Another day, another Etat Pur rave! Whilst their Salicylic Acid will never replace my beloved Citric Acid, I’ve had to start using this as an alternative to the CA as you’re not supposed to use it everyday. Therefore, every other night this concentrated active gets used in place of the Citric version.
I’ve never been too much of a fan of Salicylic Acid products as they’ve never really done much for my skin. I realise that this ingredient alone has a huge following and lots of Doctors and Dermatologists recommend it’s use for treating spot-prone skin, yet I’ve used several products that lead with this as their main ingredient and they’ve never really blown my mind.
I was soooo reluctant to stop using the Citric Acid on a nightly basis (read my full review of it here) but I was worried my skin would build up a tolerance to it (as it often does to many products unfortunately) so after around 2 weeks of using the CA nightly, I started mixing it up and alternating it with the SA.
Using it as a nightly treatment I wouldn’t say it’s as good as the CA and nothing struck me as particularly amazing at first. It certainly wasn’t making my skin any worse and I kind of felt like it was maintaining the work the CA did rather than offering anything great itself.
However, when this really came into it’s own was over the weekend when I had a facial. Whenever I have salon facials I always breakout afterwards as my skin is really rather fussy about what it will and won’t tolerate, and inevitably in any salon facial there’ll be at least one product that’ll wind my skin up. Therefore I’ve come to accept this as an after effect of facials and I put up with it for the longer term effects facials have on my skin.
The day after my facial I developed a couple of cystic spots overnight and around 3-4 on-the-skin pimples. As I was having a PJ day I decided to give the Salicylic Acid a go as a spot treatment and applied it when I got up. You can either use this all over the face, or target it to breatout-prone areas. I then applied it again around lunch time and by the afternoon the pimples had shrunk considerably and the cysts were feeling a lot less tender. I then proceeded to apply this every 2-3 hours for the rest of the day and the next day you could barely tell I’d broken out. The pimples were ready to fall off (bleurgh) and the cysts were considerably reduced and barely noticeable.
If you consider that this was really just 24 hours of treating, I think it’s pretty impressive. I’ve always accepted spots as having a minimum of 3 days life, but now I have pure SA in my kit I can really work at getting rid of them as quickly as possible before an event. Pretty fab, don’t you think?
So in conclusion, this is another Etat Pur product that’ll be regularly repurchased to keep my breakouts to a minimum and treat my hormonal or post-facial spots.
Etat Pur’s Salicylic Acid (S) is available from their website here for £12.20.
Salicylic acid is really good for calming down irritated skin. That’s what it does, it doesn’t necessarily cure acne.
What you can do after you finish this bottle, is use a much cheaper alternative.
You can dissolve a tabled of aspirin into a few drops of water. After that you mix it with honey or yogurt and apply as a mask for 10 minutes or so. I used honey which has a hydrating effect as well and yogurt seemed to irritate my skin.
Also if you want to try this don’t exfoliate before or after.
I used this mask to calm down my skin a couple of times a week when I had severe acne and really red skin.
Thanks very much Diana. The problem with this approach, from my understanding, is that the use of Aspirin in pill form as a cosmetic is quite risky, and whilst I know that quite a few people swear by it, it’s technically an uncontrolled dose which I personally think is not a good idea as you don’t know how much your skin is absorbing. At least using a pre-formulated treatment guarantees that these sort of issues have already been tested. Thanks very much for the tip though! xx
Thanks for blogging about this particular brand (I havent seen it on any other blogs) I have ordered a couple of products from them as although I have used the acid marks with these ingrediants I like the idea of a milder concentrate that I can use everyday. I am VERY prone to spots along the jawline so this was one of the products I ordered.
Hi Jessica,
That’s exactly where I get the spots too; not fun! I’m definitely a big fan of both this and the Citric Acid as I do believe they’ve made a huge difference to my skin without drying it out. If you have the time, I’d love to hear what you think when your products arrive xx