Serious Retinol: Review of Paula's Choice Clinical 1% Retinol Treatment (with before and after photos)

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Paula's Choice Clinical 1% Retinol Treatment

When Paula's Choice initially came out with their Clinical 1% Retinol Treatment, I wasn't especially interested. I'd worked through two very generously-sized bottles of their retinol serum (reviewed here) without seeing any clear results at all. But then I read Lab Muffin's review of the new retinol treatment, and I decided to add a sample, in a 0.16 oz. pump bottle, to my next order. Cheap as I am, I was particularly interested in the value breakdown Lab Muffin provides, showing that this product is really competitively priced, at least in Australia. As I understand it, cosmetics are really fucking expensive in Australia, but her price analysis seems promising anyway. Unfortunately, I am not mathematically inclined, so I haven't calculated a similar comparison among U.S. products (but if you are, and you want to share, that would be really exciting). The price of the full-size bottle is $56, which is not exactly cheap, so it's nice to feel like I'm spending my money relatively wisely. Especially since it turns out that I really like this stuff, and I want to keep buying it. Though it's mainly marketed as anti-aging, I'd also recommend this stuff if you have problems with clogged pores and/or breakouts, like I do. (More on how to save some money on it at the end of the post.)

I do suggest trying the sample size if you think this might work for you, because I got 4-5 weeks of use out of it. Since you only use a "pea-sized" amount each time, and you have to gradually increase the frequency of use, the sample contains more than enough to decide if it's right for you. You can see the main claims Paula's Choice makes about this product's purpose on the bottle above, i.e. to improve skin's firmness, smooth wrinkles/lines, reduce dark spots, and refine pores.

One pump of Paula's Choice Clinical 1% Retinol Treatment

During my initial testing period, I used the retinol treatment 2-4 times a week, as I adjusted to it and tried to determine what my skin could tolerate. I'm glad I read the Lab Muffin review first, because that meant I knew to expect peeling. And holy shit, the peeling. It's not painful, red peeling or anything, but I did lightly molt for the first few weeks I tested it. The peeling doesn't start immediately, at least for me - it would show up, reliably, 36-48 hours after I used the retinol. It can be controlled with lots of moisturizing, but unless your skin is super tough, do expect peeling. I recommend going slow when you start. Use only a small amount the first several times, or mix it half and half with moisturizer. That's what I did the second time around, after I got a full bottle and started the process over again, and the peeling was much less dramatic.

Another side effect that I noticed was that it seems to make my skin more sensitive to other products that I usually don't react to. Nothing major, but I sometimes notice a slight burning sensation when using my regular moisturizer or even things like liquid highlighters. Odd.

Anyway, results! I liked what was happening to my skin while I used this, but I wanted to be sure it was really the result of the retinol and not just a coincidence or something. I tend to be paranoid and to have a bad memory, which makes testing skincare products a pain in the ass. Luckily (?), the disruption of moving (twice), traveling, and housesitting in August interrupted my usual skin care routine and allowed me to sort things out. I packed up both this retinol treatment and the Paula's Choice 2% BHA liquid (also reviewed here) that I have been using for years, and I didn't have access to either of them for a couple of weeks. That, combined with stress, meant that my skin gave me a big old fuck you, and I ended up with a mess to straighten out.

I broke out really bad, I had seriously clogged pores, and my skin looked dull and just generally shitty. I started back in with just the BHA liquid for a week or two, and things improved noticeably. Definitely fewer blackhead and congestion. So, okay good, I haven't been wasting my money on that stuff all this time. Then I cracked open my new, big bottle of 1% retinol and an even greater improvement was noticeable immediately.

I don't really like using vague language like "brighter skin," or "radiant," or "luminous," or whatever, because I feel like a slippery ad man. What exactly do those adjectives really mean? They seem accurate, to some extent, for the results I get from this retinol treatment, but I'm going to try to be more specific. I think the main thing it does for my skin is keep my pores clearer than they would otherwise be, which in turn makes them appear smaller. Smaller pores make my skin, overall, look smoother, and that is the main thing that gives it a "radiant" appearance. For me, "refining pores" is the claim by Paula's Choice that I can really see when I use this.

I still get hormonal breakouts on my chin, but with this product they clear up more quickly and are less intense overall. When I stopped using it, those cystic zits came back with a vengeance and would not fuck off until I went back on the retinol. I'm not sure about overall firmness, but I don't (yet) have a lot of sag in my skin that I'm concerned about. I don't have many dark spots, but my freckles haven't really diminished, which is fine with me. I didn't think it was doing anything for lines until I looked at the following photos side by side. The first one is from May 2015, about 6 weeks before I started testing this retinol treatment, and the second is from the end of July, right as I was finishing up the sample. (I started to use it again toward the end of August.)

