I haven’t had any prior experience with Docteur Renaud products but I was reasonably impressed with his “Lime Purifying Programme”. It’s a one-use kit containing a scrub, clay mask and mattifying serum and it promises to purify the skin and even out the complexion in just twenty minutes. I say reasonably impressed because I find it difficult to judge one-off products. The kit costs £29 (though I think it’s £20 at the moment) which is getting a little bit steep for my liking when it comes to something that you only get one shot with! You still can’t go and get a good facial for anything near twenty quid, so I’m not saying that it’s bad value-for-money, but it would be nice if the kit contained two lots so that you could perform a follow-up treatment the week/month after.

The programme started with a scrub, which delighted me immensely because it had no scrubby bits, it was more of a peel. Much my preferred method of exfoliation! Then I had to mix my own mask (I love things like that) by pouring the Lime Clarifying Formula into the Enriched Clay Powder and mixing it all up with a wooden spatula. I applied the mask and waited. See below:

Hahaha. It dried really fast, so those in a rush really could have a quick and effective facial in no time at all (though see below for side-effects!) and it wasn’t too traumatic to remove. I soaked my face first with a warm cloth and then removed the mask once it had turned sludgy. This is always best, I find, rather than knackering the hell out of your face trying to chip dried plaster off it. After patting dry, I applied the Lime Mattifying Serum.

Results? Extremely clear, bright skin. Results after about seven hours? Extremely clear, bright skin with what looked like three volcanic eruptions blasting out of it! I had the hugest spot on my cheek, one in my eyebrow (possibly the most painful type, surely?) and one on my forehead. (I had filmed the spots for your amusement, but I doubt that film will ever see the light of day.) These spots aren’t necessarily a bad thing – many deep cleansing masks and treatments have this effect on me. I suppose you could say that it’s just the product working properly! One of my favourites, the Omorovicza Deep Cleansing Mask makes me look as though I’ve been in battle the day after I use it, but then a few days after that my skin is ridiculously smooth and clear.

Some might argue that it’s a bit pointless purifying the skin just to go and get a load of spots, but I do think that when the skin is cleansed deeply on a regular enough basis (I try to do it once a week or once a fortnight at least) then you go some way to keeping impurities to the minimum. It’s only when I forget to do a treatment for a while that I then come a cropper – which is what has happened this time!

Anyway. The Lime Purifying Kit – not bad, but steep in terms of price-per-use, which is, er, the price divided by ONE! I’m interested in the thinking behind the pricing structure here, because the other products in the range are very reasonable, I think. If you were canny, you could easily get two uses out of the kit, because the bottle and tubes are re-sealable, but you’d have to be careful with storing the clay powder and make sure you used the right proportions when mixing.

Has anyone else tried Docteur Renaud? You can see the kit and other ranges on the website: doctor-renaud.co.uk