I’ve been reviewing beauty products for more than 10 years, so not a lot of things excite me – but some things did in 2023. The Olay Super Serum was one of them!
The video version of this review is here, keep scrolling for the text version….
Olay Super Serum is the best new skincare product I’ve tried in a really long time. I did a sponsored Instagram post on this, but this blog post and the video aren’t sponsored – I’m purely talking about it because it was such a standout product.
Here’s my general process for reviewing products (both sponsored and unsponsored posts).
I’ll start by looking at the claims and ingredients. If that all makes sense, I’ll try the product on my skin for usually 2 weeks, maybe more (depending on what the product is).
This is really important because even if you know everything about cosmetics, you can’t tell how well most products work just from the ingredients list, because it has such limited information. The overall formula is crucial, so you really need to test it on actual skin.
For a serum that has actives like this one, I’ll start with my skin at its best. I’ll use my standard skincare routine for a few weeks, then introduce the new serum as the only active product. I’ll still be using products like cleansers, moisturisers and sunscreens that I’m really familiar with, so I know what they’re going to do to my skin and I’ll be able to notice any difference.
Usually over the next few days, there’ll be little skin issues popping up. The most common things for me at this stage are closed comedones around my jaw area – these are little flesh-coloured bumps that form when pores get clogged and gunk starts building up inside, much like baby pimples.
If these don’t go away after a few days, I’ll know that the serum doesn’t work for closed comedones. I’ll then blitz them with my go-to products (alpha hydroxy acids and a peeling gel), then keep using just the serum, and see if that happens again.
I’ll go through this process for a bunch of other skin issues. Then by the end of the trial period, I’ll have a really good idea of what the product is and isn’t good for, and which products and ingredients it’s good at replacing in my routine.
Related: Free Exfoliation Guide!
Sometimes my skin will just hate a product, or it might not do much. If it’s a sponsored post, I’ll tell the brand that I’m sorry but I can’t endorse their product.
Most of the time, even with products that I really like and recommend, there’ll be little issues popping up. And that’s fine, because most serums aren’t really designed to do everything.
But with the Olay Super Serum… this was one of the very few products where I went from my skin in peak condition, dropped all my usual hard-hitting actives, and my skin just… stayed the same. Essentially, this serum just replaced all the actives in my normal, super-optimised maintenance routine, without making any sort of noticeable difference!
I used this continuously for about 5 weeks because I just was so surprised – I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing did. My skin just stayed nice!
Then I had to add a retinoid back in because this doesn’t have a retinoid, and I want those long-term effects that I talked about in my retinoid post. And that threw my skin out of whack, so I had to add a whole bunch of other products back in to deal with that. But if my skin wasn’t such a baby when it came to retinoids, I feel like I could have used this as the only other product.
Related Post: 7 Common Retinoid Skincare Myths, Busted
Olay Super Serum has a whole bunch of actives. I was pretty skeptical at first – with products that contain lots of actives, there’ll usually be one active that the product will really focus on getting to work, and the rest will be largely sprinkled in for marketing purposes. But this serum does seem to get multiple ingredients working at the same time!
The main innovation here is with niacinamide. This serum uses a patented method that Olay invented to get niacinamide to stay active at a low pH, which that normally doesn’t work very well. Olay and P&G did a lot of that original research on niacinamide for skin, so it’s not surprising that they have cutting edge niacinamide research!
Related Post: Behind the Scenes at Procter & Gamble’s Singapore Innovation Centre
This technology helps niacinamide absorb into the skin a lot more easily, and according to their testing data, this serum works a lot faster than Olay’s other best niacinamide products. Since niacinamide does a little bit of everything in skincare, I think it’s why this serum works so well.
Lactic acid (an exfoliating alpha hydroxy acid) is the next highest active on the ingredients list. I think this is likely working well too, since lactic acid is an ingredient that works really well for reducing my closed comedones.
