Review: Mario Badescu Acne Drying Products

Mario Badescu may not be a household name, but the company's products have earned the praise of such beautiful-skinned celebrities such as Naomi Campbell, Jennifer Anniston and Liv Tyler. After hearing such great things about Mario Badescu products, I decided to give a few things a try.

Recently, I dealt with a strange breakout that completely dominated the right side of my face and I was looking for something to dry up the breakout. I have combination skin, and after doing some extensive searching and scanning several customer reviews, I decided to try the Mario Badescu Drying Cream and the most popular MB product, their Drying Lotion - widely acclaimed as a miracle worker.

The Drying Cream is advertised as both an acne fighter and a concealer. However, I wish to revoke its concealer status. When used as instructed (on a clean face after moisturizer, before makeup) I found that I had to jump through hoops in order to get this to blend into my skin and then apply makeup on top of it. Because I am not a fair-skinned woman, this made one side of my face look pale unless a very thin layer was used. Unless you are a woman of fair complexion, I do not recommend purchasing this for its concealing properties.

However, there are a few nice things about this product. First and foremost, this cream absolutely reduced the redness of my acne outbreak. It also managed to get rid of a few "low bump" under-the-skin pimples. But, I was unfortunately expecting a lot more. The desired effect of this cream is to draw the toxins from the pimple that cause redness and inflammation and the bring the pimple to a treatable white head. Unfortunately for me it did not do everything that I expected it to do, but I will continue to use it as a spot treatment and underneath makeup.

The Drying Lotion, however, left even more to be desired. This was something that I had really been looking forward to using because so many others had been so eager to shout their praise for it from rooftops and beauty forums alike. I figured that it may work for me. I began applying it nightly (as directed) and occasionally through the day (when I did not have anywhere to be, or anyone to see me of course) on the outbreak and did so every day for about a week and saw no results. I applied it to both whiteheads and under-the-skin pimples and saw no improvement in either. In fact, (prepare for a possible over-share of information) with one particular pimple the bump remained while the whitehead disappeared. Thinking that perhaps it was working, I continued treating it for a few days but there were no changes. However, the bump was still there. Well, after another 3 days of this I realized that there was a problem - there was still pus beneath the skin, despite it not being visible on the surface. This was what caused the bump. With clean fingers I gently popped it, only to find that the pus had hardened under my skin. Okay, gross. But, had I not popped it myself, it wouldn't have gone anywhere - at least not for a good long while!

Overall, I still believe that these products may work for others although they did not work for me. The Drying Cream was able to give me moderate results, though I saw nothing from Mario Badescu's best-selling Drying Lotion. I will continue to use these products until I have finished them and hopefully they will do some good with a little more time, but thus far I remained unimpressed. If I were to give a grade to each of these products, I would give the Drying Cream a B- and the Drying Lotion a C-.