Trilogy Certified Organic Rosehip Oil (20ml) – £16.50 When a brand’s entire reputation rests on the kudos of one product, it’s got to be good. Trilogy’s Rosehip Oil is their name-making, best-selling, must-have – and the hype is entirely justified.
Trilogy has taken great care with the integrity of their product. Containing a minimum of 80% essential fatty acid content (Omegas 3, 6 and 9), the product’s high potency in terms of active ingredient, means it is highly effective at tackling skincare issues such as dehydration.
You hear a lot about dry skin, but dehydration is definitely one of skin’s most nefarious enemies. A dehydrated skin can be dry – it can even be oily or combination – the cause is a lack of water in the skin. The tell-tale signs include a tight feeling to the skin (even though you may experience oiliness and breakouts elsewhere on your face); and when you apply moisturiser – your skin slurps it up in record time.
A good quality, hydrating oil can work wonders on dehydrated skin – and one with high grade ingredients will help to restore your skin’s balance.
I prefer this as a night-time treatment, worn on its own or layered under a night cream– it really does improve the texture of the skin, smoothing and hydrating in a smart way that doesn’t clog pores or cause irritation, thanks to its simplified approach to ingredient inclusion. There’s nothing in there that doesn’t belong, and the result is a wonderfully hydrating oil that works by keeping it simple. Oh, and this product comes with its own royal seal of approval: it’s one of the Duchess of Cambridge’s favourite beauty treats.
Dr Hauschka Rose Nurturing Bath Essence – £18 Because beauty products shouldn’t have to be all work, work, work. Sometimes a girl likes a little luxury, and this beauty from Dr Haushcka is the perfect way to unwind at the end of the day. Formulated from rose essential oil and extract of rose petals, this bathtime treat isn’t just beautifully scented, it also contains almond and jojoba oils to condition your skin while you soak. At 100ml, this is a pretty generous size of product; bearing in mind the concentration of the formula means you only need a small amount per bath. Dr Hauschka is a holistic beauty range known for its high quality skincare (particularly famous for its face creams), but its body range offers excellent value and is well worth exploring.
http://www.dr.hauschka.com/en_GB/products/rose-nurturing-bath-essence/
Kiehl’s Creamy Avocado Eye Treatment (14g) – £20 Eye creams on a budget can be a tough ask: to get the formula right often requires more expensive ingredients than a £20 cream can muster. The skin around the eye is so delicate it requires a carefully-balanced cream that doesn’t overwhelm.
Eyes do a lot of work during the day (especially if you use a PC / Mac / are wedded to your Instagram account). Your eyes get tired easily and the surrounding skin needs a lot of TLC.
Kiehl’s is a brand with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to cult products (the Ultra Facial Cream…aptly named). But I have found there is gold to be found behind the multi-award winners and beauty editors’ favourites. The Kiehl’s Creamy Avocado Eye Treatment is starting to become more popular, and justly so. It is a supremely hydrating, mid-weight eye cream that softens and soothes the eye area.
Perfect for protecting the eye area during the harsh winter months, this eye cream would be a must all year round for anyone who regularly works outdoors, or in an air-conditioned office. This cream provides real, long-lasting comfort for dry, tired skin – make it part of your skincare routine and reap the rewards.
Korres Wild Rose 24-Hour Moisturising and Brightening Cream – £20 At around the £20 mark, this is where skincare, in particular, moisturisers start getting serious. Korres is a Greek skincare brand with a reputation for combining quality, natural ingredients and lab technology to create products that give real, measurable results.
Launched in 1996, the Wild Rose Moisturising Cream is Korres’ global best-seller, and nearly 20 years on, it’s still one of Korres’ cornerstone products. Making a big splash in the beauty industry is relatively difficult to accomplish – staying at the top? Much trickier.
Available in two formulations (dry-normal and oily-combination skin), it uses an extract of Wild Rose which is an excellent natural source of Vitamin C. The cream aims to add brightness and radiance to the skin, whilst helping to repair damage and discolouration.
