The Drugstore Moisturizer Sarah Hyland Has Used Every Day Since Turning 30

Sarah Hyland got into skin care because she is, in her words, a “control freak.” While quarantined after a transplant surgery in 2018, the Modern Family star turned to her beauty routine to give her a sense of normalcy in her otherwise unstructured days—a feeling that the rest of us now know all too well. “Skin care represents me being able to take control and practice self love,” Hyland told me during a recent conversation about her partnership with Olay. “When everything around me is chaotic and very much out of your control, skin care is one thing that I know I have control of, and that gives me at least one type of structure in my life in the morning and at night.”

Now that she’s 30 (she celebrated her birthday during Sagittarius season), Hyland has continued to rely on skin care as a tool for mental wellness, but has shifted her routine to include ingredients that will nourish her skin as she enters this new decade. And her go-to for giving her complexion what it needs? Olay Collagen Peptide 24 Moisturizer ($40). “I love using it because it really goes deep into my skin, which stimulates natural collagen production, reduces wrinkles, and improves skin—and since I just turned 30, I definitely need more of that,” she says, citing the fact that women’s natural collagen production depletes 10 percent by the time they hit their third decade. “It’s good to take precautions,” she adds.

The moisturizer is made with peptides (and it’s worth noting, it’s got one of the highest concentrations of them that you can get at the drugstore), which stimulate your skin’s natural collagen production. “The way they do it is because the skin has a receptor for peptides,” board-certified dermatologist Dennis Gross, MD, previously told Well+Good. “Receptors are these things that sit on the outside of a skin cell that the peptide connects to, and if you think about peptides as the key, our receptors are like a lock—and the peptide goes into the lock, turns, and then once that receptor gets into the peptide, it opens up and allows it to enter the cell, as if the receptor was a gateway.” It’s also got niacinamide, which helps skin retain moisturizer as well as stimulate cell turnover. As the brand puts of this moisturizer, “it’s our unicorn.”

“When you feel good. You look good and when you look good you feel good,” says Hyland. “It’s just all about confidence… you could be having an amazing day and then you catch yourself in the mirror and you see a pimple or a dark spot and that confidence just like shoots right down. And I love the idea of facing anything with skin care, because it helps bring about self love, and that’s what everybody really needs right now.”

Shop now: Olay Collagen Peptide 24 Moisturizer, $40

Got more questions about peptides? Check out the video below. 

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