Niacinamide, and what 5% actually does.

Niacinamide is a form of vitamin B3, and it is the ingredient I recommend most often to women in the transition, which is odd only because it is the one nobody gets excited about. It does not tingle, it has no scent, and it produces no dramatic first week. What it does is rebuild the specific thing that perimenopause takes away.

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth understanding because it explains why this ingredient in particular. Your barrier is held together by lipids, ceramides chief among them, which sit between the surface skin cells like mortar between bricks. Estrogen supports their production. As estrogen falls the mortar thins, water escapes, irritants get in, and you arrive at the tight, reactive, dull-looking skin that brings most women to a practitioner. Niacinamide increases the skin's own synthesis of ceramides and free fatty acids. It is not sitting on top of the problem, it is restocking the exact supply that ran down.

“Estrogen falls and the mortar between the bricks thins. Niacinamide tells the skin to make more mortar.”

The dose, since it decides whether you are buying anything. The research clusters around a low single-digit percentage: roughly 2% is where barrier and ceramide effects show up, and around 4 to 5% is where the work on tone, redness and sebum quality sits. Five percent is the well-studied middle, which is why our B3 serum uses 5% and says so on the front. Higher is not better in a way you would notice: past about 10% the main additional effect is flushing and irritation in sensitive skin, which on a thinning barrier is a cost with no matching benefit. If a brand is advertising 20%, they are advertising a number, not a result.

Now the myth, because it is the most persistent piece of misinformation in skincare and it stops people using two good ingredients together. You will read that niacinamide and vitamin C cancel each other out, or combine into something irritating. The origin is real but ancient: heat niacinamide in a strongly acidic solution and some of it converts to niacin, which causes a harmless but unpleasant flush. That is a chemistry experiment, not a bathroom shelf. It requires conditions modern cosmetic formulations do not create, and it is entirely irrelevant to an oil-soluble vitamin C at neutral pH, which is what ours is. Use them together. Millions of people do, in the same products, with no issue.

How I ask clients to use it: morning and night, after cleansing, before any oil. It is a water-phase step, so it goes on first and lets the oils seal over it. It is one of the very few actives gentle enough for genuinely every day, and unlike retinoids it does not need a tolerance build.

Expectations, honestly. Barrier comfort is the first thing to shift and often the fastest, sometimes inside three to four weeks: less tightness after washing, fewer days where everything stings. Redness and tone take longer, eight to twelve weeks. It will not lift pigmentation on its own, it is not a retinoid, and it will not do anything visible about lines. What it does is make everything else you apply work on skin that is intact enough to receive it, which is why I would keep it over almost anything else.

Davina Hearne, Naturopath (Diploma, NZ) · Founder, Valentia

Educational only. Always speak to your healthcare provider about your symptoms and before starting a new supplement.