THE ORDINARY | AZELAIC ACID SUSPENSION 10%

This product review was originally part of my blog article titled, A Complete Oily Skin Routine from The Ordinary – Best Niacinamide Serum for Oily Skin, Best Oily Skin Mask with Salicylic Acid. You can catch the full piece here.

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As summer winds down here in New York City, I look forward to fall — my favorite season with its sweater weather. I can’t wait to get the hoodies out! Before those days begin to seep in, I look back on July and August with a range of mixed feelings.

I love a warm, pleasant day like everyone. Sure we’ve had our share of them; but we’ve also had a few unbearable scorchers — days when it was so hot and humid that I could be mistaken for believing I had oily skin again.

Truth be told, I haven’t suffered from legitimately oily skin since my early 20s. But when I’m sweating it out on a 90-degree subway platform in July awaiting the 4-train to the Bronx, trust me, I’m a greasy mess. Just like the 16-year-old zitted-out gaggle of Upper East Side teens that always seem to be causing a ruckus on the stairs at Union Square.

In fact, as I do every summer, I published a two-part series on my recommendations for warm weather face creams. Each of the two was titled, Super Lightweight Summer Moisturizers SS21 – Best Brightening Moisturizers, Best Face Creams For Oily Skin (And All Skin In The Heat!).

SUPER LIGHTWEIGHT SUMMER MOISTURIZERS BEST FACE CREAMS FOR OILY SKIN (AND ALL SKIN IN THE HEAT!)

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To me, heat is the great skin equalizer!

The first piece featured one of the best face creams for oily skin I’ve ever come across — the Glossier Priming Moisturizer Balance. I joked in the product review that when temps are in the 90s, we’re all oily, making Glossier’s lightest moisturizer perfect for just about everyone with skin. The brand’s Priming Moisturizer Balance is perfectly mattifying and has left my skin comfortable and fresh on many a hot day throughout the summer season. I wish I could dole out a tube of it to each of those greasy teens!

PRODUCT REVIEW: GLOSSIER PRIMING MOISTURIZER BALANCE – BEST MATTIFYING MOISTURIZER

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Those two blog articles this year about summer moisturizers got me thinking about the people who actually manage oily skin year-round. Not just those of us who sweat it out in July.

Of course, there are hundreds of great face cleansers, face creams, face serums and sunscreens made for oily skin. But I thought it would be helpful (and fun!) to pull together the best oily skin regimen from The Ordinary — one of my all-time favorite and most dependable brands.

I love skincare ingredients and using targeted serums to address my own skin concerns and the skin concerns of Skincarma followers. The Ordinary was one of the first brands that offered a broad range of single-note products — that is, products focused on one primary active ingredient.

In doing so, they met the curiosity of consumers like me (and you!) to learn about ingredients and how they benefit their skin. Until then, it was rather challenging to adequately target your specific skin concerns — like T-zone oiliness, occasional sensitivity and patches of dryness.

The Ordinary has empowered us to weed through the chaos and confusion created by big beauty marketers and truly focus on our skin’s unique needs. By focusing on specific ingredients like Salicylic Acid, Niacinamide and Vitamin C — and offering them in affordable, well-formulated products — The Ordinary makes it possible for just about everyone to be able to consistently and effectively maintain the health of their skin. That is especially important at the extremes where oily skin and sensitive skin require extra TLC.

I first began my not-so-ordinary journey with the brand about four years ago, just as The Ordinary was bursting onto the skincare scene. Early favorites were the Resveratrol 3% + Ferulic Acid 3% serum, Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% serum and the 100% L-Ascorbic Acid Powder.

THE SKINCARMA PRODUCT OF THE YEAR : THE ORDINARY 100% L-ASCORBIC ACID POWDER

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In fact, that entirely basic 100% L-Ascorbic Acid Powder, essentially a pot of pure Vitamin C, was the first-ever Skincarma Product of the Year, in 2018!

Very recently, the brand began to supersize many of its products which, until now, came in rather stingy 30 mL / 1 oz. bottles and tubes. At that size, I literally go through a bottle of The Ordinary’s Caffeine Solution 5% + EGCG every three weeks. So I certainly welcome the larger sizes. According to the brand,

We want to encourage good when buying beauty, and so we recently upsized some of our beloved The Ordinary products to offer more of what you love, better value, and a smaller footprint.

Compared to our usual (humbly*) sized products, we're helping to reduce your footprint (and ours) - for each of the larger products, moving from the smaller size to a bigger size can save an average of 35% in packaging weight** and over 15% in shipping emissions**, *, which is one way of hugging the world a little tighter for a more human approach to beauty.

While The Ordinary has yet to “upsize” my beloved Caffeine Solution 5% + EGCG, the brand has done so with many of the most popular products, including the ones I’ve targeted for an oily skin routine. How did I come up with them?

To start, I hit The Ordinary regimen builder on the Deciem website and, well, pretended I had oily skin. The products below are the results of my online consultation — and what appears to be the best skincare routine for oily skin composed of some of the best products from The Ordinary.

But first…

What Is Oily Skin and What Causes It?

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, no matter our skin type, it’s that oily skin isn’t fun. If you’re human and have any recollection of your teenage years, you likely struggled with oily skin and every oily skin concern imaginable, the most frustrating of which is acne.

There’s an excellent article on the causes and behaviors of oily skin, and solutions for mitigating the side-effects of excessive oiliness, from the experts on the Paula’s Choice Research Team titled simply (and quite hilariously!), Help for Oily Skin.