Before and after using Paula's Choice Clinical 1% Retinol Treatment for a month

It's hard to replicate lighting conditions exactly when taking photos like this months apart, and so the lighting is a bit harsher (at a more oblique angle) in the before photo. But I examined several different before and after photos taken on these same dates, and the comparison here is accurate. I think it's clear that I haven't added a filter or anything to the after photo, and I'm not wearing makeup (or anything but moisturizer) in either one. You can see that I still have a bit of hormonal chin acne and any freckles I had are still there in the after photo. The overall texture of my skin, however, is smoother, and that smile line between my mouth and nose is still there, but maybe slightly diminished. These subtle improvements add up to my skin generally just looking better.

In my current regimen, I use the Clinical 1% Retinol Treatment every third day, because that allows me to combine it with BHA liquid for optimal exfoliation with minimal peeling. You are not supposed to use BHA or AHA exfoliants at the same time as this retinol. So my routine goes something like this:

Day 1: one pump of retinol treatment in the evening on my entire face, except the eye area, since you're supposed to keep it away from there. I use a separate moisturizer around my eyes. I may or may not add extra moisturizer to the retinol, but it already contains things like glycerin and emollients, so it's usually moisturizing enough on its own for my combination-oily skin.

Day 2: light moisturizer and/or hydrating serum in the morning and evening. I find that using something with hyaluronic acid works well to prevent peeling. The Paula's Choice Antioxidant Concentrate Serum (reviewed here) worked - though I ran out a week ago and have been adding Paula's Choice Hyaluronic Acid Booster to my regular Moisture Gel since then (also reviewed here - yes, I seem to be a Paula's Choice fangirl, but you already knew that).

Day 3: BHA liquid in the morning or evening, whenever I remember.

Day 4: return to Day 1 (and I use the same moisturizer as Day 2 on Days 1 and 3 as well, as needed).

My skin is looking good with this routine. It's not perfect - I still get the occasional blackhead or pimple, and I still have human skin with pores. But I'm getting a lot of good things from the combination; besides the retinol, there's vitamin C and peptides in the treatment, and then there is the BHA and the antioxidants and everything else in the other products. I'm not hating my face at the moment. My skin is the best it has been in quite some time.

So. I'm recommending something that costs $55. Maybe you have health insurance that covers other retinoids, and that is a more affordable route to go for this kind of thing. I don't, and if you don't either (or you want to try something a bit gentler), here are some options for buying it. I usually get things directly from the Paula's Choice website, because they have frequent sales and free shipping deals. Right now they have 20% any one item and free shipping on $50+. Soon they will probably have a sale on all of their "Clinical" products or all of their retinol products or something, and it will probably be 15-20% off. If you don't already have a Paula's Choice account, you can also get $10 off your first $15+ order by using someone's invite link (here's mine).

Another option, if you've already used your $10-off, is to buy Paula's Choice stuff from the Nordstrom website. Here's the 1% retinol. This is a good way to go if there isn't an appealing sale on the Paula's Choice site, because Nordstrom always has free shipping and free returns. You can also collect your rewards points, if that's a thing you do. Nordstrom doesn't have the sample size, however, which you can only get here from Paula's Choice, and I really recommend trying that out first. Either way, you should also shop through Ebates and get at least 3% cash back from Nordstrom or 5% from Paula's Choice (here's my previous post about Ebates in case you're not familiar). I think that about covers it as far as saving money on this shit goes.

Have you used retinol? Does it work for you? I assumed it didn't do anything for me, but it looks like I needed a higher concentration than I had tried in the past in order to get results.

Cheap and effective BHA exfoliant! Stridex Maximum Soft Touch Pads (from Lab Muffin)

Disclosure: This post contain an Amazon affiliate link.
I've posted before about BHA/beta-hydroxy acid/salicylic acid. Quick summary: it works great not only for improving the texture and appearance of the skin and making it look smoother, but also for clearing blackheads and acne and soothing redness. Good stuff. But effective products containing BHAs have to have a certain pH level to really work. On my previous post, Emi from Project Swatch recommended the Stridex pads in the comments, and I was intrigued. The cheapest I've found them online is $3.49. But without knowing the pH, how could I tell if they would be as effective as the more expensive products I'd been using? Lab Muffin to the rescue! She tested the pads and found that the ones in the red package have both the right concentration (2%) of BHA and the right pH (below 4) to work well.

