Find your vitamin C

Vitamin C is the morning workhorse of a good routine — antioxidant defence, brightening, and support for firmer-looking skin in a single step, and it makes your sunscreen's job easier while it's at it. That pairing, vitamin C under SPF each morning, is where it earns its keep.

What the marketing rarely says is that vitamin C formulas differ more than almost any other category. Potent traditional formulas deliver faster results and ask more of your skin; gentler self-activating and derivative formulas trade a little speed for a lot of comfort. Starting lower and building up is not caution — for most skin it is simply the better path.

Three questions — your goal, your skin's tolerance, and your history with vitamin C — and we'll point you at the formula your skin will actually get along with.

Take the vitamin C quiz

Also considering a serum more broadly? Try the serum quiz.