Welcome back to Point/Counterpoint—after a yearlong hiatus, everybody's favorite beauty debate column is back. This time, we're diving headfirst into a very shallow pot of eye cream. Is it necessary? The jury is out. On one side of the aisle, we have Brennan, a self-proclaimed "Eye Cream Truther". On the other is Emily Ferber, who maintains eye cream to be an essential part of a balanced skincare routine (or something like that). This is Point/Counterpoint. Gloves on, folks. This one's gonna get dirty.
Point, from Brennan: Imagine I'm a salesperson at your local beauty department—I lure you over to my counter with a song and sell you a moisturizer for $40. You love it so much that you want the accompanying eye cream, so I go over to my little station and distill the same moisturizer into a much tinier package and I charge you twice for it. Boom! You've been scammed. Congratulations—to me, not to you, because you fell for it. This little scene happens every single time an unsuspecting chump purchases an eye cream. They're just elfin little moisturizers—and almost every benefit that's promised ends up being a marketing gimmick. (Dark circles are hereditary, no matter how much rare plankton sperm you press into them.) Undereye moisturizer is necessary but you can use literally anything else. Your regular moisturizer, a hyaluronic serum, or this $8 Korean aloe cream. This is the end of the article—please disregard everything you're about to read.
Counterpoint, from Emily: Brennan, the veil of youth shrouds you so opaquely you wouldn't be able to argue yourself into fries to go with a hamburger. Literally everyone knows that the skin around the eyes is thinner, and if you have any joy in your life at all, that skin gets stretched every time you make an expression. Suffice it to say, crow's feet come in early on a lot of people, and those people want—NAY, those people deserve eye cream with active ingredients like retinol and other anti-aging antioxidants. Indeed, the area around the eyes is more sensitive, more prone to dryness, more prone to milia than other parts of your face. I say customize your skincare accordingly. Currently my eye area is more chapped than the rest of my face—no need to slather on a heavy moisturizer everywhere. Just a little Bobbi Brown Extra Eye Repair Cream does the trick. Or by all means go on ignoring that, Brennan, and see how you fare 10 years from now. In the meantime, you may go parade your youth around some other part of the internet. Who knows how long it'll last you.
Photographed by Tom Newton.
