Top Secrets Natural Action Exfoliator, €43. No press samples featured.
If I look after my skin, it looks after me. It’s grand. If I slip up? Ugh. My pores gape in protest, like a sea of mouths screaming about how micellar water alone cannot sustain a good complexion. It gets duller by the second, until a few spots spring up to add a bit of colour.
At times like that, when I properly look like I’d trade you a book of spells for your first born child, I use YSL Top Secrets Natural Action Exfoliator. It’s one of those clever chemical exfoliants, so, while it will absolutely blast the bad bits off your face, it’s gentle on the rest. Also, it has sparkles, but more on those later.
The big idea about chemical exfoliators is targeting. In old-school scrubs, dead cells were sloughed off with granules, grains or beads. The issue there is that granules get to work on whatever type of skin they find. Yeah, they’ll demolish pesky dry patches, but they do the same to healthy skin. When we swap clumsy granules for chemicals, we skip the scratching.
In texture, YSL Top Secrets Natural Action Exfoliator is totally smooth. BUT, unlike a lot of chemical exfoliators, it’s also really thick – exactly the same consistency as honey. That means more time massaging, and, inevitably, more product-to-skin time. And when that product is a forty quid luxury mask, more is what you want.
Upon application, there’s some resistance. It can feel a bit like it’s dragging, but warmth makes it malleable. Once you start adding warm water, it dilutes a lot, from gel to cream to milk. That process is nice – it feels like your skin is getting cleaner, and it’s kinda, sorta mildly warming. Nothing like THE BURN from toners of our teens, just a reassuring sort of tingle.
The results, at least on my skin, are incredible. It’s as if there was a layer of grime, going unnoticed but somehow also ruining everything, and then suddenly it’s gone. It’s hard to pin it down to one thing. There’s just a definite and immediate improvement. My complexion looks much brighter – I’d go so far as to call it rosy – and there’s a bouncy look to my skin, like I am v. v. healthy
The super supple radiant magic aura is strongest on the day of use, but there’s no sudden dip. If I stay on the wagon and off the makeup wipes, the effect lingers, much more than you’d expect from a one-time wash. It’s good.
My one caveat would be that this is splurgy skin care, a nice extra. If you don’t have a bunch of core products that are working well for you, don’t leap to this and expect that it will carry the weight of a full routine forever. If you’ve got your daily products down pat and want to branch out, YSL Top Secrets Natural Action Exfoliator Review is worth a look.
