The Weleda Skin Food Original Ultra-Rich Cream Transformed My Dry Skin

We put Weleda’s Skin Food Original Ultra-Rich Cream to the test after receiving a complimentary sample from the brand. Keep reading for our full product review. 

Moisturizers are endlessly catering to every area of the skin—hands, feet, face, body, scars, cracks, stretch marks—their tubes and tubs sneakily hoarding themselves in our bathroom cabinets, purses, and nightstands. After recently testing Weleda’s Skin Food Original Ultra-Rich Cream, I felt like the clouds had parted, and I had been given a clear, directional solution for all of my winter skin woes. Skin Food was able to nourish the most dried, cracked areas of my feet, and yet it also gave my face a dewy, glowy complexion, enabling me to sub-out the careful efforts of applying the occasional highlighter.

The iconic cream, which was initially launched back in 1926, has remained a favorite amongst dermatologists, makeup artists, and celebrities alike, and for good reason. The formula truly is multifunctional, and in addition to acting as a nourishing all-over moisturizer, it doubles as a cuticle cream, a flyaway tamer, and a natural highlighter, just to name a few other uses. 

Keep reading for my honest review and the details of my current infatuation with Weleda’s Skin Food Original Ultra-Rich Cream.

About My Skin: Dry, sensitive and eczema-prone

I have needy skin. This may be why I’m so actively invested in skincare over any other realm of beauty, such as hair, makeup, or nails. I have eczema year-round, and now that I live in a valley, in the mountains, within a forest preserve that gets a heavy dose of all four seasons, let’s just say my skin has had a lot more exuberant flare-ups than the norm while acclimating to this drastic change from city life. My body is sensitive. What I eat, how I sleep, my activity or inactivity all have immediate, noticeable effects on my skin. For example, I’m not diagnosed with celiac or lactose intolerant, but when I consume dairy or gluten, I end up with dried-out, pink, scaly rings all over my body.

My husband laughs at the fact that I collect so many different types of creams and lotions. Creams for my body, my hands, my feet, my lips, my irritated patches of eczema, my eyes, my postpartum stretch marks. There’s a tube on nearly every countertop in our home, and the top of our dresser looks like a beauty lab with its array of ointments and special potions prescribed to soothe symptoms of itchiness and cracked skin. Skin Food became a replacement to nearly all of it for the course of a week. It made its way into the bathroom as my facial night cream and daily moisturizer/highlighter, followed me into the kitchen to smother my hands after cleaning countertops and washing dishes, and comforted the heels of my feet and soles of my elbows as I cuddled up in front of the wood-stove fire with a book in the evenings.

While I still turned to my derm-prescribed ointment to calm my flare-up after eating bread and kept my post-shower colloidal cream to subdue the itchiness that accompanies my skin as it naturally dries, I kept my Skin Food close at all times.

The Packaging: Environmentally conscious 

The packaging of this product is straightforward and easy to use. What I want to point out with Weleda’s packaging for Skin Food is their efforts toward sustainability and having an environmental consciousness. Taking packaging and product materials into careful consideration is a serious issue and topic of contemplation for us as consumers, dear Byrdies. Thankfully, I think beauty companies have a growing consciousness around the number of plastics and microplastics that are being used in their packaging efforts and the fact that most of it cannot break down to be reused or recycled. Weleda has teamed up with TerraCycle, a program whose mission is to “Eliminate the Idea of Waste” by repurposing hard-to-recycle bottles like those coming from the beauty industry. Pack up your finished tube or bottle into a recyclable box, print your free shipping label, and your Skin Food has the chance to take on another life.

The Feel: Truly, an ultra-rich cream

This cream is rich. It has some weight to it. But as a sensitive, dry skin type, most of my other creams have a similar texture and heaviness to them at this time of year. Despite its thickness, this cream doesn’t sit as heavy as others I’ve used. It’s a great foundational layer on the face that doesn’t interfere with the minimal makeup I wear (mostly bronzer and mascara). It absorbed into my hands quickly, leaving them soft to the touch. Now, a little does go a long way as stated on the back of the bottle, so if you go overboard, you may end up with a greasy feel.

Due to the density of this cream, it isn’t like most lotions you would apply to your entire body. I would recommend using Skin Food as more of a spot treatment, targeting areas that need extra moisture and attention. 

