Skinetica Anti-Blemish Solution

Sarah on my Facebook asked me if I had come across Skinetica.  As it happened I had because I had been sent a sample of it when it came out, though I hadn’t taken a lot of notice of it.  I get sent a fair bit of stuff and unless it grabs my attention I tend to ignore it.  But as someone was asking, I had a quick look at it.

The way these products work is pretty basic.  Spots – whiteheads and blackheads – tend to form in pores that have for some reason become inflamed.  This makes them attractive to bacteria who can colonise them giving rise to a whitehead.  If the whitehead sticks around for a while it can accumulate dirt giving a blackhead.  One solution that often works is to simply apply an antibacterial which knocks back the bacteria and gives your skin the opportunity to heal the problem.

It doesn’t always work, but it works often enough to be worth a try.

There are number of options for the antibacterial to use.  One popular choice is the family of quaternary ammonium compounds which include things like cetrimide.   These are fairly effective and are reasonably mild.   So that is a good compromise between efficacy and safety.

The ingredient list reveals that this product really is as simple as these things go.

Purified water, ethyl alcohol, fragrance, quaternary ammonium chloride.

Those aren’t strictly the correct names for those ingredients but they are near enough to give an idea, with the exception of the antibacterial.  They describe it as quaternary ammonium chloride.  They might mean by this simply ammonium chloride.  This would probably work pretty well to clear spots but I would think it would be a bit on the irritating side.  I tried it on my arm and it didn’t irritate me.  This might mean simply that the level is too low to do so.  I am inclined to think it more likely that they are using some kind of more skin friendly material which has a quaternary ammonium group on it somewhere.  A typical example is cetrimonium chloride.

(This is also used as a hair conditioner, and I have posted about it before.

Cetrimonium Chloride .)

Indeed this product might well be using cetrimonium chloride – though there are plenty of other options open to them to achieve what they are trying to achieve.

I am a bit loath to wholeheartedly recommend a product where the makers have taken such a slapdash approach to the ingredient list.  But the claims they make for it are fairly reasonable.  They make a few claims on the pack that are not actually wrong.  It won’t work for everyone, but the claim of fast acting skin clearing is believable enough.  They claim it has been dermatologically tested as well.  This probably just means they took the trouble to get it patch tested for irritancy.  This is hardly a reason to buy it, but it is sort of reassuring.  They say that it is non-greasy, which is true enough.  With only four ingredients it is non-quite a lot of things.  It is also non staining, again there is not much in there to cause stains.

It is also claimed to be non-toxic. Well I should think it is.  Why would anyone sell a toxic product?

So reluctantly I have to say that this is probably worth a try if you have some blemishes that are proving hard to shift.  It might work for you and if it does, you’ll probably be happy to overlook the shortcomings in the labelling that rather annoy me.

Here is my spontaneous off the cuff review on Youtube.

 

2 thoughts on “Skinetica Anti-Blemish Solution”

  1. You are amazing. Thank you for the review. Might I suggest putting the video a little higher up along the page (or a comment suggesting video review below)? Reading the article on the phone doesn’t really show the video until you have read the whole post and then you see the wonderful video at the end. I’m you’re newest #collinsbeautypage addict

  2. Thanks for your suggestion Jom. I see what you are saying, but I don’t find that many people reading the blog actually watch the videos – and indeed the people who find the videos on YouTube don’t seem to come and read the blog. So I think I’ll leave things as they are for now.

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