Retinoids: the family, and why frequency beats strength

This page contains affiliate links. MoreThanMy earns a commission on qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.

Researched. We have not used this one long enough to give you a verdict, and we would rather say so than invent one. What follows is how it works, who it suits, and what it will not do. When we have used it properly, this page carries the verdict and the date.

The Ordinary Retinol 0.2% in Squalane

Retinol, retinaldehyde, adapalene, tretinoin. Four names, four price brackets, and a great deal of argument about which is best — most of it missing the thing that connects them.

They are not four different ideas. They are one idea at four distances from the finish line. Skin responds to a single molecule, retinoic acid, and everything on that list either is retinoic acid already or is something the skin has to convert into it. The only difference between them is how many conversions stand in the way.

The ladder, fewest conversions first

Tretinoin is retinoic acid. Nothing has to happen to it, and it is prescription-only in the United States.

Adapalene is a synthetic that acts on the same receptors directly, so it also skips the conversions. It is also more stable in light than tretinoin.

Retinaldehyde, sold as retinal, is one conversion away. Retinol is two. Retinyl palmitate and the other esters are three, which is why they sit at the bottom of the ladder and near the top of ingredient lists belonging to products that would like the word "retinol" on the front.

Each conversion is a step at which some of it does not make it through. That is the entire ladder, and it means the number on the bottle and the amount arriving where the work happens are different quantities. A percentage of retinol and a percentage of anything else on that list are not comparable figures.

The one that is a drug and still on the shelf

Everything on that ladder is sold over the counter except tretinoin. What is unusual about adapalene is not where you can buy it. It is what it is filed as.

In 2016 the FDA cleared adapalene 0.1% for sale over the counter in the United States. That was a prescription-to-over-the-counter switch of one approved product, rather than the ingredient being added to the acne monograph that covers salicylic acid and benzoyl peroxide — a different route to the same shelf, and part of the reason there are still so few adapalene products standing on it. Either way, what you are buying is regulated as a drug rather than a cosmetic.

The visible consequence is the box: fixed wording, fixed warnings, and a fixed timeline — the unflattering one about how many weeks pass before anything shows. We have written separately about why that box is candid and the cosmetic beside it is not; the short version is that nothing compels a cosmetic to mention week nine.

None of that reaches a retinol bought as a cosmetic, which is nearly all of them and includes the one this page ends on. A cosmetic is filed as a cosmetic: it talks about the look of skin, it does not mention acne, and it carries no drug panel and no obligation to print a timeline at all. Same family, different paperwork — and it is the paperwork rather than the potency that decides what a bottle is allowed to say.

Why the strength on the front is the least useful figure

Irritation does not rise politely in step with effect. Go up a rung and the sting climbs faster than the benefit does.

The arithmetic settles the rest. A strength your face objects to gets used every night until it cannot be, then not at all for a fortnight while the barrier recovers, then restarted lower down having lost the ground. A strength your face tolerates gets used twice a week for as long as you like. Count the nights.

Frequency beats strength, by a margin wide enough that the honest advice is to start at the bottom, move up only once the current rung has become boring, and regard the urge to skip one as the thing that will cost you the year.

Irritation, and the thing called purging

The claim is that a retinoid changes how quickly the pore lining sheds, so congestion already forming underneath arrives at the surface sooner than it otherwise would. On that account, a bad few weeks early on is your existing queue emptying rather than new damage.

It is worth being straight about what that rests on. The mechanism is plausible, clinicians have described the pattern for a long time, and early worsening turns up in the literature as something recorded in passing. What it lacks is research designed to test the purge explanation against the obvious alternative — that the product is simply irritating some people. It sits between clinical folklore and established fact, and anyone who tells you how many weeks yours will run is describing their own face.

There are still useful tells.

