THE “EVERYTHING” SERUM: OLAY SUPER SERUM

Being a beauty reviewer for more than a decade, not much impresses me, but these did last year. Olay Super Serum was one of them.

Here’s my general process for reviewing products (both sponsored and unsponsored posts).

I’ll check the claims and the ingredients (if they make sense, I’ll check the last too). If both the claims and the ingredients make sense then I’ll apply the product on my skin for either 2 weeks (may be more depending on what the product is).

OLAY SUPER SERUM

This is super important because even if you are the foremost expert in the world in cosmetics, the ingredients list isn’t going to tell you how good most products are, because it is such an incomplete way of describing the product. The overall formula really is everything, so you have got to do your testing on skin.

I start with my skin at its best. After a few weeks of my basic skincare routine, I’d add only the study serum, to test how an active shakes up my skin. I would continue with all my other products, leaving all location variables (cleansers, moisturizers, sunscreens, eye creams etc) the same. The added product would be the variable and I would know exactly what the other products would do to my skin, so I could pinpoint any difference.

OLAY SUPER SERUM

But you’ll probably notice a little skin drama over the next few days: the most frequent things for me are closed comedones, or lumps of flesh-coloured bumps usually around my jawline that form when pores clog up, leading to a build-up of gunk inside, a bit like little baby spots.

If they don’t fade after a few days, at least I will know that the serum is not for closed comedones, and I will destroy them once and for all with my holy trinity of products (alpha hydroxy acids and my peeling gel), and see whether that will happen again, and then just the serum.

I’ll do this for a bunch of other skin woes. Then, after the trial period, I’ll know what a product is and isn’t good for and which products and what ingredients it’s good at replacing in my routine.

OLAY SUPER SERUM

Sometimes it just acts like ‘Ew, gross, we don’t like that at all’. Sometimes it just doesn’t do anything. If it’s a sponsored post, I tell the brand: ‘So sorry, but I can’t vouch for your product.’

With the exception of Vitamin C serum, which can be one the few products in your cabinet that does nothing wrong, most of the time, for most of the products you like and use (both on- and off-site), some things will chime your inattentive ear. That’s okay; most serums are not super-serums.

Yet the Olay Super Serum… this was basically the only product in human history where I dropped all my usual hardcore actives and went back to the baseline of the softest, happiest skin my sun-damaged, suburban life could offer, and my skin just… did nothing. It basically replaced the dozen or so hard actives in my standard maintenance routine, blew on them, and folded them into its baggy, neglected pants.

OLAY SUPER SERUM

I continued taking this every day for roughly five weeks because I was so shocked – I was just waiting and waiting, and it was nothing. My skin just stayed perfect!

There’s a whole slew of actives in Olay Super Serum. At first I was skeptical – in products with a lot of actives, there’ll be one active that the product wants to focus on getting working (especially if there’s a star active), and the rest will largely be sprinkled in for marketing. But it seems like this serum is getting multiple ingredients working at the same time!

OLAY SUPER SERUM

The novel thing about the cleverness here is actually niacinamide itself: this serum uses Olay’s patented technology to get the niacinamide to stay active at low pH, which normally isn’t great. Here’s where Olay was doing a ton of the pioneering work on niacinamide in skin – thus it makes sense that they would have cutting edge niacinamide research!

This technology greatly improves niacinamide’s absorption into the skin, while their testing data also shows that the serum works much better and more quickly than Olay’s other best niacinamide products. Because niacinamide does a little bit of everything in the realm of skincare, I think that’s why this serum works so well.

OLAY SUPER SERUM

Lactic acid (a type of alpha hydroxy acid) is the second highest active and that’s probably working nicely for me too; lactic acid is an ingredient that I know reduces my closed comedones particularly effectively.

I didn’t need moisturiser – not even in winter in Australia – most nights.

The only real downside is the fragrance which is at a moderate level of intensity. I think it smells nice, but could see how some would really not like it. There’s also a Night Repair version which is fragrance-free.

OLAY SUPER SERUM

THE “EVERYTHING” SERUM: OLAY SUPER SERUM

gothambeautyproducts
gothambeautyproducts
SERUM: OLAY SUPER SERUM
SERUM: OLAY SUPER SERUM
SERUM: OLAY SUPER SERUM