Quick question: Do you believe in eye cream?

I've been thinking about eye cream since I saw that Paula's Choice recently started to sell one. I'm seriously side-eyeing that. I've been reading Paula Begoun's recommendations for well over a decade, and one of the things she's always emphasized is that eye creams are a waste of money and a marketing gimmick. That is, they're just moisturizers in a smaller package at a higher price, and your eye skin is made out of the same shit as the rest of your face, even if it's a little thinner, so it doesn't need different ingredients. And now her company is selling eye cream. I understand that she will sometimes change her views with new evidence, as all reasonable people should, but I seriously fucking doubt that there has been any revolutionary evidence showing that eye creams are, it turns out, not just moisturizers in smaller tubes. I think that as her company gets bigger, she's started to let them formulate products based on consumer demand, rather than focusing on educating and not selling products that conflict with the principles she's promoted all along.

For a long time, I was strictly anti-eye cream, for the above reasons. And I still believe those things to be true - all you have to do is compare the ingredients and formulas of various eye creams and moisturizers. I have, however, tended to become more moderate over time, as many of us do. I can imagine some reasons why people might spend extra money for an eye cream. The main reason, other than just being fucking inundated by marketing telling you it's necessary, is that you might have sensitive eyes and want a product that presumably has been formulated to be gentle on the eyes. I think you're still better off just using a gentle moisturizer with good ingredients in it, because it will work just as well and cost you way less. If you think your eye area needs something richer than the rest of your face, there are lots of rich moisturizers out there. I've tried eye creams and didn't notice any different results than what I've got from moisturizers. But it's your call.

I know my opinions are not universal, and I am open to hearing why I'm wrong. So what are your views on this riveting topic? Are you pro- or anti-eye cream? Scam? Or vital element of a skincare routine? Any other beauty conspiracy theories you want to talk about? (We already know what I think about diversion of salon products.)

Is "diversion" of salon hair care products a conspiracy theory?

I suspect that some people will get really heated up about this and argue with me, because they are trained hairstylists or salon owners or whatever, and I admit to not being an expert. Most of the explanations, however, of how fake, expired, or stolen salon products supposedly end up in mainstream drug and groceries stores have all the earmarks of a conspiracy theory. Namely, they don't stand up to scrutiny or make a lot of sense, when you think about them. In some versions, the shady distributers are storing up products for months or years until they expire, because then they apparently can no longer be tracked by their bar codes after a certain amount of time (?), and then they sell them to CVS, Target, etc. And that major corporation is totally cool with this, because they don't fear lawsuits from selling supposedly contaminated products one bit! Nope! In other versions (and sometimes combined with the previous ones), the crooks are emptying out half of the good product and filling the rest of the bottle with water or alcohol because . . . ??? Do they also have a stockpile of fake bottles to dump the other half of the product into? In that case, why buy the legit product at all? Why not just fake it all?

Anyway, yell at me if you like, but I suspect that this is something that stylists are taught in school, probably by people who really do think it is true (and maybe those people are told it by salon hair care brand sales reps). I don't think the stylists are lying - I think they believe it. Just like when they tell you that drugstore products with silicone will make your hair worse. The most logical explanation is that salons want you to buy products from them (which is reasonable) and so they need to have some kind of explanation for why what you find at the salon is better than what you find elsewhere.

I'm not saying there aren't counterfeit beauty products out there. But I doubt that Walgreens has been selling them - or stolen merchandise - for decades with no repercussions.

Do you have a better explanation for how this "gray market" functions? One that explains how it is profitable to the distributors and worthwhile to the large retailers? I'd love to hear it. ETA: I'm not just saying that. Everything I've found has been unconvincing. The argument that they sometimes actually cost more at mass retailers than salons is interesting, but not totally relevant, I think. That's just about shopping around for good prices.