Q. I recently bought the Clarins Double Serum after my therapist recommended it. I love it and raved about it so much that a friend of mine bought it too. She bought hers via a cosmetics retailer on the internet for £10 less. When it arrived I had a look at it and it smells completely different to mine. I told her not to use it as it might not be real. What would you recommend.
A. You are absolutely right and have done your friend a service in advising her not to use it.
The purchase of skincare over the internet is a risky business. Unless you are purchasing directly from the manufacturers website you cannot be sure the product is the genuine article and when buying direct from the manufacturer you will still pay their set recommended retail price. What you won’t get the one to one advice and expertise of your beauty consultant like you do in salon. You are just guessing that what sounds nice in the description and has an impressive list of ingredients will be right for you, and you can so very often be wrong, choosing the inappropriate products and then there is a lengthy process to return it, if they will let you do so at all. In the end what have you really saved?
Third party retailers of skincare over the internet are a real threat to your skin, they are not regulated and are generally not selling genuine products. They are in most cases, as you found with your friends product, skilled in recreating the packaging and logos but the products inside could be anything at all and as a result be potentially harmful, causing sensitivity, skin reactions, burns etc. It is also common to find discontinued and out of date products on such sites, I actually found a site selling a product that was discontinued five years ago and at the time of manufacture only had a shelf life of three years, meaning that this product was a minimum of two years out of date. The active ingredients would have broken down and would be useless, a complete waste of money and the potential to cause a reaction.
I would strongly advise that your friend contact the seller and try to return the product, and purchase the product from a registered stockist, where she can be 100% certain that she is getting exactly what she paid for.
As a Clarins Gold Salon we run the Clarins For Me scheme where you can save between 10-20% on Clarins and claim FREE products when you have saved enough points. We also have regular gift with purchase promotions where you receive extra goodies and gifts.
Your skin is too important to take a chance for the sake of a small saving. Remember if something seems too good to be true, then it usually is.
