Читать книгу Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look at the Beauty Products that Changed the World - Sali Hughes - Страница 52

This is a perfect example of how subjective skincare can be. For a good ten years, all any dermatologist seemed to recommend was Cetaphil, a relatively inexpensive and unfussy rinse-off cleanser available widely in the States but not, at that time, in the UK. While moisturiser, mask and serum recommendations were varied, Cetaphil seemed to be the doctors’ default cleanser of choice for almost any skincare gripe. If you had rosacea – try Cetaphil; if you were sensitive – stick to Cetaphil; if you’d just had a facelift – wash only in Cetaphil; if you were acne prone – well, you get it, I’m sure. The endless and uncritical love for Cetaphil was especially enticing to me because I have a serious obsession with American drugstores, and a disproportionate love for tracking down hard-to-find products. Truly, I’ve barely dumped my suitcase and passport in my hotel room when I’m on the sidewalk, charging towards the nearest Duane Reade or Walgreens to spend 200 unnecessary dollars on wholly unsuitable products because the font on the gaudy bottle looks pleasingly foreign. And so my love for Cetaphil seemed like a done deal.

Sadly, it failed the due diligence. While the friends for whom I brought back a bottle raved about Cetaphil, I was left wondering what all the fuss was about. First, it contains sulphates. I’m not a fan of these foaming agents in skincare, though I quite understand those who need the psychological boost of a foam. The problem is that Cetaphil is so low-foaming that one gets the worst of both worlds: my skin feels drier, only without that sense of squeaky cleanliness. Second, and for me crucially, Cetaphil is no good at all at removing make-up. The most thorough-seeming cleanse will still result in orange smears on the towel, making Cetaphil advisable only as a second night-time step. This flaw sums up my long-held belief that while dermatologists – whom I have utterly revered and valued since early childhood – are the final word on the science of skincare, their insight is often poor when it comes to real life outside a lab or surgery.

What I mean by that is while a great derm can tell you exactly which sunblock will best protect the skin without clogging pores, they will rarely know if it also peels off in lumps the minute you apply your foundation, rendering unusable even the best product in the world. Doctors are rightly thinking about skin health and efficacy, not lifestyle and quality of use. They correctly obsess over ingredients, while not always acknowledging that overall texture, packaging and formula can be the difference between addictive and useless. And so I concluded that Cetaphil was, for me, one such case in point. Almost everything about this legendary product looks good on paper, and I can understand why it’s so respected by doctors, even loved by so many consumers. It just doesn’t work for my life.