I royally overdid it on the retinol-testing front over Christmas and New Year. Most people overdo it on the food and booze, but not me; I prefer to live life more dangerously and become the world’s most idiotic guinea pig. This guinea pig went in all guns blazing – squeak squeak! – and tried out a relatively high-powered retinol cream, neat, on four consecutive days, without reading the instructions properly.
My face pretty much fell off. It was Face/Off starring Nicholas Cage and John Travolta but with a special guest appearance from Ruth Crilly. Flaking, peeling, itching – I thought I had sunburn except that I hadn’t been in the sun. I thought that somehow I’d scorched my face opening and closing the AGA ovens when I was cooking Christmas dinner. (World’s most idiotic guinea pig actually Googled to see whether that was a possibility. It didn’t occur to me that I might have been enthusiastically basting myself in something that should probably be used quite carefully and in small amounts.) And it isn’t the product’s fault – the product (the new A-Passioni retinol cream from Drunk Elephant) did exactly what it’s supposed to do; I just think it would have liked to introduce itself a little more slowly and demurely than the way I forced it to introduce itself.
Baby steps is what A-Passioni would have no doubt preferred; A-Passioni might have liked being buffered with a bit of face cream and given a cauti...