Two weeks of niacinamide, five percent

I bought a small bottle of five-percent niacinamide from a Korean skincare line in early April. I had been hearing about niacinamide for three years and had never tried it. The bottle was twelve euros, a dropper, simple cream-coloured glass. I decided to use it morning and evening for two weeks and to take notes.

I am not a skincare scientist. I am a person with thirty-five-year-old skin who has historically used one moisturiser and a sunscreen and not much else. The notes are honest. They are not a review of the product, which I cannot meaningfully give. They are a record of what I felt and what I saw.

Days one to four

Nothing. The niacinamide is colourless, watery, slightly slippery on the skin. It absorbs quickly and does not leave a residue. Under my moisturiser it was almost imperceptible. The first four days I kept checking the bottle to make sure I had actually applied it.

Days five to seven

The first thing I noticed was not in my skin, it was in my moisturiser. The moisturiser felt different — slightly slipperier, more like it was sliding on a primed surface than absorbing into dry skin. The niacinamide had, apparently, restored some amount of water to the upper layer of my skin, and the moisturiser was now sitting on a less thirsty surface.

Days eight to fourteen

Slow. Subtle. By day ten the small patches of redness around my nose, which I have had for years, were measurably less red. Not gone. Less red. By day fourteen the skin on my forehead, which had been slightly bumpy for the past winter, was smoother to the touch.

I would not claim a transformation. The skin I have at day fourteen is the skin I had at day one, only slightly calmer and slightly more uniform. This is, I think, what a working active is supposed to do. The skincare industry sells transformation. The actual ingredients deliver, when they work, small consistent improvements over weeks.

I am going to keep using it. The cost-per-day at this concentration is about eight cents. If two weeks made a small visible difference, three months might make a larger one. The whole experiment has, more than anything, taught me to be more patient with skincare than I had been.