These are something worth trying not only for people dealing with acne, but for anyone who wants their skin to appear less dull, pores to be smaller, wrinkles to be less prominent, to reduce redness or hyperpigmentation . . . the list goes on. Just start out slow and make sure your skin can handle it. I've never had any irritation from BHA at all, but that's not the case for everyone. I'm definitely going to pick up a jar of this stuff when I run out of my Paula's Choice 2% BHA. The PC versions sells for $23 and works fantastically, I admit.

It's hard to compare the Stridex and the PC prices per unit, since the Stridex is measured in number of pads. On Amazon, the Stridex pads are described as 8 oz., but I don't know if that reflects the volume of liquid they contain (shipping weight is 8.8 oz., says Amazon). The PC BHA is 4 oz. and costs about 6 times as much. Either way, the Stridex is looking good in this comparison. I'll let you know my results once I've tried the Stridex pads myself, but since that will be a while, I wanted to give you the heads up. They come highly recommended by trustworthy sources, as you can see!

ETA: I just noticed that these have menthol in them. I hate skincare products that make my face tingly purely for the sake of making it tingly. Now I'm grumpy and I might just have to stick to the more expensive options after all.

When Good Skin Goes Bad, Part II

Disclosure: This post contains an Amazon affiliate link.
In my previous post, I began my quest to figure out why my skin has started to fuck with me. Click back there if you want to know exactly what I'm talking about, but in short, I'd been getting worse acne, blackheads, clogged and enlarged pores, fine lines/wrinkles, rough texture, etc., over a really short period of time, and it sucked. I mentioned that I had identified four possible causes for my skin's shittiness. To recap:

• Increased use of moisturizer to combat seasonal dryness.
• Discontinued use of BHA exfoliant.
• Increased consumption of delicious, delicious wheat.
• Use of battery-powered, rotating face brush for cleansing.

I started to address the second item on the list in Part I, and I'll return to it in a future post. For now, I thought I'd explain what the hell I was talking about with the other three. The thing about wheat probably sounds particularly weird.

First: moisturizer. I don't really think this was a major culprit. The moisturizers I was using didn't contain ingredients that differed much from anything I'd used successfully in the past. Plus, while this could, perhaps, explain an increase in clogged pores, it doesn't explain other problems, like lines/wrinkles.

At any rate, I've scaled way back on the moisturizing, simply because my skin seems to be adapting to the dryness and I don't need as much. That started before I took the other steps described below, and it didn't make much difference in my skin's condition.

Second: The wheat. Okay, here's the thing: my body just has a problem with wheat. I am not gluten-intolerant (I've been tested), but eating wheat does cause issues for me. The main problem is that it severely worsens the inflammation in my joints, which is pretty bad to begin with. I'm not imagining this. Wheat is inflammatory. Plus, I have tested whether or not it has a negative effect on me very extensively, like so: (1) I feel shitty (mainly joint pain in my hands, wrists, and arms - but there are other things too) so I stop eating wheat. (2) I feel dramatically better. (3) Wheat constantly taunts me with its seductive perfection and I begin to forget how shitty I felt when I was eating it. (4) I gradually start incorporating more and more wheat into my diet (bread! pizza! just a little pasta!) until . . . (5) I feel really shitty again. And repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat. At this point it is abundantly clear that wheat hurts me.

So what does this have to do with my skin? I'm not completely positive, but I have a theory that isn't any more sophisticated than this: Wheat is aggravates inflammation (at least for me). Inflammation is bad for the skin (for example, an inflamed, clogged pore = a pimple). Therefore, inflammation caused by eating wheat makes my skin worse.

When Good Skin Goes Bad (or: All About Exfoliants), Part I

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.
This is a detective story, but also a story about the decisions we make when we're broke. It's a long one, so I'll just jump right in. I've never had flawless skin - occasional breakout, etc. - but the last 6 weeks or so it seemed to be getting progressively worse. Not only worse acne, but rougher texture, bigger pores and lines - not a change I was pleased with. There's a photo below, hidden behind the jump for the squeamish. I mean, it's not nasty or anything, but it's also not pretty.

