About 15 years ago, I was making $16 an hour selling designer denim to rich housewives at an upscale boutique. Though it was more expensive than I could afford at the time, I scraped together the cash to buy a three-figure bottle of SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic serum. I was obsessed with beauty magazines—including this very publication—and blogs, all of which said it was the gold-standard vitamin C formula. So I figured it must be worth the splurge to get rid of my post-acne marks.
And it was. And it still is! Twenty years after its launch, C E Ferulic is an icon in the skin-care world (we don’t use the i-word lightly). It’s won six Allure awards between Best of Beauty and Reader’s Choice and sits on the top shelves of beauty editors, celebrities, and skin-care enthusiasts everywhere. The serum is a beyond-potent combination of 15 percent vitamin C, one percent vitamin E, and 0.5 percent ferulic acid formulated to brighten skin, fade dark spots and hyperpigmentation, and target fine lines and wrinkles. It’s also… not cheap. A 30-milliliter bottle currently goes for $182. But C E Ferulic’s 20-year patent, which protected that hyper-effective ingredient blend from being duped, has just expired, which means other brands can now attempt to make their own versions, likely at lower price points.
Though vitamin C serums are a dime a dozen these days, they haven’t been around all that long. The late Sheldon Pinnell, MD was a dermatology professor at Duke University who first started working with vitamin C in the 1980s. He joined forces with Cellex-C to launch the first vitamin-C serum in 1990, before working with SkinCeuticals to create their C E Ferulic serum in 2005. In 2007, he spoke to Allure about his fascination with vitamin C and its impact on the skin. “I was interested in how it could stimulate collagen synthesis,” he said. “But we found that what it was really good for was protecting against sunlight.”
C E Ferulic isn’t your run-of-the-mill vitamin C treatment, and that’s what makes it so beloved. (And so effective. And so expensive.) Its magic is in that exact ratio of vitamin C to vitamin E to ferulic acid. According to Kelly Dobos, a cosmetic chemist and adjunct professor of cosmetic science at the University of Cincinnati, ferulic acid plays a very important role in this formula. It scavenges free radicals, helps the formula maintain its acidic pH—important for efficiency—and absorbs ultraviolet light that would otherwise cause destabilization.
That’s key when vitamin C, a notoriously fickle, unstable ingredient, is involved. “Stabilizing the vitamin C is [C E Ferulic’s] real benefit. Ascorbic acid itself is a great ingredient, but if it's breaking down, it's not useful at all,” Dobos explains. She says that on its own, pure vitamin C would only last about a week before destabilizing and becoming ineffective. Dobos tells me that, according to the patent, the addition of ferulic acid preserves “90 percent of vitamin C when stability tested for one month at 45 degrees Celsius [113 degrees Fahrenheit].” SkinCeuticals’ website touts testing that found that its ingredients “remain potent to the last drop for up to 36 months.”
SkinCeuticals patented their formula when it launched and has been vigilant in protecting it. Back in 2018, L’Oréal, which owns SkinCeuticals, sued Drunk Elephant, claiming that its C-Firma serum was too close to C E Ferulic for comfort (the case was dismissed two years later). But patents typically expire after about 20 years and now other companies will be able to legally try to replicate C E Ferulic’s potent ingredient makeup.
There are already many “dupes” for C E Ferulic, as a quick prowl through Reddit’s SkincareAddiction forum will tell you, but none of them could have the same ingredient balanC E—until now. “I think we're going to get a lot of competitors jumping in and trying to create a dupe product for lower cost,” Dobos speculates.
(As far as Allure knows, there is so far at least one new C E Ferulic serum coming from another brand this year, though we can’t share the details yet.)
But before you add a new and cheaper C E Ferulic dupe to your Amazon cart, Dobos advises doing your research and being skeptical of brands that capitalize on the patent expiry too quickly. “Are they as high-quality and safe as something from SkinCeuticals?” she says.
As cosmetic chemist Perry Romanowski points out, having the same ingredient makeup as SkinCeuticals’ original C E Ferulic doesn’t guarantee that a formula will have the same efficacy. Potency comes down to the quality of the ingredients themselves and the product manufacturing process, too. “Somebody can put in vitamin C, not stabilize it, put in the vitamin E and ferulic acid, then say it's the same as SkinCeuticals,” he says.
So, sure, the SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic formula is fair game now, but it remains to be seen if another brand will achieve the feat of creating an equal without a similarly high price tag. I’m doubtful, but happy to be proven wrong! Until then, though, I’ll continue reserving space in my budget for regular restocks of the original.
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