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Having had my head turned by the launch of No7s age-defying Future Renew range in 2023 – which includes serum, eye cream, day and night cream – I really didn’t think there was much more you could add to it*.
After all, it contained a world-first ‘super peptide’ formula called pepticology, designed to kickstart a healing process that helps reduce the signs of wrinkles and hyperpigmentation, and I really did begin to see a difference after just a month of trying it out.
However, turns out I was very wrong, as the scientists and creative bods at No7 have been beavering away behind the scenes to make Future Renew work even harder for our skin.
Enter the No7 night serum (starts at £39.95 for 25ml), a ‘scientifically advanced’ concoction specifically aimed at fixing our skin as we sleep.
This product has been so top secret, I had to sign an NDA to get my hands on it and it didn’t even have any of the Future Renew signature packaging.
I’ve always been a fan of No7s skincare offerings, having first tried and tested their breakthrough Protect and Perfect range in 2007, which saw their serum sell every 15 seconds.
But it’s not just me that’s a devotee. When the Future Renew Range was launched, five months’ worth of stock sold out in just one day. And, after I put it to the test and had visible results after six months, my mum and a couple of good friends quickly became converts – two years later, we all still swear by the range.
My only niggle back then, when I first tested the range, was how heavy the day cream felt on my skin, which was down to the fact that it contained SPF40. In comparison the day serum felt light on my skin – that was until I tried the night one, which feels even lighter.
Putting it on before bed – followed by the whippy-light texture of the night cream – is a huge bonus, as I go to sleep feeling less ‘slathered’ than I might have done otherwise.
Plus, I have been told that I don’t need to use eye cream with it, as the serum does the job just as well, so it’s one less step to a bedtime routine that these days contains a bevvy of supplements as well skin, hair and teeth maintenance.
When I wake, my face feels soft rather than night-addled – and, in my opinion, after two months of use, I also look a tiny bit fresher than usual.
Obviously it’s not all down to the night serum. Using it in tandem with all the Future Renew goodies, means that overall my skin is looking pretty good for nearly 52.
I certainly don’t have any major resting face wrinkles and despite a touch of menopause redness, which is tackled with Derm Solutions facewash (another product from No7 that I share with my teen sons), I’m still pretty happy with the range and its results.
Of course, time will only tell – so let’s check in after I’ve used this for a good six months to see what all the fuss is about.
THE BEAUTY EXPERT VERDICT
Claire Coleman is an award winning beauty journalist, this is what she thinks of this new product:
So No7’s latest night serum, is it really all that? Well from a geeky scientific perspective, the research they’ve done is certainly interesting. The brand has had a long-standing relationship with the University of Manchester and in 2023, launched Future Renew, an anti-ageing skincare range based on two brand new peptides, that took 15 years of collaborative research to create.
The latest research focuses not on peptides, but on chronobiology aka the science of your body’s daily rhythms. You might have heard of circadian rhythms, the way in which various processes — including sleep, digestion and hormones — in the body fluctuate over a 24-hour period, ideally in sync with the external clock, so you’re waking in the morning, hungry at lunchtime and so on.
Turns out your skin also has a circadian rhythm. In never-been-done-before research (set to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal later this year), the scientists took 20 women over the age of 50, and analysed skin from the buttocks (which isn’t usually exposed to the sun) and the forearm (which showed signs of sun damage) at 6am, midday, 6pm and midnight.
What they discovered was that the genes involved in repairing the skin are particularly active between 2am and 4am, and that sun-damaged skin suffers from ‘skin jet lag’ with fewer genes active and the rhythm of those genes weaker. Why does it matter?
‘You’ve got millions of skin cells within your skin and if their rhythm is out of sync with each other, then the signal that they’re sending is not as clear,’ explains Dr Mike Bell, head of science research at No7. ‘If you can synchronise the rhythms of these skin cells, you create a stronger signal.’
Basically it’s like everyone in an orchestra playing a bit out of time, you won’t hear the tune. But get a conductor in and get them playing to the same rhythm and the tune comes over loud and clear. And, when you’re talking skin, and that signal or tune, is the skin’s instructions to repair itself, that’s pretty important.
So what works as a conductor to synchronise the rhythm of skin cells? No7 tested a number of ingredients, including one called Lindera Strychnifolia, a plant extract that’s already in a number of their night creams because it has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. But it also appeared to have an impressive ability to get those skin cells back in sync and so in the night serum, it’s combined with the Future Renew peptides.
‘Testing on skin cells in the lab, we found that adding the Lindera extract resulted in three times as many genes being active, compared to when we tested with the peptides on their own,’ says Dr Bell.
It’s not the first time a skincare brand has promised to sort out your skin’s circadian rhythms. Estee Lauder’s Advanced Night Repair (£65) contains ingredients that claim to help synchronise clock genes — the genes that help govern the skin’s circadian rhythms — in skin, while other US-based brands, such as Althaea ($180 for the night serum) and 4AM ($69 for the night serum) also claim to work with your skin’s 24-hour cycles.
I don’t know for sure that No7’s does a better job of it than they do, but I do know that it’s far more competitively priced and that the technology — both behind the peptides, and behind the new understanding of circadian rhythms in skin — is exactly the sort of science I want to see beauty brands investing in.
*Apart from a neck cream, which I will never stop wanging on about until it happens.
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