Drugstore Skin Brighteners & Skin Lighteners

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If you've roamed the aisles of most drugstores, you most likely have stumbled across many of these skin brighteners and skin lighteners:

Aveeno Skin Brightening Treatment
Derma E Skin Lighten
Juice Organics Brightening Line
Boots Brightening Line
Neutrogena Ageless Intensives Tone Correcting Serum
Kiss My Face Brightening Day Cream

...and the list goes on.

Believe it or not, I've tried many of these products before. Not all, but ones very similar. After discontinuing the use hydroquinone (after I read more about it) as my go-to skin lightener I turned to the complexion correcting treatments found in my local drugstore for safer alternatives. I tried the Aveeno Skin Brightening one, Derma E Skin Lighten and the Kiss My Face Brightening Day Cream. I'm sure a few more as well.

I used these products for a long time and saw little to no improvement at all in the reversal process of my sun damage. During that time I felt like I was wasting my time and money, and I guess I was, but now that I look back I realize I needed to try these products in order for me to learn that these aren't really skin lighteners or skin brighteners. I mean, I guess I could have just read more about the ingredients and the signficance of them at the time (it would have saved me a lot of time and money) but thinking that it was learning experience makes me feel better ^_^

These products are basically just regular moisturizers. Not all of them, some of them are valid skin brighteners but none of them are really skin lighteners. If you need clarification on the difference between the two, I blogged about it in The Difference Between Skin Brighteners & Skin Lighteners.

The Aveeno Brightening Treatment is nothing more than a moisturizer. A wonderful moisturizer, but it doesn't do anything in terms of brightening or lightening. The SPF content is unstable, and it has vitamin A in it which means it should be used only at night since vitamin A becomes unstable in daylight.

Soy can lighten skin, this has been proven. But it's in such a low amount that you won't see much visible change.

The Juice Organics Brightening serum did nothing but break me out with it's array of essential oils.

The Derma E Skin Lighten has licorice extract, but in very small amount if you actually see where it is placed on the ingredient list. Licorice extract alone can only do so much (inhibits the enzyme that creates melanin). It should be coupled with other ingredients that hinder the melanin transfer so you are killing two birds with one stone. I saw no improvement with this one either.

The common theme with all these are that they have too low of a potency to be considered real skin brightening or skin lightening agents. Even if they claim to remove dark spots, fade hyperpigmentation and acne marks or lighten the overall skin - chances are their just going to hydrate your skin.

Overtime (if you use them for a long time) I'm sure they can give a slight glow or some radiance but that's probably the extent of benefits they can give you.

The ones I tried are pretty useless in terms of pigmentation correction, but I do understand there are a couple of diamonds in the rough. The Boots Brightening line looks good, as well as Kiehl's brightening products.

A lot of international skin brighteners or skin fairness creams are great as well like Olay White Radiance, Ponds White, Fairever etc. They aren't lighteners, but they do brighten or have sun protection or great ingredients like niacinamide which can lead to brighter, more radiant skin.

The point of this article is that a lot of what you see in drugstores is purely just marketing. I'm not saying all the products you see on the shelves of drugstores are worthless, but many of the common brightening ones like Aveeno or Neutrogena are. There are a lot of good skin brighteners and even skin lighteners found in drugstores like Vichy Bi White, Reversa as well as the various vitamin c serums (vitamin c is the ultimate skin brightening ingredient IMO) by La Roche Posay and Vichy.

You just have to do your research so you don't get suckered into the claims of these companies ;)