Forget the celebrity founder. Two of this month’s launches come from a dermatologic surgeon who has spent his career watching wounds heal and a chartered chemist who has spent decades formulating for sensitive skin, and we’d take that CV over a famous face any day. Add a laser eye mask and a foundation made of peptides, and October’s skincare has plenty to say for itself.

The gadgets

Hello Klean Skin Filter

We read every label on every product, but what about the water that comes out of our tap? Hello Klean, the British water-filtration brand best known for its shower filters, wants us to face the hard truth about our cleansing step – and it’s providing a brand new solution for London’s hard water. Its new Skin Filter fits onto a single-lever bathroom tap without any drastic plumbing, then filters hard water in stages: a calcium-based scale inhibitor and a titanium-based medium deal with scale and metals while activated carbon fibre takes on chlorine. The brand says this can inhibit up to 92% of scale and reduce lead and chlorine by up to 98%.

We’re bubbling over the microbubble mode, which works on the Venturi principle: water is squeezed through a narrow passage, speeds up and pulls in air, which breaks into microscopic bubbles in the stream. Those bubbles are said to increase contact between the water and your skin and help loosen sebum, SPF and make-up residue so they rinse away more easily. Cleansing is a job for two, apparently. If you’re new to Hello Klean, there’s also an app that tracks your usage and can connect to multiple devices within your home. It’s available now at HelloKlean.com and subscribers get a significant discount on refills with zero commitment.

Magnitone’s Eyevenger Pro

Eyes may be the window to the soul, but they’re also the window to late nights and regrets. Thankfully, if you thought LED masks had reached peak facial furniture, Magnitone has another trick up its sleeve. The London beauty-tech brand has launched Eyevenger Pro, an eye mask that combines three LED wavelengths with 1072nm low-level laser therapy – a step beyond the LED-only devices that have become a fixture of at-home skincare routines.

While the different LED wavelengths work at different levels of the skin, the 1072nm laser is designed to reach into the dermis, where collagen lives, making it a deeper treatment to improve firmness and reduce visible signs of ageing.

The combination of red, deep-red and near-infrared LED with the low-level laser targets fine lines, wrinkles, puffiness, dark circles and sagging, with 108 light sources giving coverage across the eye contour. A £174.99 price tag will make you wince, sure, but this is a significant upgrade to your home therapy spa.

The skincare heroes

Eighth Day Regenerative Serum

Dr Antony Nakhla has treated more than 10,000 surgical patients, specialising in reconstructive procedures and wound healing, which means he has spent his career watching skin do what it does best when it gets the right instructions: repair itself. Eighth Day, the brand he founded, is built on that observation, and it has now launched online and in 20 Space NK stores, its first full launch in the UK.

The Regenerative Serum leads the nine-product range and is where the idea is most concentrated. At its heart is Peptide-rich Plasma, a patented complex of 24 bioidentical peptides along with amino acids and growth factors, inspired by platelet-rich plasma and developed over more than 20 years of research to mimic the skin’s own ability to renew. The brand says the serum goes after the ten visible signs of ageing, which is a long list for one bottle, and we love that it comes from a surgeon who has seen skin heal up close. Just beware of the price tag – this one is a skinvestment.

Drunk Elephant Kamo Triple-Peptide Cover Drops

Drunk Elephant has finally and officially entered the make-up chat (after dipping its toes in it with bronzer drops), but Kamo Triple-Peptide Cover Drops is a very Drunk Elephant way of doing it. If you’ve ever mixed D-Bronzi into your moisturiser, you’ll recognise the formula: concentrated colour which can be added to whatever moisturiser or SPF you’re wearing, with the amount of coverage entirely up to you. Kamo turns that into complexion makeup, with 18% amino-acid-coated pigments and a 4% peptide complex that can be used on its own as foundation or concealer, or mixed into your moisturiser, serum or oil for a sheerer skin tint.

The quantities are entirely up to you – and we love the sheer flexibility of it all. Regardless of how heavy-handed you are, the coverage is natural-looking and not cakey, mostly thanks to components like marula oil, green tea seed oil and squalane. Relatively pricy (£37) but you get what you paid for – skin-loving goodness bottled up. It’s also available in 25 shades. Available here.

SOS Body

Sensitive skin has an emergency number, and it’s SOS Serum Skincare. Created by chartered chemist Bruce Green, who spent decades formulating for top UK and US cosmetic brands, the brand has trust stamped all over it. Its answer to the biggest issue he noticed on people’s skin – sensitivity – was a vegan, cruelty-free range of simplified formulas with minimal ingredients, made to be as gentle as possible and suitable for all skin types and for anyone over one month old.

Now the rescue team has been called in for everything below the decolage. Two years in the making, SOS Body is a hand and body cream that Bruce describes as “a weighted blanket for your limbs, not a sheer silk scarf”, and the formula backs that up with a higher level of occlusive ingredients than your average body lotion, creating a protective layer that slows moisture loss.

Gentle exfoliation keeps skin smooth, coffee seed extract and edelweiss bring antioxidant support, and sage leaf extract soothes, while grapeseed oil, a signature across the brand, nourishes without leaving a sticky finish. It has just launched at sosserum.co.uk and we strongly recommend you keep one in your bathroom shelf at all times – not least to resurrect your skin when other brands have rubbed it up the wrong way.

Evolve Organic Beauty’s EGF + Collagen Renewal Booster

Salmon DNA anyone? No? Well, luckily we no longer need it to get the skin-repairing benefits PDRN is prized for. Vegan PDRN interest on TikTok has reportedly jumped 414%, with brands swapping salmon for biotech and plant alternatives. The results of plant-derived PDRN might not match salmon’s to the letter, a bit like vegan versus bovine collagen, but our powerful plants are clean, lean and often hyper effective, and Evolve Organic Beauty is a love letter to them, transmuting wonderful natural ingredients into skin-friendly skincare.

Its brand new EGF + Collagen Renewal Booster piqued our interest, as it combines T-EGF, a signalling protein that helps skin cells communicate while they renew, with a spinach-derived PDRN sourced from Korea and vegan collagen peptides from upcycled Arctic microalgae that support the look of firmness and elasticity. Multi-molecular hyaluronic acid and regeneratively grown Amazonian cacay oil complete the formula, which is 100% natural, 60% organic, COSMOS Organic certified, vegan and cruelty-free.

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