BEAUTY: active serums can deliver stunning results for your skin

Actives are skin saviours, and identifying your hero can make your shopping more simple and your purchases more potent. Vicki Bramley explains how.

The latest in skincare, single active serums, can deliver results that are nothing short of stunning, with no impossible promises. They come in lab-style bottles with simple labels listing the active ingredients inside. Wherever you shop – Priceline, Myer, Mecca – there are shelves lined with everything from AHAs to zinc. They are upfront, potent, empower us to pick and mix our own favourites and can be surprisingly affordable.

And yet, they’re still utterly baffling, unless you know what to look for.

New brand The Inkey List helps demystify actives with dictionary-style information on the box, right down to pronunciation. Skin coaching is also becoming a popular service: former Brisbane nurse, microbiologist and university lecturer, Dr Michele Squire, turned her passion for cutting through confusing jargon into a consultancy (from $80 at qr8list.com). Clients seek her out when they’re disappointed with the return on their skincare spends, or have no time to waste in turning their skin around.

“The move to actives has allowed us take control of our skincare. These products have a beautiful place for those that know what they’re doing and want to add something to their current skincare regimen,” says Dr Squire. “For others, it adds to the confusion about what to choose and how to layer. Remember, it takes multiple actives working on different pathways to make a dramatic difference to your skin.”

For the uninitiated, an active is a skincare ingredient that has been shown to change the skin. You may have seen them in your anti-ageing cream. The allure of single active serums is that you can buy exactly what you want (such as retinol for fine lines) in a high concentration, without the extras you don’t want (pretty packaging and superfluous actives). Essentially, you’re buying what once was the hero ingredient in a little bottle of its own.

If you’re a happy cherry picker (you use a bit of this and a bit of that) or you love a shelf crammed with serums to play with, then this is the skincare for you. Oily complexions will appreciate the light formulas that pack a punch. And anyone who’s breaking up with their current skincare can try a new active affordably, with many from brands like The Ordinary and The Inkey List slipping under the $20 mark.

However, there’s an art to using single active serums to guarantee your skin gets all they can give. The first thing you need to know is which actives match your skin goals.