My mom enjoys Korean dramas, Sudoku puzzles, and extracting blackheads. That’s right, those annoying little black dots that appear when your pores get clogged but stay open. When I was a teenager, I had acne on my back (“bacne”), so my mom used to beg me to let her squeeze out my blackheads. She was excited for me when I got into college, she was happy when I made her favorite scones, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her more delighted than when I grudgingly agreed…

What makes a skincare product label effective? I think we’ve all come to expect that skincare products will try to sway us with pretty pictures and uplifting words like “brightening” and “soothing.” But it was only recently that I thought to question what it actually means for a skincare product to be “clinically proven.” I see this from time to time on certain labels, and I always thought that it referred to actual clinical trials. But it turns out that…

Do you ever notice the same ingredients appearing in lots of skincare products? Stuff you never noticed before? This happened recently with phenoxyethanol, a preservative that is often used as an alternative to parabens. Now it’s happening again with allantoin—I’m suddenly noticing it in lots of products that I write about on this blog. Allantoin is a white powder that has no odor, and provides conditioning properties to the skin, according to the National Eczema Foundation.