In high school, my skin was fighting a losing battle with acne. I remember my friends and I would wipe our faces with Clean & Clear Oil Absorbing Sheets and then compare how dark our sheets ended up. Of the four of us, one friend and I would always have much darker blue sheets, and my other two friends would hold up their barely smudged sheets and then gawk at how dark ours got. I don’t blame my skin—it was probably just rebelling against all the acne treatments I was submitting it to…

The holy grail of vitamin C serums has to be SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic—but it comes at a crazy high price point. Many companies make similar products because SkinCeuticals is kind enough to spell out the key aspects of its patented formula: 15% vitamin C (in the form of L-Ascorbic acid), 1% vitamin E (in the form of alpha tocopherol), and 0.5% ferulic acid. SkinCeuticals’s serum includes this specific combination of active ingredients because research has shown that these ingredients make…

Gatsby is a Japanese-based brand that makes hair gels, shave gels, and other men’s grooming products. When I heard about this brand in the past, I always wondered it if was indeed an ode to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel, The Great Gatsby. It turns out that it really is: read the company’s about page to read the full story, but basically, Gatsby’s founder was inspired by the lifestyle of the novel’s title character.