of Faces and Fingers: La Mer

Creme De La Mer is one of those iconic products in the beauty industry everyone's heard of. It is legendary, and the very definition of a cult product, and is often claimed to be a "miracle broth" that miraculously somehow helps in anti-aging. Despite its outrageously high price, or perhaps because of it, the buzz around this product is high - celebrities are said to use it, lots of blog reviews can be found raving about it, and those who spend the money on it claim that it definitely does work. It is the one and only Creme De La Mer, after all, and it is so unique that nothing can come close to it, and there aren't any products like it - or are there?

Creme De La Mer: A legendary product, with legendary hype (Source)

You guys know that I get pretty skeptical of such claims. It has been said that the humble ol' Nivea Creme is a dupe for Creme De La Mer - but of course, if you search the Internets, you'll find people saying that they don't see a difference between the two, and you'll also find tons of people who say that the La Mer version is still much better, and the plain ol' Nivea can't compare.

So with that said and done, let’s examine the Creme de La Mer more closely, and find out what exactly is in this "miracle broth". From there, we can figure out how the product works, and then, see if there are any dupes for it, or if not dupes, perhaps similar products. And the only way to begin this process is to get down and dirty with the Creme De La Mer ingredients list!

Edited to Add: Due to shady dealings by the skincare-addiction.com website owners and previous subreddit owners, I can no longer recommend the skincare-addiction.com website. I've edited this post to remove all SCA links, and have republished the Creme De La Mer Dupes post here on my own blog instead.

I've recently been asked to contribute an article (or a few articles, depending on what I feel like) to the Skincare Addiction blog, which in turn is a blog written by and for the /r/SkincareAddiction subreddit. My guest post, "Skincare Dupes and Analysis: Creme De La Mer" is up on the SkincareAddiction blog. It's got my usual ingredients analysis, and some skincare science thrown in! So my skincare geekery is hanging out on that post in full force!

My first SCA blogpost is on skincare dupes for Creme de La Mer (Image source)

When the SkincareAddiction people approached me to write a post, I readily agreed, because skincare science was right up my alley, and I always love exchanging views and interacting with such people. (Coincidentally, I had just gotten a Reddit account at the time and was a lurker on the SkincareAddiction subreddit, as well as a few other beauty-related subreddits - because I'm creative like that, my Reddit username is also musicalhouses.) They were open to whatever I wanted to write, and stylistically, their blog accommodated quite a few different writing styles. In fact, other than standardizing things like formatting, my blog post was published as-is.

For this post though, rather than just do a "go read my post! XOXOXOXO" and a link and that's it, I thought I'd explain how we can find skincare dupes through ingredients analysis. I've been getting some questions from real-life friends and acquaintances on how you can find skincare dupes (or if not dupes, similar products) through ingredients analysis and ingredients comparisons of skincare products, so I thought I'd just outline what exactly we're doing when we do ingredients analysis below. So read on if you're interested, or if not, go ahead and find out what La Mer dupes there are. (You can also view the accompanying thread on Reddit with more comments from readers and responses from yours truly.)