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Drunk Elephant launches in Boots: These are the products worth buying

Your skin will love you with this Instagram favourite brand

Pippa Bailey
Thursday 11 March 2021 12:04 GMT
It’s universally loved for its promising-sounding formulas and its bright pops of packaging
It’s universally loved for its promising-sounding formulas and its bright pops of packaging (The Independent)

There were a long four years between Drunk Elephant’s launch in the US in 2014 and its landing in the UK, during which time it became the envy of Instagram and beauty bloggers for its promising-sounding formulas and its bright pops of packaging.

It’s been available through Drunk Elephant’s website, Space NK and Cult Beauty since 2018, but this week, on 9 March, it’s reaching a whole new level of accessibility in the UK as it launches into Boots.

The story goes that Drunk Elephant got its name from a myth about marula fruit– marula oil is one of the key ingredients of the line – which elephants eat when it has fallen from the tree and is rotting and fermenting on the ground, making them drunk.

The brand clearly has a thing for slightly cryptic naming: please don’t ask us to explain what the “Beste No 9” means in the Beste No 9 Jelly Cleanser, for example.

Read more: 10 best ice globes to bring a healthy glow to your face

The brand founder, Tiffany Masterson, describes the line as “clean clinical”, and while we don’t love the word “clean” (it has no clinical or legal meaning and gets slapped on all sorts of products), the approach is appealing: high-tech, clinically proven ingredients that are the best for the job, whether synthetic or natural , without what the brand calls the “Suspicious 6”: essential oils, alcohols, silicones, chemical sunscreens, fragrances/dyes and SLS.

You’ll find lots of the big-hitter ingredients here, from retinol and vitamin C to glycolic and hyaluronic acids, lots of “cult” formulas, and, of course, the internet-famous neon-pop packaging. To tie with with the Boots launch, we’ve rounded up our favourite Drunk Elephant formulas, so you know what to make a dash for in Boots.

You can trust our independent reviews. We may earn commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections. This revenue helps us to fund journalism across The Independent.

The verdict: Drunk elephant skincare

Cleansing is an area where you simply need a project that gets the job done, but Slaai makes it a luxury experience too; a little treat at the end of the day. It’s also among the most accessibly priced of the range. Coming a very close second is the skin-smoothing and clearing powders of the TLC framboos glycolic serum.

Now that Garnier is officially cruelty-free, here are the IndyBest team’s favourite products

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