• Where it turns up. Purging appears where you already break out. A retinoid has no mechanism for emptying a pore that was not filling, so spots in territory that has never done this are a different event with a different cause.
• What it looks like. A queue emptying looks like your own usual congestion arriving at once. Deep, painful and unfamiliar is not a queue.
• What it feels like going on. Stinging as you apply it is not purging. That is irritation, and adjustment and irritation are separate events rather than two points on one scale.
• Whether it ends. A queue is finite by definition. Nobody can tell you how long yours runs — not us, and not the box — so the test is direction rather than a date. Something still getting worse rather than less bad, months in, is a mismatch, and continuing is only paying for it.

Buffering, short contact, and the sandwich

Three techniques with three names, all doing one job: less retinoid onto the skin per night, in exchange for there being a per-night at all.

Buffering is moisturizer first, retinoid over the top, or the two mixed in the palm. It takes the edge off, and it takes some of the effect off with it, in that order of noticeability — what goes under what, and what the layering costs.

Short contact is applying it, leaving it, then washing it off. It is borrowed from how strong topicals are used under supervision, and the appeal is controlling exposure directly. There is no correct length — only the longest one your skin is currently untroubled by, arrived at from below.

The sandwich is moisturizer, retinoid, moisturizer. It exists because buffering leaves a hole: the retinoid is still the outermost thing on your face, with nothing over it all night. The second layer is the lid, and it works best when it genuinely is one — an occlusive holding things in rather than another watery layer that has gone by midnight.

All three reduce delivery as well as discomfort. Anyone presenting the sandwich as a free lunch is selling optimism. It is a trade, and a good one, because a slower routine you continue beats a faster one you drop.

A retinoid and an acid on the same night

The usual explanation is a pH argument: acids sit low, retinoids want otherwise, the two undo each other. That is overstated, and it is not the reason.

The reason is duller. Both are asking the same barrier for the same tolerance on the same night, and the barrier has one budget. Spending it twice does not buy a stronger result; it buys the fortnight off. It is not a sequencing problem, which is why no sequence solves it.

Alternate the nights. And if both will not fit without complaint, keep whichever matches the problem you actually have: an acid is the tool for congestion and texture, and a retinoid is the longer, broader, slower project.

Sunscreen, which is not optional here

Every morning, without exception. Retinoids leave skin more sensitive to sunlight while you are using them, and much of what people buy a retinoid to work on is sun-driven anyway — so a routine without SPF is two steps forward and the same two back, on a schedule you will never see happening. What the number on a sunscreen does and does not measure is the thing to settle before you buy one.

A second reason concerns the bottle rather than your face: retinol degrades in light and air, which is why the sensible ones arrive in something you cannot see into, with a closure that limits how much air gets in. A retinol left on a sunny windowsill is an ornament.

What it will not do

• It will not do anything about the spot you have tonight. Wrong tool, wrong timescale — what a hydrocolloid patch draws out overnight is the page for that.
• It will not touch the brown marks a spot leaves behind at anything like the speed you want. Pigment runs on its own calendar, months rather than weeks on the brightening shelf, and every week of it depends on the sunscreen above.
• It will not fill a crease that folds when your face moves. Expression lines are structural, and what sits on the surface works on the surface. A product bought for that disappoints on its own terms.
• It will not do more at a higher strength if the higher strength is the reason you stop.
• Not one to start if you are pregnant or trying to be. Ask a doctor. That is the whole of our advice on it, and the only line on this list we would not have you reason your way through.

The thing that decides whether you get anywhere

Picking the rung you can keep rather than the rung you respect. Most of the above is a question about attendance dressed as a question about chemistry, and the strongest retinoid available, in a drawer, is a drawer.

The product

It is the bottom rung, which is the whole argument of this page: 0.2% is a strength to stay on for as long as it is working rather than a stage to get past, and it is the rung most people skip on the way to a number they cannot keep up. The formula is retinol suspended in an oil and not much else, the bottle is opaque rather than clear glass, and it costs little enough that finding out your face objects to retinoids is a cheap thing to find out. It is a cosmetic, so none of the drug labelling described above belongs to it.

The one people are searching for is the The Ordinary Retinol 0.2% in Squalane.

The Ordinary Retinol 0.2% in Squalane

We do not print prices here, because a price we typed last month is a price that is wrong today.

Written by JamieG in Garner Town, Tennessee.