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4 Oct 2012

Dior One Essential Capture Totale Skin Boosting Super Serum

Dior *deep breath* One Essential Capture Totale Régénérateur Cellulaire Intense Skin Boosting Serum

What is it with the super-long names for these things?

Ok so my skin is going thru some hiccoughs lately.  I'm de-toxing for the last eight weeks or so, and that always makes it act out somewhat.  Almost like it keeps going, doing its thing, motoring on, pottering away... then when I start a new dietary regime, it stops and thinks to itself, whohoo, my time to shine...  So I've been a bit congested of late (and long overdue a decent facial, hmmm, must schedule that in).

Given that we're now hell-for-leather-bent to approaching wintertime here (I'm freezing the last week or so!) I've needed to Get Real with my face creams again.  I'm back (after a temporary summer hiatus of trialling a few different face creams - more reviews will follow eventually) using my beloved CDLM moisturiser, but I have still been trying out a few different serums to see what is good and what is not.

This one?  Meh.

It's not good, it's not bad.  It does contain glycerin which will help with the old sealing-in-of-the-moisture, but it also contains alcohol, which usually (but not in this instance, strangely) causes my skin to flare up.  It also contains salicylic acid (although well down the ingredient list) so is mildly exfoliating, and a bunch of other things that I would usually expect to see in food ingredients (xanthan gum, mallow extract, hydrolyzed soy flour, evening primrose root, sorbitol, biosaccharide gum, hydrolyzed soy protein, citric acid, cellulose gum, red dye 4...).  I'm confused, is this for your face or for eating?  It also contains old faithful plankton extracts (what is it with Dior and plankton extracts?), which I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with to be honest (but maybe that's just me).

All of the above combine to make a serum that smells very... soapy.  Very strongly soapy.  Not a bad smell, but one that Refuses To Go Away after a while.

The usual claims apply... "age-defying booster" ... "correction of all the visible signs of aging"... etc.  Right.  We can ignore those.

Personally, I found that this is a weird serum that feels both tacky and a little drying at the same time, which is odd.  My skin didn't feel particularly nourished or silky after it - this is not necessarily a bad thing, very often these days that "silky" feeling just comes from silicones (and there are no silicones in this).  It didn't feel good, similarly however it didn't feel bad, but the strong smell (very often common with Dior products) was just a bit of an assault on the old senses (again, for me and my ridiculously over-sensitive nose perhaps).

Fast-forward a week to see how I got on.  I'm back to "meh".  At €87 for 30ml and €115 for 50ml, I'd expect a lot more (in terms of ingredients and in terms of what it does).

I shall not be purchasing.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I was given 10ml of this to try out when I went a bit nuts recently at the Dior counter, I didn't purchase a bottle myself).