Beauty Round-Up | 2013

2013 has been a wonderful year for beauty - beauty is becoming more advanced, more unusual, mixing nature and science to really drive and deliver results. Far from the days of yester year, where more unusual ingredients were thought of as scary, every month we now discover amazing properties within wonderful ingredients. 2013 was most definitely the year of acids and venoms. More and more of us learnt about chemical exfoliation as an alternative and as complementing manual or physical exfoliation. We, as a beauty community, learnt the ins and outs of the science of such ingredients, for example many now know that glycolic acid helps to loosen the bonds that bind dead skin cells to the skin, leaving a smoother visage.

Bee Venom, which skinChemists have a whole range devoted to, was a big trend last year - an ingredient loved by the Duchesses of Cambridge and Cornwall, as well as the supermodel Jourdan Dunn. Stimulating the skin to heal itself, bee venom is an all-round skin perfector that can act to work on fine lines, wrinkles, expression lines, skin texture and tone. All in all a wonderful starter anti-ageing ingredient.

Coconut Oil is not so much of a discovery, but a re-discovery for most of the beauty world. Those of us "in-the-know" have been using it for years, as have all the people who came before us! The ultimate in multi-tasking, coconut oil can be used as a moisturiser and cleanser from top to toe, hair to feet, as well as in food and drinks.Thought to be a wonderful anti-ageing ingredient, coconut oil is pretty much a do-it-all and fix-it-all kind of product.

Oils and Balms in general. People have become savvy to the use of oils and balms this year - every skin type, from the oiliest to the driest, can benefit from an oil. Some come in pure oil form, some in balm form, and the cleansing balm and oil has become the most effective, least traumatic way to cleanse the skin.