Me and my flat iron are great friends 95% of the time. The remaining 5% is made up of those few occasions when I am too stupid to pay attention and get various body parts of mine caught between the two ceramic plates. A few weeks ago it was my left thumb’s turn to get fried. Having finished my usual ritual of yelling profanities through a mouth full of said left thumb, I immediately started rummaging through my stash in search of some magic potion that would restore my poor limb to an acceptable state. I soon came up with three things:

1. a home-made replica of Skinceuticals’ B5 gel
2. a bottle of aloe vera gel, enriched with some more panthenol, hyaluronic acid and extracts of various herbs
3. and finally, a sample of Uriage’s Cu-Zn Cream

I sat down to my desk, applied these three things in the respective order, and what followed was nothing short of a miracle.

I first put a drop of the home-made B5 gel onto the burnt skin and let it settle a bit. After it got absorbed a little, I sprayed on the aloe vera gel to give the hyaluronic acid some moisture to work with and to further aid the healing process. I kept blowing air onto the damaged area as well to cool it a bit and lessen the pain, but of course the calming effect was only temporary: the minute I stopped, the pain came back.

As a last step I dabbed on a smidgen of the Cu-Zn Cream and the miracle began: my thumb ceased throbbing and burning the second I applied the cream and the pain never came back. After this pleasant little surprise I put a band-aid on my finger and went about doing my business for the day. When I got back home about 6 or 7 hours later it was time to do the washing up, pack in and head for our summer cottage. I tried to do the washing up with the bandaid on, but it soon fell off and to my greatest surprise the deep red, irritated skin I had had in the morning was entirely a thing of the past by then. My thumb was as good as new, with only the skin still feeling a bit tight, but that too went away remarkably quickly. By the time I arrived to our cottage, my parents couldn’t tell which thumb I had burnt in the morning, and to be quite honest, if (by some weird accident) I had suffered a partial memory loss and had forgotten everything that happened to me that day, I couldn’t have either.

Oh boy… Look how much I babbled when I could have just said instead: “Wow girls, take a look at this weird blue stuff! It made my burn go away in less than half a day!!!” But then I do strive to be a little more convincing than that.



On another occasion my encounter with a particularly nasty bug left me with a similarly nasty swell on my neck, which looked not unlike a raspberry with an insect bite in the middle. That was in the morning, and applying the same treatment (sans the aloe very spray) had left me with the same spectacular results by mid-afternoon. There was only a slight rosy tint left, a faint reminder of the angry thing that it was just half a day before.

A friend of mine whom I actually got this cream from uses it as a night treatment when she feels her skin is in need of some serious calming and soothing action. She reported that in the morning she wakes up with skin that is firmer and more uniform, as if it had been given its own weekend getaway to a spa.

I haven’t had this cream for very long yet, but it has already helped me out on several occasions, which made it well worth a blog entry and a strong recommendation.

Uriage Cu-Zn cream is a copper-zinc emulsion made for “atopic skin and skin prone to irritation, requiring a protective, soothing and disinfectant effect”. It is hypoallergenic, free of fragrance and preservatives, and comes in 75 ml metal tube.

Above mentioned friend of mine got me the full size product from Romania (naturally, the brand Uriage is not present on the Hungarian market...) and it cost me 2100 HUF, which is the rough equivalent of 11.18 USD or 7.8 EUR, but I have seen it being sold for more than 30 USD on online stores, which in my opinion is simply ridiculous.

Izar © 2009