There’s something glamorous about coming home from a long, late night out. I’ve always loved the high that comes with sitting in the back of a taxi, my hair disheveled and eyes bleary while the sun begins to rise outside. But as I wade and out of this blitzed bliss, I know there’s something much more menacing lurking around the corner: the possibility of a breakout in my near future.
Like most other people coming out of a year and a half of lockdown, I’ve been keen to fill up my calendar with as many parties as I can. (After all, I’ll never shy away from an excuse to get dressed up.) But after a night of schmoozing and dancing, a 10-step skincare routine hardly sounds ideal (though when I have more time and energy, it is my preference). This is where 4AM Skin—a no-fuss, two-step serum duo that eliminates the need to pile on product after product—comes in. Thankfully, it only takes a quick dash of 4AM Skin’s serums to keep my face looking and feeling as if I have spent hours relaxing in a steam room.
The magic lies in this product’s formula. A touch of ferulic acid prevents aging, while stabilized vitamin C helps fix discoloration and other forms of sun damage. There’s also a bit of rosemary extract to soothe skin and Aquaxyl to enhance the moisture throughout the layers of the skin. 4AM Skin founders Jade Beguelin and Sabrina Sadeghian wanted to embrace the guilty pleasure of staying out late without having to compromise good skin. “We felt the clean beauty customer was limited,” the duo says. “We wanted to offer a skincare product for people like us, people who like to have a bit of fun.”
But the 4AM Skin line takes things a step further. Beguelin and Sadeghian confront a major contributor to skin damage: blue light from phones, laptops, and other screens. The dual serums are designed and formulated to maintain the skin’s circadian rhythm. In normal people language, this is the natural sleep cycle that keeps up skin barrier repair, collagen rebuild, and oil secretion.
The creators extract from a plant called Lespedeza Capitata, which allows the serums to resynchronize the circadian rhythm which might have been thrown off by an excessive amount of Twitter scrolling or staying out all night. “You don’t have to change your lifestyle. The serum does the heavy lifting for you,” says Sadeghian.
Whatever science may back it up, I have yet to experience a breakout after using the serums following a late night. It’s become my trusty secret weapon within an arsenal of skincare products. While I try to be the queen of the night, 4AM skin is enthroned as the queen of my medicine cabinet.
