Elizabeth Pugh

Somebody with very good skin told you the French one was worth it. That is usually how this starts. They said it with total confidence, their face backed them up, and now you are standing in an aisle holding two bottles and quietly doing sums about the difference between them. So: you are a college

It is late. The pharmacy closed hours ago, the bottle is open on the side, and you have already used it once. That is usually when this question gets typed into a phone. So: you are a pregnant woman, and you want to know whether Nivea products are safe compared to Burt’s Bees or Mustela.

There is a jar on your bathroom shelf that you bought some time in the spring. It is about two-thirds gone. Every morning since then it has been working, or not working, and you have no idea which. That is not carelessness on your part. It is the nature of the thing. You have been

There is a particular twenty seconds that only some people know about. You have put something new on your face, and now you are standing at the mirror doing nothing at all, waiting to find out whether this one is going to be fine. Sometimes nothing happens and you forget about it. Sometimes there is

Nivea Men has been on the same supermarket shelf since before you started shaving. Blue and white, third shelf down, somewhere near the deodorant. You have walked past it a few hundred times without once thinking about it. Bulldog is on the shelf beside it and looks like it was designed this decade. Different typeface,

Two baskets at the same checkout. The first one holds a cleanser and a tub of moisturizer. Two things. Whoever is carrying it has bought CeraVe, and they are finished with skincare shopping until roughly Christmas. The second holds a serum, an exfoliating acid, a moisturizer, a bottle of something with niacinamide in it, and

There is a tub of petroleum jelly in most bathrooms in the country, usually near the back, usually older than anyone can account for. It costs almost nothing, it never seems to run out, and half the people who own one are not entirely sure what it is for. Which brings us to the question

You are standing in front of the shelf. Blue tin in one hand, green bottle in the other, and both of them look perfectly reasonable. You have probably already typed some version of it into your phone: I’m a skincare beginner, is Nivea a good starting brand compared to Garnier? So here is the honest