I find the long-lasting hydration of this cream to be its real selling point – it’s a beautiful choice for the colder months, and as it comes it two weights, Wild Rose easily turns into a perennial favourite. I’ve found this to be an easy to wear moisturiser that never causes irritation. For real brightening impact, I would recommend its companion product the Wild Rose Sleeping Facial (£26), but you want a terrific moisturiser that nourishes, bringing out your skin’s natural glow; Wild Rose is a great budget option that rivals face creams at twice the price.
Clinique Chubby Stick Shadow Tint for Eyes – £17 There are times when you think you’ve seen it all: this is going to be as good as it gets, and then a lovely little surprise comes along, reminding us that great ideas are still to be had. Eye pencils are nothing new, but where Clinique got it so right was by taking the easy application of the eye pencil and applying it to eyeshadow. The result: a product that boasts shamefully easy make-up application: one sweep across the lids and you’re done.
The fact that these pencils allow for one-step, quick-as-you-like eyeshadow application is by the by. The fact that they’re terrific for travel, and compact enough to squeeze into any make-up bag – a great feature, but not its main selling point.
What Clinique offers is a colour-saturated eyeshadow without the hassle of blending, without the worry of particles dropping down onto your cheeks – if you can hold a pencil and do a bit of smudging with your finger – that’s all the technique you need. I love this movement towards products that don’t need lots of practise in order to be used at their best. If in doubt, keep it simple – that’s just what Clinique did and simple done well is frankly awesome.
http://www.clinique.co.uk/product/1598/22855/Makeup/Eye-Shadows/Chubby-Stick-Shadow-Tint-for-Eyes
Benefit Fake Up Crease Control Hydrating Concealer – £18.50 Again, this joins Clinique’s Chubby Eye Pencil in the same ‘Simple but Incredibly Effective’ group.
Benefit has a well-deserved reputation for delivering innovative cosmetics at reasonable prices, and you can rely on them to create something other than your usual concealer.
This is a concealer with an inner core of moisturising balm, making the application of this concealer a dream for dry or sensitive skin. It blends beautifully onto the skin, warming quickly with your body temperature to make a concealer that’s quick and easy to work with.
I personally use this as an under-eye concealer, as I think the consistency is excellent for that purpose. As the name suggests, the concealer doesn’t crease or settle into fine lines, its lovely texture means it sits proud on the skin, rather than sinking into it. The slight pink tinge to the concealer makes it a great choice for hiding mild-moderate dark circles. (If you have hard-core dark circles, you may want to look at spending a little more on a concealer – brands such as Laura Mercier, Bobbi Brown and By Terry offer targeted formulations)
If you’ve found concealers to be drying, or they start off strong but end up settling into the very areas you’re trying to conceal, Benefit’s Hydrating Concealer is an excellent solution – a well-thought-out product that rivals many of the bigger brands.
https://www.benefitcosmetics.co.uk/product/view/fakeup
La Roche Posay Effaclar Duo + Anti Blemish Cream – £15.50 Spot remedies are available across all price points, but I’m definitely an advocate of getting what you pay for, when it comes to treating blemishes.
The problem in treating blemishes is that if you go in too hard, with a product that not only dries out the spot but the skin surrounding it too, you could end up with even more blemishes than you started out with. Blemished skin needs gentle treatment – not kid gloves – but a product that knows when to say when.
French pharmacy brand La Roche-Posay excel in producing targeted treatments, especially for sensitive skin, but their Effaclar Anti Blemish Cream is a real star. Beloved by beauty bloggers and editors alike, the Anti-Blemish Cream is slightly mistitled as it’s a light-weight cream-gel texture that, when applied to a blemish, gently but surely reduces redness and irritation, and gets to grips with the spot, making it a thing of the past.
This treatment is robust, reliable but never dries the skin out – a key component to Effaclar’s greatness. You can get cheaper spot treatments, but if you want something that’s effective, but won’t create more problems than it solves, it has to be La Roche-Posay.
First Aid Beauty Facial Radiance Pads – £20.50 Okay, so they’re a smidge over the budget – but try these beauties just once, and you won’t begrudge that extra 50p.
