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9 best replenishing face oils
Facial oils boost the moisture in your skin and restore your complexion after the summer
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Your support makes all the difference.Post-summer, it can take some work on the skin to compensate for a season’s worth of sun, chlorine, sea salt, holiday drinking, late nights and flights. A good autumn skin-saver in the form of a replenishing oil works wonders on dry and dehydrated complexions.
Modern oils are packed with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and natural superfood extracts. They’re more and more lightweight and easily absorbed. These were all factors we looked for during our rigorous testing process.
And, contrary to popular belief, they’re not just for dry skin. You can have dehydrated skin that’s combination or even oily.
Noella Gabriel, co-founder of the Elemis brand, says: “Facial oils support the moisture barrier, helping to create balance so the skin is not overproducing natural oils, which is what happens when you strip it with harsh products in an attempt to dry it out.
“It feels counter-intuitive, but treating oiliness with oil really does work. Combination skin evens right out and of course dry skin will drink up as much oil as it needs.”
Layering with serums and moisturisers will also boost moisture levels and increase nourishment, but how do you get the best out of your oil?
“A facial oil should be the first step in your daily skincare routine,” says Gabriel.
“The massaging process helps to smooth and soften the skin, ensuring it’s fully prepped for what’s to come. You can layer the facial oil with a serum, which will sink in effortlessly into the skin’s deeper layers to deliver a potent hit of actives.
“Finally, the densest product in the lineup, your moisturiser, will seal in the other skincare products, ensuring optimum efficacy from all those powerful actives. If your skin is feeling especially dry, you can finish with a couple of drops of your facial oil pressed over the top.”
We’ve tried and tested more than 40 facial oils over the past few months to find our pick of the best for hydration, texture, radiance, softness and the beauty holy grail, a more youthful looking complexion.
Emma Hardie Brilliance Facial Oil: £39 for 30ml, cultbeauty.co.uk
Facialist extraordinaire Emma Hardie has added this sumptuous oil to her award-winning skincare lineup and it was one of the most impressive oils we tested.
It’s drier than some others and very lightweight, which makes it good for morning use as well as at night – ensuring makeup stays put all day on top of a very rich oil can be tricky.
The zesty lemon oil hit is perfect for a morning complexion wakeup call and it also has antibacterial qualities. This makes it ideal for oily and stressed skin, and it cleared up a few stubborn blemishes our tester was suffering from.
The 15 organic essential and botanical plant oils include smoothing sunflower oil, protective sweet almond and apricot oil, restorative grapeseed oil and camelina oil for elasticity and luminosity.
The scent is a stunning blend of rose, sweet orange, rose geranium, camomile, mint and vanilla essential oils, which makes it an absolute pleasure and treat to use.
You can also add it to your usual moisturiser, serum or even body lotion to turbo-charge its efficacy. Results-driven and value for money, this is a deserved best buy.
Elemis Superfood: £45 for 15ml, elemis.com
Packed with antioxidants and omega fatty acids from the oils of superfoods like broccoli, flax seed and daikon radish, blended together with a whole host of other oils including sweet orange peel oil, rosehip oil, sweet almond oil and rosemary leaf oil, this formula has a distinct, vibrant, fresh and herby scent.
We can nourish our bodies with good, healthy superfoods, and now do the same for our complexions.
A little goes a long way – just two to three drops is plenty. So although it seems expensive (it’s £45 for only 15ml), the bottle lasts a phenomenally long time.
It was one of the best oils for sinking in immediately and delivering the most beautiful radiant glow.
Votary Facial Oil Rose Maroc and Sandalwood: £65 for 30ml, spacenk.com
For seasonally fragile, dehydrated skin, this is the ultimate soother. Packed with avocado oil it sinks in like a dream and leaves the skin silky smooth and ultra-nourished. And if the beautiful scent of delicate old-fashioned roses hits your olfactory spot, then this is the one for you.
Votary founder Arabella Preston saw the benefits of using oils before applying makeup in her former job as a makeup artist, and started creating her own blends at home.
Using natural oils derived from vegetables, fruits, seeds and flowers, she made sure her blends were free from mineral oils (which can sit on the skin rather than being absorbed), petrochemicals, unnecessary preservatives, fillers or bulkers.
There’s also no testing on animals or any animal ingredients. From a kitchen table idea to small batches made in the UK, all the formulas are still blended and tested by Preston herself.
We found it particularly soothing after a windswept beach day, when the sunscreen wasn’t applied as liberally as it should have been!
By Terry Cellularose Liftessence Oil Elixir: £95 for 30ml, spacenk.com
Some skincare products are ridiculously overpriced and deliver no better results than a much cheaper high street version.
