Ines Halvorsen

Ines Halvorsen is the Beauty Director of Ruvyne, writing from Oslo. She trained and worked in dermatology before moving to magazines, and she has spent the years since trying to work out which of the industry's promises survive contact with the evidence. Her position is that the honest list is short, and that saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise.

Halvorsen studied medicine in Bergen and spent six years in dermatology clinics, most of them attached to a hospital department where the same complaints arrived week after week: pigmentation that would not shift, eczema aggravated by the products bought to soothe it, patients who had spent a great deal of money on routines that could not have worked. She began writing about it partly out of frustration and partly because nobody in the consulting room had time to explain why the label on the jar and the study behind the ingredient were describing different things. At Ruvyne she covers skin, colour and hair with the same method she used on the ward: ask what the claim actually is, ask what would count as evidence for it, and then ask how long the honest timeline is. She is unimpressed by ingredient lists used as marketing and interested in the small number of things, sunscreen, retinoids, a few acids, patience, that hold up under scrutiny. She is equally interested in the part of beauty that has nothing to prove, the pleasure of a colour worn for no reason, and sees no contradiction between the two. She lives in Oslo with a great many half used lipsticks and a professional dislike of the word miracle. Her reporting has taken her to formulation laboratories in Lyon, to trichology clinics in London, and to a long argument with a chemist in Basel that she still refers to as productive. She writes a monthly column on what the research says, and considers the most valuable sentence in beauty journalism to be an admission that something has not been tested properly yet.