L'Oreal Age Perfect Night Cream Saved My Skin (Oh the Humidity!)

I'm not a skincare expert. Not even an aficionado, and I'm not into skincare as much as I admittedly should be.

I haven't tested a zillion and one products to compare this night cream to, so you can absolutely move on along if you're looking for an in-depth, vetted by an expert type of review. This is definitely not it.

All I know is that L'Oreal Age Perfect Night Cream saved my skin from a horrid existence, and I don't even use it as often as I should.

Essentially, before I moved to Portugal, my skin was great. To be explicit, I've never used make up on a daily basis. I don't use foundation when I do wear make up - only powder - and I typically have good skin.

The exception apparently, as I discovered the hard way, occurs whenever humidity strikes.

The backstory first. I lived in Toronto, from 0 - 27 years of age. Back then, I didn't understand the importance of skincare and couldn't fathom why anyone besides the acne prone would happen to be into skincare products.

I always knew I was blessed by the skin gods. I didn't have many pimples past my acne-prone youth, and once I was on birth control, even the pimples I developed during that-time-of-the-month nearly all disappeared.

I had friends who would say their diets influenced their skin, especially breakouts and oiliness, but I never once had these types of issues, even when my diet was completely out of whack.

Dry skin and flaking? A little around the nose, but nothing to write home about. Not even enough to bother me into buying a face moisturizer.

It was smooth sailing for ages, to the point where my thoughts on skincare were warped.

I figured moisturizers were only useful before or after priming your skin if you used heavy foundation.

Or if your skin was exceptionally dry one week, you might apply a cream overnight one day, or every so often after washing your face first thing in the morning.

But each and every day? Who had a need for that much product?

Oh how lucky I was.

Looking back, my guess is that in Toronto, humidity issues were fairly non-existent to begin with, and central air heating likely remedied what little high humidity there was outside.

Either way, my next stop was the UK, which Thomas and I stayed in for 2 years. Still the skin gods smiled down on me. Not much of a change.

Maybe there was a smidgen more flaking around the nose, a little more dryness, but that was possibly more down to aging than a shift in weather.

Alas, the lucky streak failed to continue the next hop over to a new country.

We landed here in Portugal two and a half years ago, and suddenly my skin morphed to be virtually unrecognizable.

Whipped by the weather, it flaked, itched, became blotchy and red, and to top it all off, speckles of blood from scratching too hard on my eyebrows appeared every so often. Good days? Yes, many, but there were full on seasons of dry, cracking skin.

The flaking wasn't just aesthetically unappealing, it was physically uncomfortable. And I didn't know how to handle it.

It took me a long time to make the connection between my skin problems and the humidity. I finally started to clue in once I'd begun to go through the second passing of the humid seasons.

I realized the summer months, which are dry here and not riddled with humidity issues at all, were a-okay skin-wise. Not completely normal, but I never stressed about the state of my skin.

That was true until the autumn rolled around. Like clockwork, my skin would get progressively worse until it was at a pretty steady bad-to-mildly-infuriating dry itch.

Spring would pass and so would the rain and humidity peak, and along with it my skin problems.

So to fix all the shenanigans the humidity was playing on my face, I bought both this face cream (Thomas picked it out) and a massive dehumidifier to help regulate the indoor humidity.

The first time I tried the L'Oreal Night Cream, I loved it. It's nice and thick, but not heavy on the face, it's easy to forget you have it on, without being insubstantial.

All I did was wash my face and apply it. I tested by using varying amounts at night, using very little products some days and a lot on others.

I definitely don't need much product, but since it's not all that expensive, I like to layer it on heavily in problematic spots on my face - like my eyebrows.

It did so much moisturizing to my face overnight, by morning I had immediately better looking skin, and if I happened to continue to use it, or to use it in the summer when my skin was already alright, it improved beyond what my "good skin" days ever looked like before.

Surely, this is why people moisturize their skin daily, even if they don't need to. It does look a lot better. Even if you already have good skin.

But back to the blotchy, itchy, flaking humidity-tortured skin.

Because the humidity was the problem, I was placing my bets on the dehumidifier being the thing to help most - how naive I was.

I started off using both each and every day - the dehumidifier and the L'Oreal Age Perfect Night Cream.

I was good at maintaining the routine at the start, but I'm lazy, an epic slacker when it comes to beauty regiments after years of being so spoiled with good skin (and good hair for that matter, which also changed drastically in Portugal, though that's a story for another day).

I started my slacking by using the night cream once every other day, then I'd skip a few days in a row, then once a week. I'd still empty the dehumidifier whenever it was full, but the night cream? It was good, but in my mind, not necessary.

I was wrong. Each and every time I slacked for too long, 3-4 days, even if the humidity was only bad some days, my skin would be in shambles.

Each time I picked up the routine, I'd see immediate improvement the next day, then if I slacked again, my skin would get steadily worse in the weeks of high humidity.

So I stopped slacking as much as I could muster, and my skin returned to normal.

I replenished my stock of night cream and bought the SPF 15 day cream as well, which I liked but wasn't a fan of with the sunscreen, since I wanted to have more of a tan.

I bought the day cream sans sunscreen to use whenever I forgot to use the overnight cream (I still prefer the night cream over the day), or to use after showers, and that helped cover me in case I was lazy/too tired to do my regimen the day before.

It all helped bring me back to baseline normal. And I'm sure if I managed to stay on the bandwagon, by now, my skin would be better than it's ever been before.

All this to say, this cream works. For me at least, for my dry, flaky skin that seems to appear every time humidity rears it's ugly head.

It makes my skin look smooth and so well hydrated if I'm having good skin days, better than it's ever looked before, and it removes the terrible look and physical discomfort from the bad days.

I love it, and while I may never be fully into skincare, I'm going to restock this product, trying my best to keep using it daily, for years to come.