Beauty bible

Skincare oils that help you brave the elements

Celia Walden is converted – and now loves skin oils

I’ VE BEEN A BIT LATE to the party with lipids. It took me far longer than anyone else to accept that fat doesn’t make you fat (I’m still slightly scared of avocados), and until last year I was convinced that facial oils would turn me into Kevin the Teenager overnight. Yes, those little frosted vials of lemon yellow and pastel pink looked lovely on the shelves of French pharmacies, and a few made it on to my bathroom shelves purely for that reason, but I wasn’t about to risk putting any on my skin.

Then came the great dermal drought of late 2016 – caused by a combination of wintry weather, heating, pollution and a particularly vicious glycolic exfoliator I will not be recommending in this column (you know who you are). My best friend assured me that a few drops of Pai organic rosehip oil on facial-g ade clean skin wouldn’t result in me looking like the turkey tray at the end of Christmas Day, and boom! How in the name of all that’s greasy had I made it through four decades on this arid little planet without these lipid lovelies?

Discovering a whole new family of products to try out is about as exciting as the realisation that hey, you can wear a jumpsuit without looking like a British Gas engineer from the 1940s, and after a frenzy of experimentation – everything from the Boots Botanics nourishing facial oil (luxurious smelling and fast-absorbing) to the Danishborn, New York-based make-up artist Kirsten Kjær Weis’s wonder product, The Beautiful Oil, via a selection of oilbased cleansers (Eve Lom’s Gel Balm Cleanser and Clinique’s Take The Day Off Cleansing Oil are two of the best) – I had the whole oil thing taped.

You don’t need to spend a lot (Waitrose’s Pure Hydration Facial Oil is only £2.50 and perfect for sensitive skin), and you can either add a drop or two to your moisturiser when your skin’s parched, or use it – still sparingly – on its own. But the best ones shouldn’t leave your skin feeling slippery: just hydrated, protected and primed for make-up.