If you spend any amount of your free time perusing beauty Instagrammers and Vloggers’ accounts, you’ll no doubt have seen or heard of The Ordinary. It’s a brand that has sky-rocketed in terms of popularity over the past year or so, and their Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5 is one of their top sellers. People are seriously obsessed with it, and for good reason; it’s a crazy good formula with a price tag of just under $7.
The Ordinary’s simplistic, scientifically-backed formulas and no-frills approach makes their products a little hard to navigate as you’d have to be fairly knowledgeable about ingredients and formulations to know what to buy and what your skin needs, but we’ve made it all a little easier for you with this product.
So, you might have heard through the grapevine that hyaluronic acid is good for hydration, but you might not necessarily understand why that is. Hyaluronic acid is a humectant, which means that it has the ability to retain moisture in the skin (the addition of B5 (panthothenic acid) is also a great, hydrating ingredient). However, as with everything skincare-related, formulation is key.
Depending on the molecular weight of the hyaluronic acid molecules present in different hyaluronic acid serums, effectiveness can dramatically differ. The smaller the molecular weight, the better the hyaluronic acid can penetrate the skin: better/deeper penetration = better results. And this is exactly why this magical little product is so great; the hyaluronic acid present is in the form of sodium hyaluronate (a hyaluronic salt), has a low molecular weight, meaning that this serum is effective.
For cruelty-free beauty consumers, hyaluronic acid can be a point of frustration as it’s often derived from chickens’ rooster combs (they contain 15x the amount of HA that we have in our own skin). Luckily, The Ordinary have chosen a different route as this product is marked as vegetarian, which is great!
This stuff works – if you have dehydrated skin (which, whether we know it or not, most of us have), this is an immediate skin-fixer. It instantly hydrates, plumps and also works well as a serum for around the eye area as the consistency is light enough. A word of warning: hyaluronic acid is usually fairly ‘gloopy’ in its nature, so it’s important to let this ‘set’ and dry down once applied to avoid pilling (AKA products layered over the top bunching up into little balls all over your face).
Brilliantly effective, brilliantly affordable – what more could you ask for? Have you tried this yet?
Jess Hall