Whenever I try a product by Dr Barbara Sturm I am impressed enough to make a mental note to write about the brand more often, but then life carries on and I forget. I am way past the age of mental notes: if it’s not written down, it’s gone. Also, these products are not cheap. Sometimes products aren’t cheap because the expense is supposed to reassure you that you’re not buying a dud: if it costs a lot, it must be amazing, right? Nope.
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But sometimes they aren’t cheap because they are really good, and happily that is the situation here. The skincare — or at least the skincare I’ve tried from Dr Barbara Sturm — is fantastic. There’s one called Super Anti-Aging Face Cream (£225, drsturm.com) that I recommend in particular.
But today we’re here for one of the brand’s greatest hits: Glow Drops (£125, drsturm.com). This is a skincare/make-up hybrid, in this case a complexion enhancer of genius, a glow-boosting hydrator that has anti-ageing properties and a pore refiner. Terms like “pore refiner” usually make me do derisive snorts, but in this instance there’s something in it. Your pores aren’t going to shrink — a physical impossibility — but mine are sort of glossed over flatteringly when I use this. They are certainly less obvious. Although really the amount of time people spend fretting over pores would be better spent reading a good novel. We all have pores and nobody likes theirs: very sad, but there we are.
Skincare capabilities aside — I’m not dismissing them, but all you need to know is that they’re there and they work — what I really love about Glow Drops is the way they immediately make your skin look. They are an unpromisingly bright white liquid that comes in a little bottle with a glass dropper. You only need a few drops. You can use them on a bare face, on top of moisturiser (my preferred option) or on top of make-up, and what they do is make you look truly, genuinely, convincingly radiant. Not crazy radiant, not “Here I come with my big sparkly face”, but rather “Hi, I have great skin”. This remains true even if you aren’t wearing a scrap of anything else on your face.
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Now, every other product promises radiance, from highlighting powders to primers to foundations and blush. What they actually deliver is high shine — a sort of spray-glossed, slightly wet-looking shimmer effect that is certainly effective but quite hard to wear in daily life (having said that, I love Rare Beauty’s Luminous Blush, though make sure you apply it with whatever the opposite of abandon is).
I don’t want a shiny face, or a very faintly shimmering one, or one that looks a bit damp. I want the sort of face you get from using a decent vitamin C serum every day — the kind of radiance that looks like good lighting, makes skin glow with health and is very obviously not down to make-up. And that’s exactly what Glow Drops provides. It’s the sheen of good health, bottled, but is so natural-looking that there is no way on God’s green earth that anyone would ever think it came out of a bottle, even in bright sunlight with magnifying glasses on. There’s nothing artificial-looking about the results whatsoever.
If your face looks a bit dull, as in tired or weary, this will sort it. If your skin looks good, this will make it look better. It is a fantastic product. Don’t be panicked by the whiteness if you have darker skin — it’s fine and it will work. You need at least half a pipette’s worth (the brand says one whole one) to see the effect. Also pat in rather than rub it in, and give it a minute if you’re putting anything on top.
India loves
Read I was desperate for Abir Mukherjee to produce a new Wyndham and Bannerjee book (a treat if you’ve not read them) and slightly annoyed to discover he’d written a standalone thriller instead. But Hunted (Harvill Secker £14.99) is so good: skintight plotting and a twisting storyline. All this, plus politics (a total goon is about to be elected US president) and trenchant commentary on race, gender and lazy assumption. It’s unputdownable. PS: the audiobook is shockingly bad — read rather than listen.