There’s also:
- palmitoyl pentapeptide-4 (also called Pal-KTTKS or Matrixyl), one of the better-researched peptides
- 3-O-ethyl ascorbic acid, one of my favorite vitamin C derivatives
- hyaluronic acid – hydrating
- panthenol – soothing
I didn’t need to use moisturiser most nights when I was using this, even though it was winter in Australia at the time.
The main downside of this serum is the a moderate level of fragrance. To me it smells quite nice, but I can imagine that some people might be really bothered by it. There is also a Night Repair version that’s fragrance-free. The other big downside (for me, at least) is that it hasn’t launched in Australia yet (confusingly, there are a whole bunch of “super serums” here, but as far as I know, this formula only comes in this pretty shiny round bottle).
Ingredients: Water, Glycerin, Dimethicone, Niacinamide, Lactic Acid, Polyacrylate Crosspolymer-6, Palmitoyl Pentapeptide-4, 3-O-Ethyl Ascorbic Acid, Sodium Hyaluronate, Tocopheryl Acetate, Panthenol, Trehalose, PEG-11 Methyl Ether Dimethicone, Sodium Lactate, Mica, Titanium Dioxide, Sodium Benzoate, Fragrance
This product was sent to me as part of a sponsored post, but as always these are my honest opinions. This post also contains affiliate links – if you decide to click through and support Lab Muffin financially (at no extra cost to you), thank you! For more information, see Disclosure Policy.
It looks like this product might be pregnancy/nursing safe, or at least not contain any known unsafe ingredients – could you confirm, to the best of your knowledge? Thanks!
Wow Michelle, praise indeed! I can’t find this available in the UK yet, but will be giving it a try when it is.
Oooo, interesting product, thanks for the review! Have you had a look at or tested any of the ESK Care (eskcare.com) products? I stumbled across their website a few days ago and am intrigued but a bit sceptical.
Very happy to have found your site. I’m a skeptic by nature ad by training and follow a number of skeptic blogs. Having just met with an MD who does only “skin care” (he’s not a dermatologist) who vehemently trashed OTC skin care and tried to sell me a $600 “starter kit”, I was feeling deeply skeptical and went hunting on the interwebs. I still want to know if dermatologists who sell “medical grade” stuff should be suspect.
Just one quibble–are you sure you want to claim that testing a product on yourself only is really a valid way to draw a conclusion as to the effectiveness of a product on the general public? I truly am just asking.
I’m obviously not the person you posed these questions to (and also not a person with any sort of medical degree, just a person with a lot of experience with skin issues) but just wanted to say I’d be skeptical of that person who tried to sell you the ridiculously expensive starter kit too!
I’ve spent the last 2.5 years dealing with a nightmare skin issue that 4 different dermatologists haven’t been able to diagnose (it may or may not be allergy-related, and it might be showing some improvement as a result of Dr-prescribed phototherapy, but beyond that everyone is stumped).
This experience has taught me a lot of things, and two of the most important ones have been: 1. Everyone’s skin may react differently to products, and 2. You don’t necessarily need a super complex, expensive routine to solve skin problems.
My problems started after a few months experimenting with skincare routines, including throwing a lot of popular fancy products at my skin. My skin is still a slowly-healing, frequently-reactive mess, but it’s a lot better than it was a year ago, and my current dermatologist-recommended face wash and moisturizers are literally just Vanicream face wash and moisturizer, and Aquaphor on still-healing areas.
My skin reacts better to these super simple, inexpensive products (and the straight mineral oil they have me use during phototherapy prep) than all the expensive products I was trying. Once my skin heals I’ll probably look into slowly adding some additional stuff to address remaining issues, but I’ve learned it’s important to start simple and slowly add stuff, vs. just diving into a complicated routine.
What works for you may be totally different of course, I shared this story just to point out that more expensive products are not always automatically better! Something I think this site has covered a number of times too (along with myth busting the popular “natural is always better, artificial chemicals are always evil” claim).