The Face and Body shop in Grotton answers your health and beauty questions
Send in your health and body questions for their experts to answer, email: aimee@saddind.co.uk or write to: Health and Beauty, 5 Kinders Crescent, Greenfield, Saddleworth, Oldham OL3 7JQ.
Find The Face and Body Shop at 283 Oldham Road in Grotton or call them on: 0161 627 1114. You can also visit their website.
Q. I recently bought the Clarins Double Serum after my therapist recommended it. I raved about it so much that a friend of mine bought it too. She bought hers via a cosmetics retailer on the internet for £10 less. When it arrived I had a look at it and it smells completely different to mine. I told her not to use it as it might not be real. What would you recommend?
A. You are absolutely right and have done your friend a service in advising her not to use it.
The purchase of skincare over the internet is a risky business. Unless you are purchasing directly from the manufacturer’s website you cannot be sure the product is the genuine article.
What you also won’t get is the one-to-one advice and expertise of a beauty consultant like you do in salon. You are just guessing that what sounds nice in the description and has an impressive list of ingredients will be right for you – and you can so very often be wrong. Then there is a lengthy process to return it, if they will let you do so at all.
Third party retailers of skincare over the internet are a real threat to your skin – they are not regulated and are generally not selling genuine products.
They are, in most cases, skilled in recreating the packaging and logos but the products inside could be anything at all and as a result could be potentially harmful, causing sensitivity, skin reactions, burns etc.
It is also common to find discontinued and out of date products on such sites. I actually found a site selling a product that was discontinued five years ago and at the time of manufacture only had a shelf life of three years, meaning this product was a minimum of two years out of date. The active ingredients would have broken down and would be useless – a complete waste of money and the potential to cause a reaction.
I would strongly advise that your friend contact the seller and try to return the product, and purchase the product from a registered stockist, where she can be 100 per cent certain she is getting what she paid for.
As a Clarins Gold Salon we run the Clarins For Me scheme where you can save between 10 to 20 per cent on Clarins and claim free products when you have saved enough points. We also have regular gift with purchase promotions where you receive extra goodies and gifts.
Your skin is too important to take a chance for the sake of a small saving. Remember if something seems too good to be true, then it usually is.
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