Best affordable beauty buys of 2024
Time for some skincare reviews. Here’s a guide to my top four affordable beauty buys of the last 12 months, and there should be something for most people in here.
It includes serums, moisturisers and body products, and the lower-priced companies are giving us good value for money. The cheapest thing I recommend here is £5.00 and the most I’ve paid for anything is £21.70, to give you an idea of the budget range.
There are also a few PG’s Tips in here to help you find the best offers and discounts, so they’re even more competitively priced.
Oh, plus there’s a review one of the worst serums I’ve ever tried. If I hadn’t done a proper patch test it might have taken longer to realise it was this product causing all the trouble.
Bubble Skincare Water Slide Hydration Boosting Serum | RRP £18.00
Bubble Skincare’s latest serum is a very nicely designed hydrating serum with plenty of beneficial ingredients, plus a few extras. They say it’s for all ages and skin types, although I’d definitely patch test first if you have any acne-prone areas because I do think it’s probably best for dry, normal, combination and mature skin.
This mighty serum contains water binding ingredients such as glycerin, saccharide isomerate, tremella mushroom extract, two forms of hyaluronic acid, and aloe vera. It also has moisturisers including squalane, prickly pear seed oil, shea butter and other fatty acids. Plus there’s niacinamide, Vitamin E, peptides, and two ceramides.
It applies smoothly, it’s gentle and fragrance free, and it sinks in quickly. I love it for an extra boost under moisturiser during the winter, and it hasn’t broken me out. The packaging is more aimed at teens and I think it looks a bit bulky, but to be fair it is clean and hygenic. The TikTok hype for this stuff is genuinely justified (and that’s something you can hardly ever say).
FIND AT >> Beauty Bay or Boots.
PG’s Tips: Both of these shops have regular offers, especially near payday weekends most months. Cheaper alternatives include Simple Hyaluronic Acid + B5 Booster Serum (£9.99, for drier skin types), The Ordinary Hyaluronic Acid 2% + B5 Serum Original Formulation (£7.30, for acne-prone or oily skin), and Byoma Hydrating Serum (£12.99, for people who don’t get on with hyaluronic acid).
The INKEY List Bio-Active Ceramide Moisturiser | RRP £19.00 (£14.00)
Or, to give this its full name, Bio-Active Ceramide Repairing and Plumping Moisturiser. I’ve mostly been using it on my neck and cheeks at night during the colder winter months, as this skin tends to be drier and more sensitive, and the texture’s lovely. It regularly turns up in offers that bring the price down too.
Ingredients include several effective moisturising agents (emollients and humectants) and a ceramide. Despite the over-the-top name it does not contain umpteen high-dose active ingredients, but it does make a good final skincare step. It cannot ‘lift’ sagging skin, no moisturiser can do this, but most people will get a slight plumping effect after a few weeks’ use.
It’s nice and smooth to apply, a little goes a long way, and it’s rich and hydrating without being too greasy. NB: Some of the visible effect is from a general moisturising and soothing of the skin, but it also contains Granisil Blur which has a light-diffusing cosmetic effect that temporarily camouflages fine lines.
FIND AT >> The INKEY List, Boots, LookFantastic, Sephora, Cult Beauty.
PG’s Tips: This regularly turns up in offers, so stock up when there’s a deal. You can save even more by joining the Inkey Insiders for free, which lets you earn discount points and get the occasional sample to try.
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The INKEY List Glycolic Acid Exfoliating Body Stick | RRP £15.00 (£13.50)
Lots of affordable brands have been launching body products containing actives, and I think this is my favourite of them all because of the unique texture. The main ingredients are 7% glycolic acid, an effective chemical surface exfoliant, and 10% shea butter, a moisturising ingredient. There’s also 0.5% salicyclic acid, an exfoliant which can get deeper down into pores, although this isn’t an especially high concentration so it’s more of a ‘nice to have.’
It can be used on dry, cracked skin such as on the heels or elbows, rough and bumpy skin on the upper arms and hips (including keratosis pilaris, or KP bumps), ingrown hairs, blocked pores or breakouts on chest or shoulders, and discoloured areas such as underarm and bikini line hyperpigmentation. Just rub the stick over the clean, dry areas you’d like to treat – no need to rub it in, or wash it off.
Expect to use it for a few weeks before it takes full effect, and remember to use sunscreen before sun exposure. I’ve been using it for a few weeks on my heels, knees and ankles for smoother skin, and on a small area of post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation on one of my legs. It works! The 45g stick lasts me for months too, so it works out quite good value for money.
FIND AT >> The Inkey List, Boots, Cult Beauty, LookFantastic (& many more).
PG’s Tips: Widely available, so at least one of the retailers will have a money-off deal of some sort. If you can’t find a discount, it can work out cheaper to buy a twin pack from The Inkey List.
Facetheory Sensitive Clarifying Serum | RRP £31.00 (£21.70)
For starters let me just say that I’ve never paid full price for this, I always wait until they have their 30%-off deals, which brings it to a more affordable £21.70. I ended up buying it in desperation after a different product wrecked my skin during the summer, and it basically does what it says on the tin (well, the bottle, but you know what I mean.)
This is an oil-free serum with Sodium Retinoyl Hyaluronate, a gentle retinoic and hyaluronic acid ester, for blemish-prone and congested skin. As usual with Facetheory you get a lot more in it than one active ingredient, so it also contains niacinamide, gentle Vitamin C, a little lactic acid, and soothing ingredients such as dill extract, liquorice root extract and two types of beta-glucan.
It’s very gentle yet effective, and is designed to respect the skin barrier while calming and clearing the skin. The antioxidants and the retinoid should also give a modest anti-ageing effect to most people, so it could be tried as a ‘starter’ retinoid too, if you’re thinking about building up to stronger products later. There’s also a 365-day guarantee where Facetheory will refund you if a product doesn’t work for your skin.
FIND AT >> Facetheory.
PG’s Tips: New customers can get 30% off their order at Facetheory, just wait for the discount popup to appear on screen, and sign up to their mailing list to be sent a discount code (you can unsubscribe at any time). There are regular offers available for all customers, including 10% off with Subscribe&Save, bundle deals and sales.
And now for the one skincare product launched in 2024 that absolutely, definitely did not work for me… yes, the skin-wrecker I mentioned earlier. Here we go…
The Ordinary Balancing & Clarifying Serum | RRP £20.20
I picked a bottle of this much-hyped product up at the height of summer, in the hope of having a less shiny t-zone. It’s one of their most expensive products and, on paper at least, the ingredients list looked like it had a lot of potential. There are various things in it that promise to hydrate and reduce oil production.
As usual, I patch tested this new product very carefully. For a few weeks I used it only on the lower right hand side of my face, so I could compare it against an untreated patch of skin. And I had a huge breakout which was worse than anything I’d experienced as a teenager, confined exclusively to the lower right hand side of my face. It wasn’t a skin purging reaction either, because it didn’t go away.
While some people have given this serum rave reviews, I can honestly say that it wrecked my skin. Maybe it was a bad batch, maybe I had some kind of rare reaction to one of the ingredients. Who knows? Everyone’s different, and it might work for some people, but definitely not for me.
PG’s Tips: On the other hand, I find their 10% Niacinamide and 1% Zinc PCA serum, which is much cheaper at £5.00 for 30ml, works just fine for the same purpose.
Full disclosure: All products bought with my own money, no PR samples. This is my honest opinion, which can occasionally be a bit too honest.
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As always, everyone’s skin is different and I really recommend reading the instructions carefully and doing a proper patch test with any product before regular use. Safety first and all that.
