Shopper's Guide•Skin & Grooming

6 signs your skin needs more than a moisturizer

Summary: I bought a better moisturizer three times before it occurred to me that the moisturizer wasn't the problem. Here are the six things I'd been reading as normal, and what they actually pointed at.

Here's all 6 👇

1. It feels tight an hour after you wash it

That tightness isn't cleanliness, it's the barrier telling you it's lost more than it can replace. I'd been reading it as a sign the face wash was working, which is exactly backwards.

2. Moisturizer stopped lasting the day

It used to hold until evening and then it was a mid-afternoon job. When the same product starts needing reapplication, the product didn't change — what it's sitting on did.

3. You look fine in the mirror and tired in photos

The mirror is forgiving and a camera is not. If every photo of you looks flatter and greyer than you feel, that's texture and tone, and no amount of standing closer to the mirror fixes it.

4. You keep adding products and not results

The shelf grows, the outcome doesn't. At some point the honest read is that the thing you're missing isn't a fourth bottle sitting on the surface.

5. It's worse every winter, and slightly worse each year

A bad February is normal. A worse February than last February, three years running, is a trend. That was the pattern that made me stop treating it as weather.

6. Barrier is the word you're actually missing

Ceramides are the lipids holding that barrier together. Superglow uses plant-derived ceramides you drink, plus collagen peptides, hyaluronic acid, vitamin C and biotin — every amount printed and third-party tested.