THE INKEY LIST | SNOW MUSHROOM CREAM

This review was originally part of my blog article titled, My Favorite Humectant Serums From Paula's Choice, The Inkey List, Ghost Democracy and More! You can catch the full piece here.

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Throughout the colder months between October and March, I really struggle with keeping my skin from becoming dry and dehydrated.

In November, I kicked off the annual dry skin season with a pair of articles on the best face creams for dry skin and all skin types in the cold, leading with a piece titled, Winter Moisturizers Part I – Some of the Best Face Creams for Dry Skin and All Skin Types in Cold Weather. A week later, I rounded out my list of the best dry skin moisturizers in Winter Moisturizers Part 2 — available to read here.

In mid-December, I followed those up with a piece on my favorite hydrating face mists titled, Favorite Face Mists For Keeping Skin Hydrated In The Cold – Best Face Mists, Best Hydrating Toners For Dry, Dehydrated Skin.

Richer face creams and hydrating mists are indispensable, essentials in every winter skincare routine. And, at least with the moisturizers, are fairly common. But the one true essential for maintaining skin health in the harsh cold months is a really good humectant product, usually a Hyaluronic Acid serum.

While Hyaluronic Acid is far and away the most popular and most sought-after of humectants, it is by no means the only one. Humectant ingredients that are also effective at preventing trans-epidermal water loss and subsequent dehydration include: Beta Glucan, Butylene Glycol, Centella Asiatica, Polyglutamic Acid, Glycerin, Aloe Vera, Snow Mushroom and even seaweed.

I think it’s just that Hyaluronic Acid was the new, sexy humectant popularized in one-note serums — treatments focused on a single potent active ingredient. Brands like Deciem’s The Ordinary and The Inkey List were founded on ingredient education and super affordable one-note serums. Among the most sought after are The Ordinary’s $6 Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% and the $8 Hyaluronic Acid Serum from The Inkey List — which I include in the line-up below.

Maintaining proper hydration levels year-round is essential if skin is going to function at its peak. Healthy functioning skin is better able to defend against external aggressors like pollution, UV, and free radical attacks. And healthy skin is better fortified against aging. So while it may seem slick to say that a humectant serum that helps keep skin hydrated is an effective anti-aging product, it’s not really a stretch at all.

Dry, dehydrated skin is certainly unhealthy; it can’t behave as it should. You may be asking yourself, as I once did, what the difference is between dry skin and dehydrated skin. Well, permit me to explore those differences.

What’s the difference between dry skin and dehydrated skin?

For the answer to that vexing questing, as I most often do, I turned to the experts on the Paula’s Choice Research Team for insights. There’s a superb piece on the Paula’s Choice site titled, What is Dehydrated Skin & How to Choose the Best Products. Here is an excerpt:

Dehydrated skin often looks and feels like dry skin all over your face, but there's a major difference between the two: dehydrated skin is usually a temporary concern (with various surprising causes) and dry skin typically doesn't change over time. If you have dehydrated skin, your skin may also produce a normal or even excessive amount of oil on its surface.
"Dehydrated skin" is something we’re asked about frequently. It seems there’s a lot of confusion about what this skin concern is about. A major part of the confusion is that the term "dehydrated skin" is often used interchangeably with "dry skin" or "combination skin" but they are not the same! Dehydrated skin can occur in all skin types and is not exclusive to those with dry skin or combination skin.
The Difference Between Dry Skin and Dehydrated Skin
Having classically dry skin is easy to recognize. Dry skin frequently feels tight and dry, with no oil anywhere to be seen. This situation rarely fluctuates; skin feels dry all year long. The dryness might get worse depending on the climate, season, or activity, but regardless of those things, without great skin care products, the uncomfortable dry, tight feeling will persist.
As mentioned above, dehydrated skin can look and feel similar, but there’s a major difference: Dehydrated skin tends to come and go, it does not persist.

With that, let’s take a look at a few of the best humectant serums for keeping skin optimally hydrated day after day…

The Inkey List | Snow Mushroom Cream

And that brings me to perhaps the most intriguing humectant treatment of the collection — The Inkey List’s Snow Mushroom Cream.

Snow Mushroom Cream sounds like something straight out of a fairy tale. Like if Cinderella had shown herself a little more self-love on selfcare Sunday, Snow Mushroom Cream might just be her favorite moisturizer.

In fact, wasn’t Cinderella dead broke? At just under $10, Inkey’s Snow Mushroom Cream is a superb, affordable humectant treatment which relies upon one of the alternative water-binding humectant actives, snow mushroom or tremella fuciformis.

If you haven’t heard or read much about snow mushrooms yet, it’s relatively new to me too. There’s a lot of great reading about the mysterious ingredient online.

I’m not particularly wowed by exotic sounding ingredients in skin care — but if the ingredient works, I’m down.

Wait. What? “With its capacity for locking in moisture, snow mushroom in skincare products is about to replace hyaluronic acid as the gold-standard.”

Wow, that’s a high bar. And it’s something to look forward to. In the meantime, Inkey’s Snow Mushroom Cream is ahead of the trend. With a relatively limited ingredient list — comprising 15 ingredients in all — it’s got a thick, translucent gel texture. It’s not watery and doesn’t absorb instantly like a more watery humectant serum.

What does snow mushroom do for skin?

I found a really interesting article on The Zoe Report called, Snow Mushroom Skincare Products Could Replace All Your Hyaluronic Acid Serums. From the article:

“Mushrooms are having what’s known as A Moment. The antioxidant-filled fungi are suddenly everywhere: Chaga and cordyceps mushrooms have made their way into adaptogenic smoothie supplements, powdered lion’s mane mushrooms are today’s healthiest alternative to coffee, and reishi mushrooms are the star ingredient in skincare products like Youth to the People’s Adaptogenic Moisture Cream.
But the latest ‘shroom on the block, snow mushroom, is arguably the best yet. With its capacity for locking in moisture, snow mushroom in skincare products is about to replace hyaluronic acid as the gold-standard.”

Snow Mushroom Cream is deceptively rich and quite a high-performance moisturizer with two of the most common humectants in skin care, Butylene Glycol and Glycerin alongside emollient, water-binding Lecithin. There are no added antioxidants in the formula — again, it’s quite simply focused on locking water and moisture in the skin to prevent dehydration.

Back to that assertion that Snow Mushroom has the humectant power of Hyaluronic Acid, the Zoe Report also reported this: “In a laboratory, hyaluronic acid can hold 1000 times its weight in water, and snow mushroom can hold 500 times its weight,” Dr. Tanuj Nakra, co-founder of AVYA Skincare, tells The Zoe Report. “However, snow mushroom’s gelatinous molecules are smaller than that of hyaluronic acid, so they penetrate the skin much better — leading to more noticeable, real-world results.”

Seriously, Cinderella would love it!

SHOP THE BLOG: Purchase The Inkey List Snow Mushroom Cream for $9.99 here.

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