As you know, I’m a bit of a sucker for beauty products so I was keen to try the NIOD range. NIOD, which stands for Non-Invasive Options in Dermal Science, is a Canadian company which seems to have taken a fresh look at the whole beauty conundrum and is approaching the main issues at a slant. It’s already had a lot of press from fashionable types, raving about the way its products work.
With dehydration, the core problem for ageing skins, NIOD’s approach is not to slather oil on top of the face to mask the problem but to attempt to lock in the skin’s own moisture instead. Does this work? Who knows. As with all beauty products, it’s ultimately a losing game. Skin loses elasticity, wrinkles form, it’s all downhill, basically. You know the score.
OK, so we may all be on a one way journey to old age, but I personally like to rearrange the deckchairs on my own HMS Titanic quite frequently. I ordered NIOD from the Victoria Health website and it arrived very quickly and was beautifully packaged. The NIOD range itself is wonderfully stark and medical looking, and I always love a pipette. So I was excited to see that the Copper Amino Isolate Serum comes with one and also involves a bit of home chemistry – you have to mix the activator into the serum bottle and shake before use. Love it! Though I was confused when I noticed a watery blue liquid on my hands – I thought the dye was coming out of the bottle label, even though the label is white. In fact, the watery blue liquid is the product itself. It’s unlike anything I’ve used before, in that, given half a chance, it will run straight off your face. You need to apply it with care as it is extremely liquid and hard to control. Apparently this makes the ingredients more active? After some trial and error, I recommend tipping up your face and dripping the solution on – carefully – from the pipette, then swiftly patting it into the skin. On the company website, it suggests putting the solution into your palm and then dabbing on.
The advice is to use the CAIS twice a day, before using any acid-based toners (which sound horrible – I don’t use a toner and swear by the Sali Hughes method of basically washing your face with a flannel, which gives a thorough cleanse and exfoliates as well). I then use my normal moisturiser – at the moment either Clinique’s new improved Dramatically Different Plus, or the Apivita cream gel, both of which have been reasonably light for the summer. I might invest in the NIOD next step, which is either the Hydration Vaccine, which locks in the skin’s own moisture, or the Multi-Molecular Hyaluronic Complex, which sounds wonderfully scientific.
But does the CAIS actually work? As with all these products, it’s hard to tell, but I would say my skin feels very soft and I have some rosacea bumps which come up sporadically which now seem to have disappeared – this is a big plus. All the usual lines are still there, but there are no new ones – that’s good. I wouldn’t say I have lost 20 years. But I’ve only been using it a few days. And do I want to lose 20 years anyway? Those were good years.
The other NIOD product I’ve been trying in the meantime is the Photography Fluid. I’ve read a clutch of rave reviews of this, most saying that they’ve eschewed a lifetime of foundation after trying it and are now besieged with compliments night and day. Of course I was hugely looking forward to this, but in fact I got a very nice compliment the day before I started using the Fluid and haven’t had one since. Mind you, it’s only been five days. I’ve just recently taken to using a bit of foundation, and it’s soley to act as a sun defence layer after having melanoma. I tried various sun screens that made me look quite ghostly so decided to mix screen with a bit of foundation and that seems to work. One of the selling points of the Photography Fluid is that you can mix it with other products to ‘correct hue’, which is just what I was after.
The product, on initial inspection, is the opposite of the CAIS – it is extremely gloopy. It looks a bit like those highly pearlised nail varnishes that were all the rage briefly in the 1970s. I was a bit doubtful about the effect this would produce on my face, but adding a scant drop to everything does, indeed, produce a bit of a misty glow which I rather like. I hope it looks natural. I haven’t had any comments yet – even from Child One who is usually highly observant – but my skin feels quite cushiony and I rather like it. I’ll keep you posted.
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