By stufflovely
It’s been just around two months since Topicals made its debut on the skin-care scene. Within 48 hours of its launch on Nordstrom.com, the retailer was sold out of products from the burgeoning brand — whose founders both happen to be under 25 years old.
Olamide Olowe, 23, and Claudia Teng, 24, set out to create a skin-care brand to give folks with hyperpigmentation and eczema some fresh, new options. They created two products: Faded ($36), a gel-serum that helps treat hyperpigmentation, and Like Butter ($32), a moisturizer that can also be used as a mask for dry, flaky, eczema-prone skin.
Though I credit my father’s genes for my relatively good complexion, as a darker-skinned woman, hyperpigmentation is pretty much inevitable. “Hyperpigmentation is caused by overproduction and irregular distribution of melanin in the skin,” Nancy Samolitis, a board-certified dermatologist in Long Beach, California previously told Allure.
Now, there are a few factors that can trigger hyperpigmentation, but skin inflammation and trauma, like getting a pimple, is definitely one. It’s also the one that most often causes me to get dark marks. It doesn’t happen with every pimple I get, but it definitely makes its unwelcome cameos, conveniently (*insert eye roll here*) after one or a few older dark marks have already faded.
By the time I received my tube of Faded, two new spots of hyperpigmentation appeared on the right side of my face — just in time! So I headed to the bathroom, cleansed and toned my face, added a moisturizing serum, then squeezed a tiny, smaller-than-a-pea-sized amount of Faded onto my finger then rubbed it into my dark spots. It has a thin consistency, but I wouldn’t say that it absorbs quickly. It takes quite a bit of rubbing in for the product to completely disappear into my skin.
