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The New Normal of Retail

An eye gel didn’t work for me — and neither did reviewing it honestly

6 min readJul 24, 2018
Wow, never even thought to cover them up like that. Credit: puhhha/iStock/Getty Images Plus

I’ve had dark circles under my eyes for as long as I can remember — since childhood, in fact. Only twice have I seen my face without them: once at a Sephora makeup demo, when expertly applied YSL concealer erased them (my own face registered shock in the hand mirror), and during my senior year in college, when I slept nine hours a night after halting my social life entirely. The circles came back pretty fast when I found a boyfriend.

Occasionally, I’ll try a product that swears its different from all the others. The product promises some kind of new oxidation process, or a new collagen blend, or a new silk polymer cloned from queen bees, or whatever. And I fall for it. And it doesn’t work.

As I browsed on Amazon one day, an eye gel popped up — let’s call it EyeLite. The reviews promised (with many exclamation points) that EyeLite worked at reducing dark circles when nothing else did. The price seemed right — not cheap enough to be suspicious, and not expensive enough to exclude me as a buyer. Oh, fine, I thought, and added it to my cart. I used it for the next few weeks and studied my face carefully before deciding that it, too, didn’t work. Sigh.

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Katharine Coldiron
Katharine Coldiron

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