I felt like there had to be something behind this downturn, but these things are hard to figure out, especially when multiple factors had changed roughly the same period, i.e. late December-early January. What exactly was to blame for the mess? These are the possibilities I came up with:

• I'd been moisturizing a lot more, especially before bed. My skin was extra dry from the weather, combined with the horrible dry heat in my apartment. (I mentioned this frustrating change back in November.) Recently, my skin seems to have acclimatized and doesn't feel nearly as parched, so I've cut back on the moisturizing.
• I ran out of my BHA (beta hydroxy acid) exfoliant and didn't replace it, because I felt like it probably wasn't doing much of anything.
• I had been slowly and steadily adding more and more wheat to my diet, despite knowing that it fucks with my body. More on that later.
• I started using one of those battery-powered rotating face brush thingies. I started by using it 1-2 times a week, and then after a few weeks went up to about every second day when my skin kept getting worse.

I'm sure there are other things, but those changes seemed like the most worthwhile ones to consider. The best way to isolate the cause of a problem like this is, of course, to remove/change one suspect at a time and see if anything improves. That can be difficult if you're impatient, and especially if you don't make a connection immediately between skin problems and some kind of behavior. 

In this case, the first thing I decided to do was try some BHA again (mostly because it was simply the first thing that occurred to me). I'd thought that it hadn't been doing much for my skin, but I realized that maybe I was behaving like someone who stops taking their medication when they feel better, even though the medication is the thing that's actually making them feel better. (Or like people who abolish the VRA because it's effective.) I made the decision to try some BHA again at the end of January - and since it was the end of the month, funds were running low. At the same time, I was annoyed enough at my stupid fucking face that I wanted to do something about it immediately.

I had been using Paula's Choice CLEAR Extra Strength Acne Exfoliant. But that shit costs $23 a bottle, and I just didn't have it in my budget before payday. I started browsing Beautypedia to see if there was a decent, but cheaper, option available. I reasoned that if the Paula's Choice version had actually been working for me, then something else they recommended would be likely to work too. 

But holy shit, BHA exfoliants are not cheap, folks. Sure, there are lots of products out there with salicylic acid in them, which is what BHA is, but they're not all exfoliants. BHA has been shown not only to exfoliate the surface of the skin, but also the inside of pores, which is what makes it good for both anti-aging purposes and also acne. (AHA, on the other hand, only does the surface exfoliating, which means it's good if you are sensitive to BHA or have clear skin, but not what I personally needed.) Not every product with BHA will act as an exfoliant, however - it has to have the right pH. 

So I was pleased to find a $7 product that Beautypedia says will work as an exfoliant: Clean & Clear Advantage Oil Absorbing Treatment. You can read what they have to say about it here. Sweet, right? I didn't have to spend $23. If you actually break it down, though, the Clean & Clear option actually costs almost as much per unit as the Paula's Choice exfoliant. It's $7 for 1.5 oz. of the C&C stuff (i.e. $4.67 per oz.) and $23 for 4 oz. of the Paula's Choice product (i.e. $5.75 per oz.). There is a difference there, for sure, but it's not as huge as it seems when you initially consider the full price of each product. It's also important to consider that these two exfoliants are very different in terms of formulation. The C&C one is a cream, while the PC one is a clear liquid. I've found that to cover my entire face with the C&C product, I actually need to use significantly more than I would with the thinner PC liquid. The latter only requires a few drops on a cotton ball (maybe 4-5 drops max), which the C&C cream requires an amount between the size of a nickel and a quarter. (Since it's about the same thickness as shampoo or conditioner, just picture that when I describe it in terms of coins.)

Because of these differences, I think that in terms of actual cost per use, the two products are quite close. The Paula's Choice exfoliant might even come out as being the more economical of the two.

Despite that fact, I ultimately chose to buy the $7 tube instead of the $23 bottle. This is what people mean when they say that it is expensive to be poor. Not that I am claiming extreme poverty, but there are definitely months when I'm living paycheck to paycheck. Anyone who has been in that situation knows that you often have to choose something that has a lesser overall value, because it also represents a lesser immediate investment. These things end up being more expensive over time, but usually you can't do anything about that. I was going to get paid, so I could have waited, but I decided to go with the slightly cheaper immediate gratification and hope it would work as well as the more familiar, but more expensive, option.

Here are my results. First, take a look at my skin before:

Sleeping on your face won't really cause wrinkles (from The Beauty Brains)

Phew.

Ugh

I feel like putting on eyeliner has become a whole different chore in the just the last year.

Be prepared for your fucking 30s, young makeup lovers.

Anti-Aging Myths from Beauty With Brains

Anti-Aging Myths from Beauty With Brains