Ingredients: Clean, minimal, and cruelty-free

By Byrdie’s standards, Weleda is a fully transparent company that prides itself on the creation of clean and sustainable products that are free of synthetic dyes and fragrances, preservatives, and silicones. The formula, which has remained unchanged since its initial launch in 1926, boasts a combination of skin-soothing and nourishing calendula, chamomile, glycerin, lanolin, and beeswax alongside a cocktail of oils. With water, sunflower seed oil, and wool wax being the first ingredients listed on Skin Food, they hold the highest concentration levels in this product. Skin Food, along with all of Weleda’s products, holds a NATRUE natural certification label which ensures the highest international standards for natural cosmetics. 

Irritations: Potential allergens 

While there are so many benefits to clean, naturally derived ingredients like the ones listed in Skin Food’s DNA, one should always take note of the specifics for any potential allergens (especially my friends out there with sensitive skin). Skin Food uses active ingredients of calendula and chamomile. These ingredients are floral derivatives, and I call this out because I myself have seasonal allergies every Spring to pollen, ragweed, grass, and other natural encounters. Another potential allergen I want to note is sweet almond oil, as I know plenty of people with severe nut allergies that wouldn’t be able to handle any trace encounter, including topical, with almonds.

Since I break out in hives easily and have severely sensitive skin, I don’t take considerations like this lightly and proceed with caution when testing a product for the first time. When I applied Skin Food aggressively all over my face, there was some initial redness that quickly dissipated and never gave me a problem again, nor at any other area of my skin. While these ingredients likely won’t give my fellow sensitive friends any issues, you should always check with your dermatologist for safety and confidence. And I’d be remiss not to note that Weleda’s Skin Food has been “tested dermatologically both for efficacy and tolerance,” and has claimed to be a safe solution for even the most sensitive skin types.  

The Results: An instantly dewy complexion

I first used Skin Food on my hands in place of my Aesop hand cream. It was similar in weight, slightly more absorbent, and required much less product to feel hydrated. In mere minutes my hands were soft to the touch. Then I replaced my foot cream from Burt’s Bees. I appreciated how much lighter Skin Food was for my feet, a thousand times less greasy with no need to throw socks on for fear of residual footprints on my hardwood floors. I used a pinch of this product to cover the driest, most cracked areas of my skin, which at the moment happens to be around my feet and ankles, and felt the immediate relief of deeply nourishing hydration that lasts all day long. I applied the cream morning and night for fast and lasting results.

After waking up and doing a quick splash of cold water on my face, I dabbed it dry with a towel and rubbed in a dime-sized amount of Skin Food all over. It gave me an instantly dewy complexion in one quick swoop, highlighting my cheekbones, brows, and the cupid’s bow of my upper lip. For someone who doesn’t like to do her makeup, that result alone was a dream come true. When I’m not covered up in sweaters and turtlenecks, I’ll be applying Skin Food to my collar bones to extend that lustful, healthy glow. 

The Value: Unbeatable

Skincare products can get pricey, fast. For some reason, I find that the cleaner and more simplistic the ingredients, the higher the price point when it comes to skincare, which doesn’t always make the most sense to me. But at under $20, I can have a one-size-fits-all lotion to tackle my dry skin woes and trump nearly every type of cream I’ve collected. I don’t know what beats that. 

Similar Products: Coconut oil vs. Weleda’s Skin Food

As a moisturizer lover, I had a lot of comparisons to make for this product, but the most similar product I used for healing hydration was probably coconut oil. Coconut oil became a savior of mine as the winter weather approached and my skin changed, becoming dramatically drier all over. I was more susceptible to cracking, bleeding, and itching, and it was a job my Neccessaire Body Lotion couldn’t handle. So I switched to something more hydrating, much cheaper, and more natural: coconut oil. While it made my dry skin very happy, I despised the amount I needed to use, the difficulty of extracting it from the jar, the extreme greasiness that lingered all over me, and the fact that it didn’t last me all day. 

Skin Food, I’m happy to report, has really worked as a phenomenal moisturizing spot treatment for my skin. It absorbs easily, doesn’t leave any residue, doesn’t require a lot of product to see results, and has a hydrating power that lasts much longer than coconut oil. The one thing neither of these products offered is a relief to my itchiness, so to combat that, I use a colloidal cream after I shower all over my body, and use the Skin Food to get by, applying wherever needed, until my next shower. Together, this combination has been a dream for my unruly winter skin.