Welcome to Deep Reviews—your one-stop destination to discover the absolute best products and brands the beauty industry has to offer. The Who What Wear staffers you already know and trust will research, test, and review the market’s most sought-after and buzzed-about products to see which formulas (of the hundreds up for consideration) are worth your hard-earned money and attention. You can expect honest, uncensored feedback and no-BS recommendations our hard-to-please testers endorse without reservations.
The majority of our Deep Reviews will feature our editors’ honest, ultra-hot takes on entire product categories or multiple products from a particular beauty brand, but every so often, we’ll sprinkle in a special single-product format called Honestly, I Love It. As the name suggests, these reviews will hone in on one standout beauty formula our editors can’t shut up about. This time, I’m highlighting one of my favorite new launches, Drunk Elephant’s Bora Barrier Rich Repair Cream ($69).
Whenever the weather starts to get colder, my skin almost immediately freaks out. I have dry skin that’s particularly reactive to the cold. Not only does it start flaking and feeling tight and uncomfortable, but it also gets noticeably duller and loses a lot of its radiance. This means that my makeup never sits that well on my skin and I have to be careful about harsher products like retinol that I typically use often.
There are plenty of moisturizers that I’ve used and loved over the years. This year, however, I was in between moisturizers and wasn’t particularly excited about any of the ones I’d been testing. That’s why when I heard that Drunk Elephant, one of my favorite brands, was releasing a new moisturizer, I knew I had to try it immediately.
Drunk Elephant’s moisturizers have always been favorites of mine. The Protini Polypeptide Cream works wonders for firming skin, while the Lala Retro Whipped Cream is a restorative powerhouse. Its newest product, the Bora Barrier Repair Cream, couldn’t come at a better time for me. The ultra-rich cream promises 24 hours worth of deep moisture.
“It’s for chronically dry skin, it repairs the barrier,” says Tiffany Masterson, founder of Drunk Elephant. “It’s a much more reparative cream. There’s some confusion on social with the community [on] what’s the difference between Lala and Bora. It’s very simple—Lala is maintenance, Bora is repair. It really goes in and fixes the broken barrier and helps by giving the skin ingredients that it produces itself, along with some of these other great ingredients to help retain the moisture.”
That’s thanks in large part to the brand’s 6-Butterlipid Complex, which is a mixture of ceramides, lipids, and butters that help soothe and moisturize the skin, support the skin’s natural ceramides, and protect and repair the skin’s barrier. The cream also has zinc and copper gluconates, which promote anti-redness and helps skin synthesize collagen. All of these ingredients are rounded out by alpha glucan, a polysaccharide found in rice, which helps boost hydration.
Masterson says that you can use Bora Barrier Repair Cream both morning and night, but I started using it exclusively as my nighttime moisturizer for two weeks. After just a week of consistent use, I noticed an immediate difference: I was waking up with dewier, more hydrated skin every morning. My face also looked more radiant. Before I started using Bora Barrier Repair cream, my skin had started to look pretty dull. For my skin to look dewy in December, it’s a major feat. I can’t wait to continue using Bora Barrier Repair Cream through the rest of the winter.