I talked in my Budget Buys (£15 and under) blog post about acid exfoliants, and how they’re not scary. Well, if you’re looking for the ultimate in no-fuss, quick-as-a-flash application – First Aid Beauty hear you.
Their Facial Radiance pads are tiny, product-soaked discs that are designed to be swept over a cleansed skin. And….that’s it. That’s as difficult as the application process gets. Containing small amounts of lactic and glycolic acid, they are a perfectly safe method of brightening your skin and refining its texture.
Also containing natural lovelies such as liquorice root, cucumber and Indian gooseberry, these radiance pads’ main selling point is that they’re gentle enough for use on sensitive skin. I have experienced periods of sensitivity and have continued to use these pads during those times with no problems. If you are sensitive, I would recommend starting them 1-2 times a week, building up to a maximum of 3-4 times a week for oilier skins.
While these pads do their best to boost radiance, their winning quality has to be their ability to rejuvenate and refine skin that has issues with uneven texture: they make a visible difference not only to the way your skin looks, but how it feels. These little pads are a real asset if you want skincare that makes a difference.
Liz Earle Deep Cleansing Mask – £15.75 Containing clay and botanicals, this mud-coloured mask may not win the prize for Most Glamorous, but as with all of the Liz Earle range, it’s what inside that counts.
If you want a mask that’s great at dealing with oily patches and blemishes, whilst not stripping your skin – this mask gets the job done, no frills, no fuss. I’ve tried several deep cleansing masks, and the Liz Earle Deep Cleansing Mask outperforms products that are more than double the price.
With ingredients such as manuka honey, propolis (a resin-like material extracted from beehives) and rose-scented geranium, it calms and balances, restoring a skin that’s reactive and out of sorts. I would even recommend this for sensitive skin, as its balancing qualities along with a gentle cooling effect would be perfect for taming a skin that’s feeling out of control. The term ‘essential’ gets thrown around a lot with regards to skincare, but a tube of this in your kit will never be a wasted purchase.
http://uk.lizearle.com/exfoliators-and-masks/deep-cleansing-mask.html
Bliss Foot Patrol (AHA) Cream – £18.50 Now, foot creams may not have the most glamorous reputation in the beauty world, but as we approach sandal weather, and our feet leave the all-forgiving, loving embrace of winter boots, finding something that tackles dry skin and rough patches is going to be up there with the Holy Grail.
I managed to get hold of Bliss’ Foot Patrol when I found a tube of it on special offer at TK Maxx, and whether you buy it at retail price or not, this little blue tube is a real heavy-hitter when it comes to performance.
My previous experience of foot creams has been limited, and it must be said, underwhelming. Minty-fragranced, thick, gooey cream that took an age to sink into the skin and when it did, it did nothing remarkable while it was there.
I am guilty of neglecting my feet, purely because of early experiences of pedicure products – my feet have regularly got a sweep of body lotion over them for several years – if they were lucky.
But Foot Patrol has now convinced me that footcare doesn’t have to be hard work: Bliss have taken cutting-edge skincare technology and applied it to the body. AHA’s (alpha-hydroxy acids) are great for refining patches of rough, uneven skin. My Murad AHA cleanser is a thing of beauty, and Bliss have taken the same technology and applied to our over-worked feet. It’s honestly genius.
All you have to do with Foot Patrol is take a generous amount, and apply it to your feet. The AHA’s get to grips with rough-textured skin, and to be a little graphic with you, the more ‘texture’ underfoot the cream has to work with, the more impressive the results.
Foot Patrol doesn’t just soften or fragrance the skin: it literally gets rid of the hard skin around the heels and ball of the foot. It’s a one-step process to get feet that don’t look like they could feature in Lord of the Rings. I’ve been extremely impressed by this product, and while £18.50 doesn’t seem like a budget buy for foot cream, the emphasis here is on a quality product delivering real results. Get it, try it – you won’t be disappointed.
So that’s my Budget Buys under £20…next time I will be squeezing in a cheeky additional Budget Buys under £25 for the products I wanted to recommend, but fell just outside of the £20 price limit. These will feature stellar products from REN, Indeed Labs and Weleda.
HELEN TOPE
designergirl77 