Product review: Nivea Q10 Firming Body Lotion

I love Nivea products. Always have. I inherited that love from my mother who has also always been a fan. Sure, most of the skin care products I use now are Dermalogica but Nivea does everything well at a fraction of the cost and for things like body lotions I think they’re really hard to beat.

So, you may consider me biased, but at least I admit it, right?

I have two bottles. I don’t consider that excessive. What if I ran out?

I’ve been trying to moisturise every day since sometime in January, I think. I go through phases with this, as I mentioned in a post last week. However, at the moment I’ve been doing pretty well at sticking to this habit and that means that I go through moisturisers quickly. It also means that by the time I reached for the bottle of Nivea (after using up bottles of Royal Apothic, Burts Bees, and some Lavender stuff from M&S) my skin was already in pretty good condition.

Nivea has a nice, light scent that to me just smells clean. The consistency is smooth and there’s no problem with it sitting greasily on the skin’s surface; it gets absorbed readily. A little goes a long way too – I expect my bottle to last me a long time. For reference, I normally go through a bottle this size in around a month – if I use it every day. I’ll update this post when I finish the bottle.

The one thing that gets me? “Firms the skin in 2 weeks.” What a claim. I’m not sure what it even means and I think it’s overly bold. I’ve been using it for three weeks now. My skin feels nice and soft and it looks healthy but is it firmer? No. And that’s really not a big deal because this is already a  good product. I don’t feel like they need to try to add these things to make it worth buying – it’s just misleading. The back of the bottle gives more detail, saying,

This power formula is now enriched with 3 effective ingredients for an energised skin feeling. The advanced “Energy Complex with Coenzyme Q10, Creatine and L-Carnitine supports skin cell’s energy and cell renewal*.

*in vitro tests

Skin cell’s energy? Does it… help the mitochondria? Or somehow persuade better glucose uptake or something? Or is this just nonsense? The cell renewal in vitro tests does suggest that someone in a lab has actually done something but it probably means someone has skin cells in a test tube and found that they “renewed” better when this moisturiser was applied than they did when it wasn’t. If you think skin behaves the same way in a test tube as it does when it’s on your body I’m afraid you’re mistaken.

As far as I can tell, the “Q10” thing should also be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. There doesn’t seem to be much science behind it. The Nivea website says it’s a “vitamin-like substance found in every cell in the human body.” and that it “stops free radicals from damaging cells, as this causes skin ageing.” Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the free radical theory of ageing had long since been debunked. Even if it hadn’t, if Q10 is already found in ever cell in the human body, shouldn’t it already be slowing the ageing process? This sounds suspiciously like nonsense to me.

I sympathise, though and I’ve ranted quite enough given that I actually really like this product. I’d recommend it to anyone if what you want is a body lotion. If you want something to reverse the ageing process, I’m sorry, science can’t do that yet. The Nivea body lotion range does work well and presumably, they need to do something like this to stay competitive in a cosmetics industry so heavily propped up by lies and pseudo-science. I wish they’d rise above it but I can see why they don’t.

Anyway, I still like the moisturiser. In my opinion, you’ll struggle to find a better one for the price and you’ll probably not find a better one even if you’re willing to pay quite a lot more.