Irked. This is the only way I can describe how I reacted the first time a neck cream landed on my desk. “Great,” I huffed. “Like women need yet another skincare category to complicate their already taxing and insecurity-riddled beauty regimes.” I had so many thoughts about their existence and efficacy but I dismissed them – and the products – simply promising myself never to become that ridiculous person who actually uses neck cream.
Recently, I looked in the mirror and noticed these odd-looking lines around my neck. Not wrinkles, per se, more like those annoying creases you get in bedsheets that no amount of ironing can eradicate. I then remembered neck creams and began to ask the questions I couldn’t be bothered to investigate all those years ago: what do neck creams actually do again? What makes them different from your face moisturiser? Does anyone in the world actually need neck cream? And, most importantly, will they sort out my creased bedsheet neck?
Society’s obsession with a supposedly ageing neck and décolletage is nothing new. Beauty brands, however – too distracted tackling the wrinkles on our face, perhaps – only began focussing on necks in more recent years. “The market for anti-ageing creams targeting neck lines and wrinkles became more pronounced when fears around ‘tech neck’ started bubbling up a few years ago,” explains Lisa Payne, head of beauty at strategic trends intelligence agency Stylus. And yet, unlike other categories that started out as niche – SPF, liquid exfoliators, eye creams – and became wildly popular, neck creams have not garnered the same traction. This, says Payne, is “in part due to distrust around the validity of claims. But also in a recession or financial pinch, high-priced products outside of the core skincare suite – like neck and décolleté cream – are the first to be axed.”
The addition of a neck cream to your skincare ritual purely for the purpose of moisturising is unnecessary, argues Dr Emma Craythorne, who says, “The creams we use for our faces can simply be extended down onto the neck.” However, explains Craythorne, a dermatologist and president of the British Cosmetic Dermatology Group, there are caveats. “If your face cream is for a particular concern, it may contain more active or irritant ingredients and the skin on the neck is much more fragile than that on the face so it can become irritated more easily. Therefore, in that instance, a dedicated cream for this area would be beneficial.” Aesthetician Jasmina Vico attests to this. “Neck creams can help with firmness and hydration but for a lifting effect this can ultimately only be done with treatments, tailored machines and lasers.”
Facialist Vaishaly Patel concurs. “There’s only so much a neck cream can do,” she says wryly. Mesotox, a non-invasive skin-boosting treatment that combines mesotherapy with the tiniest amount of Botox to smooth lines and firm the skin is “incredible for the neck. And it lasts three to four months. For very, very deep lines, however, I would recommend Profhilo.” For those – like me – who might consider that a little terrifying, it’s worth noting that one of the upsides from the scepticism around neck creams is that brands are increasingly developing products clinically proven to work.
And so exploring the more recent slew of neck creams might be a worthy starting point. The patent-pending Siren Technology – formulated with four kinds of hyaluronic acid, peptides, amino acids and powerful antioxidants – in all of U Beauty products, can also be found in The Sculpt, the brand’s Neck & Décolleté Concentrate, which is said to visibly tighten in as few as five days and even restructure the skin on the neck, jawline and décolletage. Skinceuticals TriPeptide-R Neck Repair is essentially a retinol for the neck, while Cellcosmet CellLift Neck & Décolleté Cellular Skincare Cream has been shown to have an immediate tightening effect while also brightening and smoothing the skin.
There’s The Elevator from Trinny London, a concentrate that includes a cohesion technology that is said to improve the skin’s resistance to gravity, while Strivectin TL Advanced Tightening Neck Cream Plus improves the look of everything from crepey skin and age spots to horizontal lines and slackness in an impressive four weeks. And all of these are formulated in a way that is gentle enough not to aggravate the delicate skin around your neck. But will any of these actually absolve me of my creasy neck? It remains to be seen.
The biggest benefit so far is that all this talk has made me revisit Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck” – originally written for Vogue, and the titular piece in a whip-smart collection of essays on women and ageing. One of my favourite parts goes, “Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever’s writing it says it’s great to be old. It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Do they not have necks?” And so, funnily, I’m currently too joyously distracted by Ephron’s wit to be bothered about the skin around my neck. Still, if that changes, at least there’s now a plethora of solutions that actually work.
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