Vitamin C: everything you need to know about the skin saviour

While skin ingredients may come and go, vitamin C has long been hailed as a solution for anti-ageing and gorgeous, glowing skin, but it’s extremely volatile.

Vitamin C is like happiness: Both make life and living so much better, both can be enjoyed in infinite quantities, and both help you look like the best version of yourself. However, just like happiness, vitamin C can’t be stored – you can’t bank some for when you need it – so you spend your life in pursuit of it, but the benefits are multifold.

Vitamin C, in the form of ascorbic acid, works across so many of our body’s systems – protecting our cells, building our bones, skin and blood vessels, boosting immunity and helping our organs function. It has aesthetic benefits too. No wonder it’s become the latest hero ingredient in beauty.

“Vitamin C has actually been around a long time,” says consultant dermatologist Dr Rosemary Coleman,“but it has probably caught on and gained popularity because it works; I have often witnessed visible improvements in patients’ skin from regular use of vitamin C. Its main benefits are as an antioxidant, it stimulates collagen formation and wound healing, lightens the skin, and it fades hyperpigmentation, thus improving the appearance of photodamage.” Vitamin C also gives an instant glow to the skin, when topically applied.

So, why isn’t vitamin C in every skincare product under the sun? Possibly because it’s notoriously difficult to produce. “Vitamin C has quite a complicated chemistry,” says Dr Coleman,“and because it’s a water-soluble vitamin, it becomes very unstable in water solutions. Additionally, vitamin C doesn’t penetrate the skin easily, it degrades on exposure to oxygen, and it favours a pH around three, which is too acidic for human skin.”

So, to be of actual cosmetic use, scientists have had to spend a lot of time and money in ensuring their formulations work, and continue to do so once opened. “Just because a company throws some vitamin C into their concoction doesn’t mean it is actually active,” says Dr Coleman. “The true proof is whether your skin looks better after about six weeks and whether you’d buy the product again.”