My Skin Barrier Was So Damaged Until I Found This $28 Serum on TikTok

Welcome to Deep Reviews—your one-stop destination to discover the absolute best products and brands the beauty industry has to offer. The Who What Wear staffers you already know and trust will research, test, and review the market's most sought-after and buzzed-about products to see which formulas (of the hundreds up for consideration) are worth your hard-earned money and attention. You can expect honest, uncensored feedback and no-BS recommendations our hard-to-please testers endorse without reservations.

The majority of our Deep Reviews will feature our editors' honest, ultra-hot takes on entire product categories or multiple products from a particular beauty brand, but every so often, we'll sprinkle in a special single-product format called Honestly, I Love It. As the name suggests, these reviews will hone in on one standout beauty formula our editors can't shut up about. This time around, I'm highlighting Experiment Skincare's Super Saturated ($28).

If you've dealt with extensive skin barrier damage like I have, then you know how frustrating it can be trying to find the right products to hydrate your skin. If your skin barrier isn't in great shape, it has a hard time holding on to moisture, no matter how much you apply. I've tried countless products that claim to repair the skin barrier with no luck, but I recently found a different kind of support formula that achieved the impossible for me.

To give you a bit more backstory on my skin, I've been dealing with severe dehydration and barrier damage. This happened after I used tretinoin for years without getting enough hydration. Back then, I fully believed the way to clear up my acne was by drying my skin out. I now know how seriously wrong that was thanks to a little education from dermatologists and aestheticians, but unfortunately, by the time I did learn, the damage had been done. I don't use tretinoin anymore and am a huge advocate for more gentle retinoids, but my barrier was left stripped, dry, sensitive, and reactive after that. I'm now (slowly, but surely) healing it by keeping things gentle and hydrating my skin at every turn.

As I mentioned above, though, it's tough for your skin to hold on to moisture when your barrier is so damaged—it takes a high concentration of hydrating actives to trigger those repair mechanisms. Luckily, TikTok-famous brand Experiment offers a $28 formula that does the trick. I began using it with low expectations since I'd used a lot of barrier repair formulas previously that didn't do much, but this serum is the real deal.

I'm really into Experiment and its approach because the brand doesn't do the obvious when it comes to formulation. Rather than putting out a hydrating serum that's like everything else on the market, one of the brand's co-founders Lisa Guerrera told me that they wanted to create a super hydrator that doesn't feature typical ingredients like hyaluronic acid. Instead, they decided to use a 30 percent concentration of glycerin, a well-tolerated and loved hydrating ingredient that when used in higher concentrations can repair the skin barrier.

As you can see in the "Before" photo above, my skin was pretty dull and dehydrated—it also felt a bit like sandpaper on the surface. After using Super Saturated for just three weeks, I started to notice a huge difference in my skin. It felt less tight and dry for starters, and even after just a few days of use, it gave me a serious dewy glow.

I know that repairing my skin barrier won't happen overnight, and it's still not perfect by any means, but this is a formula I actually believe can do the trick. It does have a thicker consistency that feels a bit tacky upon application so that's something to be aware of, but I find that it absorbs quickly. It leaves your skin feeling soft and hydrated, but no sticky after-feel. It's also amazing to use as a base for makeup. I noticed that every time I wore it under foundation, my makeup applied so smoothly and made my skin look extra airbrushed. It's true—great makeup application starts with a hydrating skincare base.

I also noticed that since I began using this, my skin holds on to moisture a lot better which is key for the repair process. I do sleep with a humidifier at night which also helps lock water into the skin barrier, but I credit this product as making the most difference so far. My barrier also just looks less red, angry, and dehydrated. Guerrera also shared a great pro tip with me that helps lock the formula in even further. You can pair Super Saturated with the brand's reusable sheet mask Avant Guard ($19) for your juiciest, most hydrated skin. I just apply a few extra pumps of Super Saturated than I would normally use and leave the sheet mask on for an hour. My skin feels so soft afterward.

