest of clouds, bombarding your skin with UVA and UVB rays.  This is bad news for wrinkles.  It’s estimated that 70% of those lines come from the sun.  UV radiation causes irreversible damage to your skin by decreasing its ability to manufacture collagen and elastin, which results in sagging.  Think of those leathery older people you see on the beach. They were probably bronzed beauties in their day.

But surely a winter’s day sunlight isn’t going to give you wrinkles?  Over time, it will. To maximize your anti-ageing routine, you should wear SPF 15 every day – so this Boots Botanicals cream is perfect for grey days. For anything more, I wear SPF 30 or even 50 if I’m going out for a bike ride.  I rub sunscreen onto my face, neck and back of hands, as wrinkly hands are a dead giveaway of age.

My husband and his friends did a 10km run in the dead of December coldness and actually came back with sunburn on their faces!  It’ll catch you anywhere, I tell you..

Protect against wrinkles with this
SPF15 moisturiser

Now, most creams protect mostly against UVB rays as those are the ones that cause sunburn.  Boots know that UVA is the ageing type of radiation, and have made a cream that contains a broad five star UVA sunscreen, which most products don’t have.  It’s especially good because as it says on the tin, it minimizes the face shininess that sunscreens normally give you.  Plus, it’s cheap as chips.  £3.49 for 50ml; buy it on the Bootswebsite or any store.

3.             Daytime serum and Night Cream: both Yves Saint Laurent Youth Liberator

Anti-wrinkle serum and cream..
A Nobel Prize in a bottle

YvesSaint Laurent Youth Liberator has been hailed as anti-ageing’s holy grail. Admittedly, it was YSL's general manager who was doing the hailing, but there is actually a load of scientific work behind its formulation.  Apparently 20 years in the making, the research has been recognized with seven Nobel Prizes.  (Ok, I know it's starting to sound tenuous now, but stay with me…)

Here’s some biology for those who are interested: Youth uses a type of ingredient called Glycans, which are complicated sugar molecules that play many important biological roles. Attached to proteins at the surfaces of our cells, such sugars act as labels that distinguish different cell types – for example, they determine your blood group. Glycans and related biochemicals are an essential component of the way our cells recognise and communicate with one another. Skin cells produce glycans and other substances that form a surrounding extracellular matrix, Some of these glycans attract water and keep the skin plump and soft. But their production declines as fibroblasts age, and so the skin becomes dry and wrinkled. Youth Liberator contains glycoproteins and glycans to redress this deficit.

I use the YSL daytime serum under my day moisturizer and the YSL nighttime cream on top of my Estee Lauder serum, and noticed an effect. After I started using them, my skin definitely looked plumper with fewer wrinkles and more defined cheekbones/jawline – so I’m going to stick with them and hope that these glycan things are actually doing good.  If you get spots though, you should know that the cream itself is fairly heavy.  Read this article for tips on shifting acne.

Youth Liberator concentrated serum costs £61 for 30ml, and the Night Cream is £60 for 50ml. You can buy them in most department stores, such as my fave, JohnLewis.

4. Sleep in a bottle: 

Estee Lauder Advanced Night Repair serum, Synchronized Recovery Complex II. Seriously, where do they get these names?

Night beauty serum for glowing morning skin

It’s the all-rounder serum you know and love – instantly hydrating and helping to brighten and clarify the skin in the longer term. It’s light, non-greasy and slips easily into any beauty routine – not difficult to see why it has always been such a favourite.  This version is a new type that apparently has loads of improvements.  Lets take a look…

The new version, SynchronisedRecovery Complex II, takes the serum onto a whole new level. The previous incarnation was very focused on repair; the new super-serum aims to repair and to purify. The original ANR contained a comprehensive cocktail of antioxidants that helped to fix the damage done to the skin during the day – think pollution, UV rays. It also contained a load of hyaluronic acid for an instant moisture hit, so it plumped out the skin and reversed superficial lines caused by dehydration. In my experience, very effective. The new serum, adds something else into the mix: this “purify” business – or, to give it the proper Lauder name, Catabolysis Technology. We’re talking about the skin and the metabolism of cells – how fast the skin can renew itself and chuck out, for want of a better word, the rubbish.

In a nutshell, this new serum not only delivers a welcome shot of hyaluronic (helps the skin to hang onto its water) and a big dose of antioxidants (helps to repair and protect against what I think of as “daily wear and tear”), it also helps to break down what’s not needed, which is where the “purify” element begins to make sense. I hope.  

Skip to the testing – I noticed a difference after just one night with this new version of ANR.  Sometimes, usually if I've overdone the green tea (oh alright the coffee and dark chocolate), I can't for the life of me get to sleep.  This is when I need a heavy duty sleep-in-a-bottle product. Even on five hours my skin looks bright, smooth and radiant. Well, as radiant as can be after a bleary-eyed night tossing and turning…the rest of the work can be done with a tall glass of hot water and lemon, a good foundation, and the gold Stila Shimmer liquid on the ol' cheekbones.

Advanced Night Repair Recovery Complex II costs £48 for 30ml and can be bought here.

Thank you so much for reading! If you have any questions or comments, please let me know!