While there are hundreds of skincare ingredients to be found in the best moisturisers, serums and cleansers, the ones that skincare experts genuinely rate tend to be few and far between. Typically, when speaking to dermatologists for work, it’s retinol, vitamin C and SPF that are recommended time and time again for an efficacious skincare routine, but there’s another lesser-known ingredient that’s currently rising in popularity—tretinoin.
Neither a groundbreaking new discovery or a viral fad with no science behind it, tretinoin was actually approved for medical use in 1962, and is one of the most commonly prescribed ingredients in western dermatology. However, thanks to some pretty impressive before-and-after content doing the rounds on TikTok this year, Google searches for tretinoin have doubled in 2024 and it seems that everyone wants to get in on the action.