It begins with an expression of true compassion that I find super cool:

If you struggle with the daily annoyance of a face that resembles an oil slick (something our founder Paula has struggled with herself for years), you know how difficult it is to get oily skin under control. Adding to the frustration, whether you know it or not, is the fact that that many of the products claiming to get rid of oil actually make matters worse because they contain ingredients that aggravate skin and trigger more oily shine. We’re here to help—armed with the research-backed facts for what really works.

I had forgotten that my muse, Paula Begoun, was herself an oily skin warrior in the early years of her mission to uncover the truth about skin, skincare and skincare ingredients.

An excerpt from the Paula’s Choice article on oily skin:

Understanding Oily Skin
Oily skin is hard to control because it's something we’re born with, kicking in sometime in our teen years or randomly as we age. Having oily skin is the same as being born with the predisposition for having thick hair or how tall you will be; you can’t stop those things any more than you can stop oily skin.
For those of us with super oily skin, it may be hard to believe a normal balanced oil flow from the pore does good things for skin. For example, it relieves dryness, maintains a healthy skin surface, and keeps skin pliable.
Oily skin obviously becomes maddening when too much oil is produced. This causes pores to become enlarged as they’re stretched beyond capacity to handle the amounts of oil being generated. It gets worse as the pore lining thickens, which blocks oil from getting to skin’s surface, resulting in blackheads and white bumps.
One myth to bust: Oily skin does not age less than dry skin. Oily skin may look less wrinkled because it is often less dry, but the cause of wrinkles is not something oily skin can stop or change.

If you’re curious, the article, Help for Oily Skin, goes into great detail including a recommendation for the best way to fix oily skin. Again, you can read the full piece here.

Let’s take a look at a game-changing product from my oily skin routine discovered on The Ordinary’s regimen builder…

The Ordinary | Azelaic Acid Suspension 10%

True skincare innovations are not nearly as common as you’d think, given the number of new products and brands that launch every year. And when it comes to ingredients, it’s even more rare. Ingredient complexes, blends, combinations, sure. But new skincare ingredients are few and far between.

What’s more common when it comes to skincare actives is the repurposing of ingredients and their use at higher concentrations. It wasn’t that long ago that Niacinamide was relatively unknown. Of course, as a form of Niacin, or Vitamin B3, it’s been around since the dawn of time, like Vitamin C, Vitamin E and Vitamin A — of which Retinol is a derivative.

Introduced in or around 2015, the 10% Niacinamide Booster serum from Paula’s Choice put Niacinamide on the map. With its ability to protect, maintain and restore skin health, it quickly became one of the best anti-aging serums in the world.

PAULA’S CHOICE NIACINAMIDE 20% TREATMENT - THE BEST NIACINAMIDE SERUM TO TREAT CLOGGED PORES

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Then, in 2019, the brand introduced the Niacinamide 20% Treatment — with double the Niacinamide potency of the original. At a 20% concentration, Niacinamide not only delivers effective antioxidant defense, brightening of the complexion and skin barrier strengthening, but a surface retexturizing that rivals direct acids like Glycolic Acid — without the redness, sensitivity and irritation.

Until rather recently, it wasn’t widely known or accepted that ingredients like Niacinamide, Salicylic Acid and Azelaic Acid were particularly useful for moderating oily skin. Azelaic Acid is the new kid on the block and if you’re really oily or acne-prone, don’t overlook this unsung hero.

What Is Azelaic Acid and What Is Azelaic Acid Good for?

Azelaic Acid is one of those hidden gem ingredients that seem to have been repurposed and repositioned as a highly effective, reliable substance for promoting skin health. Like Niacinamide and Salicylic Acid, which are both oily skin essentials, anyone can use Azelaic Acid.

Yet, derived from grains like wheat and barley, Azelaic Acid is ideal for controlling oily skin and one of the most vexing concerns of those with oily skin — acne.

According to the experts on the Paula’s Choice Research Team,

A type of acid known as a dicarboxylic acid derived from grains that offers numerous benefits when applied to skin. For example, it’s a gentle leave-on exfoliant which helps unclog pores and refine skin texture. Azelaic acid also significantly lessens factors in skin that lead to redness and bumps. Azelaic acid is also an antioxidant.
Research has shown azelaic acid can significantly diminish blemishes, help fade the appearance of post-acne red marks and other discolorations, and reduce the kind of skin sensitivity that leads to redness.
Although azelaic acid can be derived from grains like barley, wheat, and rye, its lab-engineered form is typically used in skincare products because of its stability and effectiveness. Because of this, azelaic acid is considered a synthetic ingredient, but this is a clear case where the synthetic version outperforms the natural version, with no research indicating a risk to skin.
Azelaic acid is available in strengths of 10% or less over-the-counter, and in topical prescription products at concentrations between 15-20%.

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A COMPLETE $100 SKINCARE ROUTINE WITH THE INKEY LIST, THE ORDINARY, BENTON & MORE!

ON MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL HERE

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For oily skin, The Ordinary’s Azelaic Acid Suspension 10% is seeing some real time in the light — and justifiably so. It’s the perfect layering treatment that’s easily incorporated into an oily skin routine.

With the light creamy texture of a face lotion, it could easily be mistaken for a moisturizer. It is not. In fact, there are no replenishing ingredients in the Azelaic Acid Suspension 10%, aside from a small amount of Vitamin E. That’s not going to feed the skin what it needs from a good replenishing moisturizer.

The Ordinary says its Azelaic Acid Suspension 10% “visibly brightens the skin tone, improves the evenness of skin texture, reduces the look of blemishes, and offers antioxidant support.” If your skin tends to be irritated — and many oily and acne prone skins are — then The Ordinary’s Azelaic Acid Suspension 10% is the perfect treatment for rebalancing and soothing your reactive skin.

SHOP THE BLOG: Purchase The Ordinary Azelaic Acid Suspension 10% for just $7.90 here.

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