Review of Proven, Curology and Personalized Skin Care Routines

Many brands like Curology, Proven, Cera Ve, and Skinceuticals offer personalized skin care routines and advanced regimen builders.  How do you know which is best? Before you buy any brand of skin care, you should take 3-5 minutes to find out your skin type. This is the best way to know which skin care brand is best for you to get a dermatologist-recommended skin care routine.

In this blog we review Curology, Proven, Skinceuticals custom skin care routines to see if they are good for your skin. These brands are not right for every skin type. Take the quiz so when we discuss below which skin types they are best for- you will know what your Baumann Skin Type is.

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Curology was started by board certified dermatologist Dr. David Lortscher in 2014 when he had been a dermatologist for 2 years. His products focus on acne. If you sign up for a consultation, you can get products with active ingredients like:

• Tretinoin
• Azelaic acid
• Niacinamide
• Tranexamic acid

When I review the Curology skin care products and ingredients in them, they focus on acne but not dry skin, aging skin, or sensitive skin with inflammation.

The custom skin care routines by Curology are not truly custom or personalized for all Baumann Skin Types. They seem like a one size fits all routine for oily, acne- prone skin types that do not have much skin sensitivity. These routines can be very irritating and cause skin inflammation.

Another downside of Curology is you cannot easily mix it with other skin care brands with confidence that the routine will still work well. I prefer choosing the best products from different brands and combining them, and Curology does not offer that.

Curology Custom Routines should work well for you if you have oily, acne-prone skin with minimal redness and irritation. 

The Curology products will only work well for Baumann Skin Types 5 and 6. Curology is best for Baumann Skin Type 6, but if you get the consultation, the products may work for Baumann Skin Type 5. If you have dark spots from acne, and do not have stinging and skin irritation, the Curology line might work well for you.

Curology is not good for acne-prone skin types with dry skin and those that cannot tolerate retinoids, benzoyl peroxide, and foaming cleansers in the same skin care routine.

I am not impressed with the Proven Skin Care Custom Regimens for several reasons.

1. They do not have a scientific way to determine your skin type or it's needs. They do not have a skin type quiz that has been scientifically validated to correctly diagnose skin type. It is well known that people guess their skin type incorrectly. (6) Proven is asking you to guess what your skin type is.
2. They claim to have analyzed genome data from many different skin care ingredients but I do not see any publications from them about this in the medical literature.
3. They claim they have the most comprehensive skincare database in the world and technology that analyzes the effectiveness of over 20,238 skincare ingredients, from arnica to zinc." My question is- effectiveness on who and what skin type are they? Analysis of consumer data on skin care ingredients is essentially meaningless without an accurate diagnostic quiz and skin typing system. Just because an ingredient works for one skin type, does not mean it will work for another.
4. There is a question about if these products are truly personalized. For example, they cannot remove fragrance.
5. They are not transparent about what ingredients will be in your products and your final skin care routine.
6. They do not allow you to combine products from several brands.
7. The chemical structure and activity of skin care ingredients change when you combine them so studies must be done on the final formulations, no on the individual ingredients alone. You also need to test them in a layered skin care routine to see if they work together.

You can learn more about product layering here.

Skinceuticals was originally started by Dermatologist Sheldon Pinnell, the Chairman of dermatology at Duke University.

The medical grade products are well made and effective for many different skin types. We do not like their skin type quiz because it is not as accurate as ours. But that is ok. You can use our skin care routine quiz and use our skin care routine builder to combine Skinceuticals products in a skin care routine with other brands.

It can be confusing to know which Skinceuticals products to use in your routine because they have so many, we can easily guide you. Once you take the quiz, your skin type octagon will show next to the products that are right for you to make it easy to build a routine.

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Skinceuticals has many different products that can be combined in a regimen to cover the spectrum of skin concerns. As long as you choose the right Skinceuticals products for your skin type and use them in the correct skin care routine order, you should have good results.

The best part about the Skinceuticals custom routines is that you can combine Skinceuticals with products from other skin care brands to get a truly custom routine that works. This is the best personalized skin care routine that we reviewed.

Each skin care product in a skin care routine step should help the other skin care products in the skin care routine work better. The order that skin care products are applied on the skin makes a big difference! Product layering of skin care products needs a lot of scientific consideration to be done properly.

Designing a skin care routine is challenging. When a skin care routine is designed properly, it is a huge scientific puzzle because there are so many things to consider when customizing a skin care routine.

For example:

• Ingredients can affect the penetration and absorption of other ingredients.
• Ingredients, even clean ingredients, can turn into harmful ingredients when combined with the wrong ingredients.
• Fatty acids in moisturizers affect how well the entire regimen works
• Cleansers affect skin pH which also changes the way products in the routine work.

So let us help! Its free, it's easy, and we will empower you to make better skin care decisions.

• Baumann L. in Ch. 35 Skin Care Regimen Design in Baumann's Cosmetic Dermatology Ed 3. (McGraw Hill 2022)
• Falcone, D., Peppelman, M., van Erp, P., Ezerskaya, A., Varghese, B., & Uzunbajakava, N. E. The Role of Quantitative Optical Methods for Personalized Skin Care Solutions: Perspectives Offered by In Vivo Reflectance Confocal Microscopy, Raman Microspectroscopy and Near-infrared Microspectroscopy.
• Siddiqui, S., Khan, A. A., & Dey, I. (2022). Internet Technologies for Personalized Care. In Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Frameworks in Telehealth (pp. 173-189). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
• Markiewicz, E., & Idowu, O. C. (2018). Personalized skincare: from molecular basis to clinical and commercial applications. Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology, 161-171.
•  Standardization of Skin Care Routine Design and Skin Phenotype Diagnosis Facilitates Machine Learning and AI, lecture at 75th Annual Society of Cosmetic Chemists
• Youn, S. W., Kim, S. J., Hwang, I. A., & Park, K. C. (2002). Evaluation of facial skin type by sebum secretion: discrepancies between subjective descriptions and sebum secretion. Skin Research and Technology, 8(3), 168-172.
• Baumann, L. S., Penfield, R. D., Clarke, J. L., & Duque, D. K. (2014). A validated questionnaire for quantifying skin oiliness. Journal of Cosmetics, Dermatological Sciences and Applications, 2014.

• Baumann, L. (2016). Validation of a questionnaire to diagnose the Baumann skin type in all ethnicities and in various geographic locations. Journal of Cosmetics, Dermatological Sciences and Applications, 6(1), 34-40.