Skin(s)care Part 1: Lacura Beautifying Daily Balm and 24k Gold Face Mask. Skin left red and sensitive.

Welcome to my skinscare series 🙂

These days it is becoming increasingly hard to know what skincare and beauty products are worth the money and what aren’t. What skin care is actually safe and ‘clean’ to put on your skin. It’s all youtube and bloggers touting ”holy grail” products but at the end of the day how do you really know if what they are saying is true or not, especially when bloggers are all competing for sponsorships and PR.

Well I am going to come at it from another angle and tell you what not to buy based on my experiences. The products mentioned within my skinscare series will be products that have produced some level of unwanted reaction on my skin. I thought this would be a useful series to chat about because it is scary when you put something on your skin and it tingles, burns, itches, dries and stings your skin. Skinscare indeed. I got the idea from the first blog I posted which happened to be a review of a product that my skin reacted to so I thought I would keep it going.

Lacura Beautifying Daily Balm

Bought from Aldi for roughly £2.99 (it may have been £2.29) a few months ago. I don’t think it can still be purchased but that is not a bad thing because I don’t want to buy it again anyway and I don’t recommend you do either! It has 8 obvious fragrance ingredients and some others that are less obvious. The second and third ingredients are known skin irritants and if that is how the ingredients list starts off you know the rest is only going to get worse. I could stop the review here because based on the ingredients it is enough that we should all put the balm back on the shelf and run away screaming.

It’s a dupe for the Clarins Baume Beaute Eclair or Beauty Flash Balm. It’s actually a brazen rip off as the packaging looks identical. How do they get away with it? Both are orange tinted lotions with a smooth silky texture. Both go on well and leave skin with an immediate soft feeling. However it doesn’t leave your skin feeling moisturised or hydrated.

Aqua, Propylene Glycol, Octyldodecanol, Oryza Sativa Starch, Glycerin, Sorbitan Stearate, Polysorbate 60, Olea Europaea Fruit Extract, Carbomer, Bisabolol, Hamamelis Virginiana Leaf Extract, Algae Extract, Citric Acid, Alcohol, Sodium Hydroxide, Parfum, Farnesol, Hexylcinnamal, Benzyl Alcohol, Limolene, Geraniol, Linalool, Alpha-isomethylionone, Citronellol, Phenophexyethanol, Decylene Glycol, Caprylyl Gglycol, Sodium Benzoate, Potassium sorbate, sorbic acid, CI 15985

So, everything in bold is obvious fragrance and just in there for that sole purpose. There are several other ingredients used as preservative, emulsifiers, bulking agents that are also used for their fragrancing properties. Realistically, half the product is made of fragrance.

Other reviews are touting rice starch as being good for the skin. Paula’s choice has it rated as “good” as it can be helpful to those with oily skin, as like talc, it can dry out oily skin. But that was the only reason. It’s not like it is fermented rice which has different good properties. The same with Hamamelis Virginiana Leaf Extract, or witch hazel to you and I. Used for its astringent properties so again good if you have oily skin. So where do these ingredients leave dry skin? You see why I didn’t find it moisturising now?

Glycerin is in there, that is a good humectant. Olea Extract is Olive and seems to be good according to Paula’s Choice and Truth in Aging. Algae extract is hard to comment on because it doesn’t say what kind of algae it is. Bisabolol has good properties – brightening and anti irritant. You will need this to help counteract all the fragrance in this product which can irritate your skin and did with mine.

Enough about the ingredients and on to my experience. I had been using the Lacura Balm with my foundations to give it a glowy-er look and thin some of my heavier foundations out a bit. Yes, it did a nice enough job of giving a bit of luminosity to the foundation.

However, my issue is the scent. It is strong and after using the product a few times back to back I started to feel tingling on my face. Tingly is not a good feeling, it shouldn’t happen. My face as a result has a compromised skin barrier – red and irritated and uneven skin tone. I’ve not used the product consistently until now because of the fragrance as it is just a recipe for disaster. If you don’t get a reaction straight away to fragrance, it doesn’t mean it’s okay. It can happen over time and the more products you use with fragrance the more likely you are to develop a reaction down the line. I am now dealing with red blotchy skin and applying Cerave and Avene Skin Recovery Cream to try and heal my skin.

I would recommend spending three quid on anything other than this balm.

Deep Cleansing Peel Off 24K Gold Luxurious Anti Aging Treatment. 

Bought for £4.99 from Tkmaxx. I bought this when I was started to become interested in skin care ingredients. Back when I had an idea about beneficial ingredients but no idea about bad ingredients.

So this has Allantoin, Sodium Hyaluronate, Licorice Root Extract, Panthenol, Copper tetrapeptide 1, Centella Asiatica to name a few. However it also fragrance and alcohol . Alcohol is third on the list and Fragrance is 12 on the list of a long list! Alcohol can be “bad”. Alcohol denat is drying. If you don’t have a problem with alcohol, then good for you. I personally am hit and miss with alcohol, sometimes I am fine, other times it turns me bright red. I won’t be finishing this product because of the reaction it gave me (red!) which I surmise is from the alcohol and fragrance being high in the ingredient list.

It didn’t burn or sting, it simply left me rather red for a while and definitely compromised my skin barrier. However the issue with this is I have used this product a few times. I had no reaction the first 2 times and then the third and fourth times I started to get red reactions. Clearly evidencing I am starting to react to ingredients now that I am exposing myself to the product on a more regular basis. I can only imagine what my skin would look like if I continued to keep using it.

I feel my reaction was more to do with the fragrance than the alcohol (but know really knows?). I didn’t find the smell strong on my face, but it is strong in the bottle. It smells like really cheap, strong strong strong perfume with a very high alcohol content. It nearly makes my eyes water when I smell it in the bottle and it smells so strong I can taste it at the back of my throat for a short time after. My partner tried it and his eyes streamed the whole time he had it on his face because of the smell.

Needless to say, I won’t be finishing this product. Skincare is meant to help your skin, not make it worse.

It had such potential to be a decent product because some of the ingredients are amazing (not the gold, it does nothing and is pure gimmick) however as with a lot of Asian skincare, they like to add alcohol and fragrance and just ruin it.

I also won’t be finishing this product off because it’s not a pleasurable product to use. It’s so messy and hard to clean. In order to get the stuff off my hand I had to scrape it off with something blunt. Trying to wash it off when it is wet is quite frankly not advisable. It goes goopy and slippery and smears it about a little, but it certainly doesn’t budge. It goes on like glue! Gold glue and I mean PVA glue but worse! It dries down the same as glue and if you get it in your hair, good luck to you getting it out. I talk from experience of this last week. Ouch.