We can categorically say this oil is not one of those products. It is worth every eye-watering penny and if you invest in your skincare or have the budget to spend out on your facial oil, this is absolutely the one for you.
Delicately rose-scented, with an easy-to-apply, pump-stopper pipette system, the radiance and hydration results after just one use were obvious. And we found the firming and lifting effects were starting to be visible after only a couple of weeks’ use, making it a really good buy for more mature skin.
This ultra-rich oil blends six rose extracts, which work to stimulate the elastin and collagen, so if you’re looking for an anti-ageing element in your oil alongside a rehydrating post-summer kick, try this for guaranteed results.
Romily Wilde Active Boost Face Oil: £75 for 30ml, romilywilde.com
Hailed as a “supercharged surge of nourishment”, this combination of oils delivers real results.
The blend of plant, marine and flower oils includes camelia, jasmine and rose oils, neroli and sandalwood for an astonishingly beautiful scent, while the calendula, camomile, St John’s wort, manuka and arnica ensure it’s a soothing, skin-repairing formula too.
With only a few days of use, we could see it was starting to plump out fine dehydration lines and produce a glow in the complexion. Two weeks in and we found the skin was looking significantly plumper and more youthful.
Lumene Sisu Recover & Protect: £34.90 for 30ml, feelunique.com
The Sisu Urban Antidotes range from Nordic beauty experts Lumene was developed with stressed, dull, weakened city skin in mind. Sisu is a word that describes their Finnish national character and the closest translation would be stoic, resilient, hardy or gutsy.
We’re constantly looking for ways to make sure our skin is resilient and able to cope with everything life throws at it, particularly if you’re an urban dweller facing a relentless assault from city living on your complexion.
Packed with antioxidants including lingonberry, blackcurrant and bilberry, vitamin E and omega fatty acids, this blend helps the skin retain water and form a protective shield against the elements.
We found this pollution-buster to be particularly effective on dry patches that had appeared during the summer; after just a few days’ use they were gone. The perfect protection for city skin.
ESPA Replenishing Face Treatment Oil: £59 for 30ml, espaskincare.com
The sandalwood and patchouli oils give this ultra-nourishing concoction a beautiful heady scent. The vitamin and omega-rich avocado turbo-boosts the skin’s moisture levels. We found after just a couple of days’ use, skin felt significantly softer, smoother and more supple.
Post-summer skin can suffer with poor texture and feel slightly rough to the touch – if this sounds familiar, ESPA will work wonders on your complexion: it certainly did on ours.
Neom Perfect Night’s Sleep: £42 for 28ml, neomorganics.com
Restless sleepers can ensure they get their beauty sleep with this therapeutic night oil, which knocked us out on the first night we tried it!
Packed with an astonishing array of skin-caring goodies, including 13 relaxing essential oils (sleep-inducing lavender and chamomile are the big players), vitamins A, B, C, E and F and omega 3,6 and 9.
It also contains restoring rosehip oil and nourishing almond, wheatgerm and peach kernel oils. Neom avoids all skincare nasties and this is 100 per cent natural.
Neom recommends, once you have massaged it in, cupping your hands over your face and trying 7-11 breathing (in for 7 counts and out for 11). If applying the oil doesn’t send you off, this little trick will have you sleeping like a baby in no time.
The Sanctuary Spa 10-in-1 Super Secret: £20 for 30ml, feelunique.com
Incredible value for money, this oil holds its own against other premium brand expensive oils. It’s not as highly scented as most we tested, so a good choice if you prefer your skincare dialled down in the olfactory department!
The 10-in-1 refers to the 10 skincare benefits, which include protecting the skin’s barrier function (to prevent pollution and other nasties having an effect), reducing the look of fine lines, improving texture by softening and smoothing, nourishing and delivering a vitamin hit.
It produced really good results over a slightly longer period of testing, with the skin looking plumped, hydrated and more radiant after a couple of weeks’ use. A great buy if you’re on a beauty budget.
Verdict: Best Replenishing Facial Oils
For your small, kitchen-table brand, all-natural facial oil try Votary Rose Maroc & Sandalwood. If you’re after a radiant glow, Elemis Superfood delivers remarkable results.
And if you need heavyweight, anti-ageing properties you won’t find a more effective oil than By Terry Cellularose Liftessence.
But hands-down winner for Best Buy is Emma Hardie Brilliance Facial Oil. Value for money, supercharged moisture, radiance and elasticity, and a beautiful zesty lemon oil hit, gave it the edge over all the other oils we tested.