Today is the first day in a long time that I’ve felt like NYC has solidly escaped winter’s clutches. It’s finally, actually, totally springtime, yay! So it feels appropriate that I’ve been using a product with a very “spring”-like name: Nectar of the C Vitamin C serum. This was one of three products gifted to me by the newly launched skin care brand, Fleur & Bee. I know some people aren’t a fan of cutesy product names, but I don’t mind them so…

When a product is as expensive as SkinCeuticals Vitamin C serum, there are always going to be duplicates waiting in the wings, waiting for you to try them. The tricky thing is finding out which dupe is actually worth your money—the last thing you want to do is spend money on a bunch of duplicates that don’t work. You might even end up spending as much as the real thing would have cost in the first place.

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…