I knew men had not
seen the true potential
of eye cream

I turn forty on the fifteenth of this month, which is the kind of birthday that makes you look at your own face rather more carefully than usual.

Five years ago I became certain of something and I am more certain of it now. Men have not seen what this stuff can actually do. We are nowhere near the ceiling, and it is not because the science is not there.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. The products on the shelf work. They were made by competent people and there is real science behind a lot of them. What I am saying is that almost none of it was ever specified for the man using it, and until that changes he will keep concluding the category has nothing in it for him.

That is the thing I was certain about. It is also why I stopped complaining and went and made one.

Specification is the whole game

You can run a high-performance engine on ordinary petrol. It will start, it will drive, and it will not do the thing the engine was built to do. Nobody would call that a failure of the petrol.

Fertiliser is the same story and closer to home. There is nothing wrong with a general-purpose plant feed. But give it to something that wants acid soil and you will spend a season in the garden wondering why nothing has happened, and you will blame yourself, or the plant, long before you blame the feed.

That is most men's experience of skincare. Not a bad product. A good product specified for a different set of requirements, producing a result you cannot see, followed by a quiet decision to stop bothering.

What the requirements actually are

Men's facial skin is around 25% thicker than women's. It produces up to twice the oil. The pores are larger, the collagen is denser, and the surface pH is lower. And most of us drag a blade across it every morning, which strips the barrier in a way no woman's routine does.

None of that makes men's skin better or worse. It makes it a different specification. The eye area is where the gap shows first, because the skin there is the thinnest on your face and it is where late nights, screens and cortisol land before they land anywhere else.

So when a man says he borrowed his partner's eye cream and did not notice much, he is usually right, and the reason is not that her cream is bad. He was asking a well-made product to meet a requirement it was never given.

Serum or cream, which is not a fashion question

You will hear that serums work better because the molecules are smaller and get further in. That is a simplification, and the version that holds up is more useful.

A cream is mostly occlusion. It lays a film of oils and waxes on the surface and slows the water leaving your skin. That is a real job, and if your skin is dry it is exactly what you want. A serum is a lighter vehicle: less oil and wax, more of the active you are paying for, and it absorbs rather than sitting on top.

Now hold that against the requirements. Twice the oil, larger pores. An occlusive cream is specified for skin that struggles to hold water in, and most men's skin does not have that problem. Under the eye in particular, a heavy cream has a habit of just sitting there, and sitting there is what produces the shine at nine in the morning.

So the format is not a trend. It is the same specification argument, one layer down.

Two decisions I would defend in a room full of chemists

I should say plainly that I run YCODE and we make a men's eye serum. Read the rest with that in mind. I have tried to write it so it survives you doing exactly that.

We did not use caffeine. Most eye products aimed at men do. Caffeine constricts blood vessels, which addresses one cause of dark circles, the vascular one. It does nothing about the other cause, which is pigment. We use a supercritical CO₂ extract of wild ginger, Zingiber zerumbet, which acts on both. It costs more and it is less recognisable on a label. It is the better molecule for the requirement.

We made three formulas rather than one. Not three shades. The serum carries light-reflecting minerals that correct the shadow under the eye optically, on contact, and how those minerals behave depends on your skin tone. Hydration, sensitivity and pigment all differ, not only colour. So there is an M for around 85% of skin tones, an M− for very light skin and an M+ for darker skin. Almost nobody in men's skincare does this, and I think that is a failure of ambition rather than a limit of the science.

Both are the same decision made twice. Specify for the requirement, not for the category average.

What the evidence says

The active has been studied independently by Eurofins Dermscan across 111 volunteers, 37 men and 74 women, mean age 42, all with dark circles or puffiness, at fifteen minutes and again at fifteen days.

At fifteen minutes, 86% said they looked less tired and 73% saw dark circles reduced. At fifteen days, those rose to 94% and 90%. Eye contour improved for 89%, and eye bags reduced for 89%.

Two things about those numbers most brands would leave out. They come from a study of the active ingredient rather than a consumer trial of the finished serum, and the industry blurs those constantly. And there is no fine-lines figure in it, so we do not make a fine-lines claim, even though it would be the easiest thing in the world to imply.

One thing that reads like a caveat and is not. Self-assessed means people reported what they saw. No instrument, no chromameter, just men and women looking at their own faces. For this claim that is the right measurement, because nobody experiences their own face through an instrument. Looking tired is a judgement, made by you in the mirror and by everyone who looks at you across a desk.

What it does, and what it does not

It will not make you look like a different person. It will not fix a fortnight of four hours a night. It addresses how that shows on your face, not the four hours a night.

What it does is the part that was measured. You see it, and you see it early. That is what 86% at fifteen minutes and 94% at fifteen days describe: not a machine's opinion, people looking at themselves.

And seeing it changes something nobody puts a percentage on. There is a difference between walking into a room having already written the day off and walking in without that small nagging thing running underneath. Not confidence in the motivational-poster sense. The absence of a low-level distraction. You stop managing how you look and get on with what you are there to do.

Most things that change how you carry yourself take months and cost a great deal. This one takes thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds, which is the specification that matters most

A rice grain under each eye, morning and night, tapped along the orbital bone. No residue, nothing to wait for, nothing to plan around.

That was the design brief. Not "is it powerful", but "will a man who does not care about skincare still be doing this in eighteen months". Everything in the formula is downstream of that question, because the best actives ever made do nothing in a cupboard.

Someone suggested recently that I stop for a fortnight and write about what happened. I said no faster than I expected to. Partly not wanting to go backwards on something that took a long time to get right, but mostly because it has become one of the two or three things I do every day without deciding to, and I would miss it. I cannot really tell you what living without it is like any more, and I am not curious enough to find out.

That is either the strongest thing I could say about it or an admission that I am the wrong man to ask. Probably both.

Which is where I came in, ten days off forty and looking at my own face. The difference between something working and something working for you is not effort, or willpower, or spending more. It is whether the thing was specified for the job. That is why I think men have not seen the top of this category yet. Not because nobody could build it, but because almost nobody has bothered to build it for them.

If you want to try it

The Advanced Eye Serum is £49 for 7.5 ml, which is two to three months for most men, a little over fifty pence a day. It is 4.9 from 39 verified reviews, and complimentary shipping over £75.

It is covered for thirty days. If you cannot see a difference, email us and we refund you, and you keep the tube, because posting a used eye serum back to us helps nobody.

Pick your formula below. If you are not sure which one, there is a short finder that will tell you.

Written by

Freddie Sheridan

I started YCODE because most skincare was never designed for men’s skin. What I write here is what the formulators taught me, and what the trials actually found.

More about YCODE →