This Brightening Serum Reduces Redness by Nearly 50 Percent in Six Weeks

Brightening serums are one of the most popular categories in skin care, and for good reason. “The ability of your skin to reflect light is a sign that it’s vibrant and healthy,” says Trinny Woodall, beauty expert and founder of Trinny London. “When our skin isn’t being looked after properly, it absorbs the light and looks dull.” To prevent that from happening and restore brightness and evenness to the skin, Woodall and her team created Naked Ambition ($86), a unique vitamin C serum with big brightening benefits. “We are super passionate about vitamin C, but we didn’t want to just develop another vitamin C on the market that was really boring,” says Claire Byrne, the brand’s chief innovation officer and scientist. Here’s the inside scoop on the formula and how it works to transform skin.

The Benefits of This Brightening Serum

“We set out a few years ago to think, can we reduce the need for people to wear concealer and foundation, and what are the reasons people do,” says founder Trinny Woodall.” They generally are because they have a redness to their skin or some pigmentation, or they just have overall dullness and want to cover things up to feel like they can face their day. To have that as a challenge, we looked at which ingredients were going to tackle that. The most obvious one for an overall brightening effect was vitamin C—we used slow-release ascorbyl glucoside—but we also love azelaic acid for redness.”

To deliver these two heavy-hitting ingredients, the brand decided to encapsulate the azelaic acid in exosomes, which Byrne had studied and was excited about. “If you go to a dermatologist’s office, you can get clinical-strength vitamin C and azelaic acid together, and they actually work as a great team,” Byrne explains. “But generally, you don’t combine them in the same routine because they are both quite acidic and can be really irritating for the skin.” The brand’s challenge was to combine them in a way that wouldn’t cause such irritation on all skin types, even sensitive, and that’s where the exosomes come into play.

“We have a very special type of lab-engineered exosome—it’s actually a global-first innovation—that contains 10-percent azelaic acid and it’s able to deliver it down to the hair follicles,” says Byrne. “Our follicular delivery system is 20 times more effective at delivering azelaic acid into the skin than just using azelaic on its own. At this depth, it’s able to target the root cause of inflammation, which is what’s causing that redness, blotchiness, dullness, etc.”

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But of course, then the brand needed to confirm the efficacy with clinical evidence. “We have our own lab, so we have the ability to really research the ingredients we want to use and do a lot of clinical testing,” Woodall says. Two placebo-controlled clinical studies were conducted at independent labs with more than 80 participants of different ethnicities (ages 22 to 70) in each. The first study was over six weeks and the second was 10 weeks. “Our clinical trial results are really incredible: We saw a 46-percent decrease in redness in eight weeks.”

How to Use It

In the morning, apply the silky serum (I love the nongreasy, gel-like texture) to your face and neck after cleansing your skin and before moisturizer and sunscreen. “It goes on really beautifully and absorbs into the skin quickly without that stickiness that you often get with vitamin C serums,” says Woodall. For me personally, the serum layers well with my hyaluronic acid serum, too (no pilling), and I haven’t experienced any irritation. The serum is also fragrance-free and refillable, which we love, and refills come at a discount ($78). There is a mini version, too, for $38 if you want a smaller jar for travel or to try the formula first before committing to the full size.