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.
