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I once read (in Vogue? Mademoiselle?) that keeping your beauty products in the fridge would prevent them from separating and going bad, so I dutifully stuck every serum and cream I had in there. For a while, I would go downstairs every morning to retrieve my face moisturizer from the butter compartment in the fridge — until I realized that all of my beauty products vaguely smelled like food. I quickly headed over to Amazon and snagged myself a tiny $40 mini-fridge to separate my topicals and ingestibles. Smart Dish Washer
The Cooluli mini-fridge runs almost silently, uses about as much power as a 50-watt light bulb, and fits in very small spaces — I’ve got mine tucked next to the towels in my bathroom cabinet. Because it isn’t technically a fridge at all (it doesn’t have a compressor or use Freon), it’s perfect for skin care, which you want to keep cool but not frozen. You know how, depending on where you put your cup of yogurt in the fridge, it can come out with shards of ice inside? Imagine that with Good Genes.
While my household fridge runs between 33 and 38 degrees, the Cooluli mini-fridge keeps things in the 46- to 50-degree range. (The Amazon page says it cools things down 45 degrees from ambient temperature, but I just stuck a meat thermometer in there.) David A. Colbert, creator of the Colbert MD product line and head of the NYDG Wellness Center, told me: “Beauty products all have a shelf life that lower temperatures will prolong, but lotions and creams have a lot of water, and can freeze closer to 32 degrees. Forty-six degrees is perfect.”
Smart Dish Washer These days, I keep my retinoids and vitamin C products in the Cooluli, as they can tend to oxidize and turn brown if not kept in a continuously cool, dark place. (If you’re still keeping expensive beauty products in your intermittently hot and steamy bathroom, stop.) My masks are more refreshing; my creams creamier. It also looks like Allure editor-in-chief Michelle Lee and I share a brain. The one thing to note is that perfumes should not go in the fridge (the cold can actually damage them), but most other skin-care products benefit. Now that I’m no longer sticking everything in the Frigidaire, I don’t have to wait for my lotions to defrost — and my face doesn’t smell like Land O’Lakes anymore, either.