SheerSkin Ultra Healing Propolis Serum Review
The serum comes in a very neutral-looking 30ml glass bottle with a handy pump-applicator. It is easy to dose, as 1x pumping gives you exatcly the right amount of product for your whole face, and the most hygienic container-type that is possible. If you are looking for the fancy Korean cosmetic packings, you won't find it here. SheerSkin products are very medical-looking, like something you might find in a pharmacy.
Propolis is a mixture which bees collect from various botanical sources and use as a sealant for unwanted open spaces in the hive. It is known to have various health-benefiting usages such as immunomodulator, antimicrobial, emollient, treatment for allergies and abscesses or antioxidant. It has anti-inflammatory effects and helps skin heal.
Sometimes so-called "natural" skin care products list certain plant extracts as active ingredients, but when you look at the ingredient list, you might notice that the product usually contains below 1% of said ingredient. However, the SheerSkin Ultra Healing Propolis Serum contains 10% of propolis, which is quite a lot.
The serum is a kind of liquid gel without any strong color. It looks a bit yellowish in the bottle, but you don't notice it anymore once you use it. It has a faint scent, which I cannot quite place correctly. It doesn't smell artificial and once the product is on my face I cannot smell it anymore.
So, how did it work for me?
Obviously here is no immediate miracle change overnight, but after a week I could see that a lot of the redness on my face was reduced, and that infected pimples healed faster than they would usually do. Despite the slight oily texture I also did not get more breakouts than usual. This is one of the problems I have with products for sensitive skin: My skin is a horrid mixture of sensitive skin, extremely oily skin and full of breakouts. Products for sensitive skin usually make my skin oilier and cause more breakouts, while products for troubled skin cause rashes and sometimes also even more breakouts. Of course this product was not able to reduce my normal amount of breakouts - I still got them like usual, but at least they healed faster, especially the very infected ones.
For my reddish and infected skin this serum was really good and I would recommend it to everyone who is suffering from overly sensitive skin. If you have multiple different skin problems, like I do, this product alone will not be enough though. I did not post any before-after photos here, because for every pimple the serum helped healing on my skin, I continued to get my normal new pimples each day, so the state of my skin looked pretty similar even after using this product.
You can get this product from Cosmetic-Love here.
Reduces redness and makes infections heal faster
English ingredient list
SheerSkin Goodbye Trouble Clear Serum Review
Since I also got the SheerSkin Goodbye Trouble Clear Serum for troubled skin from Cosmetic-Love I decided to try using the healing serum in the morning and the trouble serum at night to see whether combined they would be able to have a positive effect on all my skin troubles.This serum is supposed to be a hypo-allergenic serum for sensitive skin and is supposed to help against troubled skin and provide sebum control as well as pore care. A product that is supposed to help troubled skin, but at the same time was designed for sensitive skin is a combination that is rare to find and just the right thing for my skin.
About the ingredients all I know is that, just like with all other SheerSkin products, they are supposed to be mostly plant extracts. Whatever is in it, it has a really heavy scent. I could not find any information on whether it is in the product, but the scent reminds me a lot of Calendula (Marigold) extract and I am really not fond if it. Worse of all is that the serum is not one of the products that only smells in the bottle and you do not notice anything of the scent anymore minutes after putting it on, but that the scent stays on you for a really long time. For me it takes over an hour before I stop noticing the scent and since I don't like it, it is not the most pleasant hour for me. However, tastes in scent are very different and I can imagine that there might be people who don't mind the scent as it is still a natural/herbal one.
The serum looks a bit yellow-shaded in the bottle, but more like a ccompletely clear liquid once applied on your skin. Just like the Ultra Healing Serum it leaves a slightly sticky feeling and takes a while to get fully absorbed by your skin.
So, how did it work for me?
I had almost hoped that it would not work for me because of the scent, but, yeah, it actually worked! Usually I get new pimples every single day, but whenever I used this I had significant less new pimples and my skin looked better after only a short time of using this! The only thing were it could not really help me was when I got my period and my skin exploded like usual.
Even though this serum is also supposed to calm skin and reduce scars, I did not feel like its heeling effect was as great as with the Ultra Healing serum and spots I already had took just as long as usual to fade away.
Overall I am pleasantly surprised, because most of the time any kind of skin care products for troubled skin don't show any effect at all, or need to be used for weeks before any kind of effect is visible (and then, with the ups and downs of my skin it is always hard to tell whether the improvement actually happened because of a certain product), but with this serum I could see an effect pretty fast. My skin is still far from being perfect, but this serum helped me a lot to get it out of the really catastrophic condition it was in.
Takes a while to get absorbed