The "super" supermarket cream

The “super” supermarket cream

An economic crisis is gripping our country, so where does that leave our beauty choices?

Anyone addicted to the latest and greatest high-tech skincare, may baulk at the thought of sacrificing their favourite anti-ageing creams for something packing less power, but with a more appealing price tag.

But what if you could find a supermarket cream that could rival some of the most coveted prestige creams on the market? A cream that sits just under $50, yet ticks all the boxes when it comes to age correction, hydration, lifting and firming?

Olay Regenerist Micro-sculpting Cream, 50ml, $49.99, is redefining not just facial contours, but the entire skincare category. With its launch a new skincare niche has been created – that of the supermarket “super” creams. In a segment traditionally reserved for budget-priced, mass-market products, this latest beauty blockbuster raises the bar not just on performance, but on price tag and pampering. So extraordinary is the equation of its results to cost, this cream has the world’s beauty cognoscenti in overdrive.

When it was unveiled to London’s top beauty editors last year, their excitement overruled their adherence to the product’s embargo date, and the buzz for the skincare marvel was unleashed to the public before it even hit the shelves. In an effort to placate the frenzied band of women anxious to get their hands on this unattainable yet ultra-hot cream, an online waiting list for the product was created, resulting in 20,000 women being put on hold, champing at the bit waiting for the release of the wonder cream.

Set to launch in Australia this month, the fanfare for this seemingly humble $50 pot of perfection is not just puffery and hot-winded hype. This cream, packaged remarkably similarly to the exclusive SKII range, stands up to high level scrutiny. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of its much publicised pedigree are the results from an independent study conducted by the Good Housekeeping Research Institute in the US, an independent laboratory of the magazine in which products are evaluated by a staff that includes scientists, engineers, nutritionists and researchers.

In this case the Regenerist Micro-Sculpting Cream was blind-trialed against 24 other prestige face creams priced between $US100 and $US350. According to the results in the September 2007 issue of US Good Housekeeping, “Experts applied several creams – the Olay product as well as others with hefty $100-plus price tags – to volunteers’ skin and evaluated hydration levels over seven hours with a corneometer (a device that measures the skin’s moisture). The results: The Olay Cream beat its pricey competition, keeping skin more hydrated and for a longer time that the fancy creams. Even the $350 one.”

Paul Matts research fellow for Procter and Gamble, London, says, “There are enough ingredients in just one pot of Micro-sculpting Cream to literally sustain three separate creams.”

“But by putting the maximum amount possible of these three ingredients into one cream we aimed to target the three most difficult to treat areas – the eyes, neck and jawline.”