I'll get into a few of the other star ingredients in this formula below.

Like I mentioned above, this formula features a whopping 30 percent concentration of glycerin. This is a lot higher than most other serums on the market that feature glycerin as an ingredient. In concentrations of 25% or above, glycerin immediately increases water content in the skin, enhances its ability to retain moisture, and even repairs the skin barrier. In addition, high molecular weight polyglutamic acid hydrates the skin's surface, giving it a plump, dewy appearance.

It also does a great job of soothing redness and irritation with ingredients like bisabolol (an active ingredient in chamomile) and prickly pear extract which binds moisture into the skin while protecting against irritation from stronger actives (like retinoids). Allantoin acts as another soothing ingredient that helps speed the recovery of stressed-out skin. It's also one of my all-time favorite ingredients since it works so well for my sensitive, acne-prone skin. Lastly, niacinamide rounds out the formula which does so many great things including controlling excess oil, improving barrier function, and lightening dark spots.

Guerrera shared a bit more about Experiment and specifically why Super Saturated is such a starring formula. Being two chemists, Guerrera and her co-founder Emmy Ketcham want to carve out a new space in the beauty industry that's rooted in education and fun, experimental skincare. "Our main mission with Experiment is to reimagine what 'science' looks like in beauty and ultimately change how consumers relate and interact with science in their everyday lives," she explains. 'Science' in beauty has looked one way for so long: black and white, lab coats, dropper bottles, and sterile. While it builds trust with consumers, it doesn’t present science as something relatable, cool, [and] fun! That’s why Experiment focuses on really unique, fun, and deeply efficacious products to show science can be colorful, culturally cool, and kinda weird!"

Super Saturated is the perfect formula to showcase this. "Hydrating serums is such a crowded, undifferentiated category filled with serums that by and large feature hyaluronic acid as the primary hydrating ingredient and the star of the product formula—and their textures tend to be very similar across the board," she says. "What makes Super Saturated so unique is the high, 30 percent glycerin concentration in a water-based serum format with a stringy, gloopy texture that our community of self-proclaimed 'Lab Rats' love! Glycerin is a very common ingredient, but it's usually in smaller concentrations (less than five percent) in most of your skincare. [This is] because high amounts of glycerin can get sticky and tricky to formulate with… so Super Saturated was very hard to pull off formulation-wise. But it was worth it because, at concentrations above 25%, glycerin gains these really amazing irritation-protection and barrier-repairing properties. The texture isn’t sticky per se, but it's definitely a 'heavy-weight.'

While it wasn't easy to formulate, Guerrera and Ketcham knew they had something special on their hands. "I’m blessed to have an amazing co-founder, Emmy, who is the chemist and formulator behind all our skincare. We have an in-house lab that allows us to really experiment (pun intended) and find the best formulas. Our primary goal was to create the most effective hydrating serum that was essential in your routine and was truly bringing something new to the market. With Super Saturated, we wanted glycerin to be the star ingredient even though most beauty marketers ignore it as a 'boring' ingredient. We knew, as chemist founders, that glycerin is really one of the best hydrators we have and has so many other cool properties beyond hydration. I remember when Emmy came to me with the first formulation of Super Saturated, she [said], 'I was messing around in the lab and I made this 30% glycerin concentrate thing—not sure if it's a good idea, though,' and the second she said that I knew we had something our community would love. It took a lot of tweaking to get the texture just right, so we did over 40 iterations on the product."

Guerrera even shared a few ways she likes to use this one in her routine. "When my skin needs heavy-duty hydration and soothing I like to 'marinate' (that's what I call it) in Super Saturated. I do about four to five pumps of [it] and layer my Avant Guard reusable sheet mask on top and hang out for 30 minutes or more. Because of the ear loops on Avant Guard, I can do some cleaning around my apartment or do work without the mask slipping. The mask really force feeds your skin the serum and your skin is so plump and calm after. It can really heal any irritation quickly and it’s great for makeup prep too!"

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