Choosing the best Vitamin C serum or skin care product:

How to choose the best vitamin C serum or skin care product.

Vitamin C has a plethora of benefits to your skin.

• Vitamin C serums contain antioxidants, which help to protect your skin from the sun, pollution, and general day to day damage.
• Brightening
• Skin tone evening
• Dark spot lightening
• Hyperpigmentation Relief
• Skin repair

Forms of Vitamin C

• L-ascorbic acid
  
• Magnesium ascorbyl phosphate
• Ascorbyl palmitate
• Ascorbic acid polypeptide
• Ascorbyl glucosamine
• Ascorbyl glucoside
• Ester-C
• Sodium ascorbyl palmitate
• Sodium ascorbyl phosphate
  
• Citric Acid 

Concentration + Myth busting

Concentration must be greater than 8% to be efficacious.

Typically sold at concentrations from 10% to 20%.

Higher concentrations does not always mean greater efficacy.

 

Minimizing Side Effects

So, when you try out a product for a week, and you start breaking out, how likely are you to continue using it?

Not as likely as you would have been had it not made you break out.

Products higher in concentration have a higher likelihood of exhibiting negative side effects like burning, redness, acne, general irritation and inflammation.

The lower you can go while remaining in the efficacious range, the better. You can always increase frequency of application or increase the concentration of the active ingredient later.

Establishing and Maintaining Regular Use

Having to schedule out your skin care regimen can be a headache. What is even more of a headache is when there is a high rate of variation between days in your skin care regimen.

Using a product only twice a week or every other day is difficult to remember to sustain, but using products with higher percentages of active ingredients more regularly would cause irritation.

How do you typically establish a habit?

You make it daily.

You do it for at least 30 days.

If you can not maintain regular use of an active ingredient, you are not taking advantage of the Vitamin C’s properties in the most optimal way.

Seeing Results

Again, as long as you remain within the range of efficacious concentration AND maintain regular use, you will see results.

Formulation + Oxidation

There’s so many Vitamin C products out there, both with horrible and amazing formulations. An issue you’ll run into is that many will oxidize before you can finish your product, which at best means an ineffective product, at worst means skin irritation.

Our Vitamin C serum and skin care products in general are among the best because our Vitamin C is protected by a layer of silicones, which serve a dual purpose of preventing oxidation, smoothing skin, helping skin retain moisture, and protecting skin from the elements.

You can test it yourself! Leave some of our Vitamin C out for a day. Did it change color?

Learn more about Vitamin C and our other products at our skincare Guides, here!