How Gold Bond Age Renew Neck and Chest Cream Found a Place on My Vanity

My daughter Lauren lives in Orlando, and she is the reason a tube of Gold Bond Age Renew Neck and Chest Cream ended up on my vanity here in Fort Lauderdale. She handed it to me at Christmas with the tone of a woman who had already decided the conversation was finished. Just try it for a while, Mom. She borrows things from my bathroom when she visits, so she had a fair idea of what was already in there. I am 61. I flew for 26 years, and cabin air plus Florida sun did what you would expect to a fair, combination-dry face with redness across the cheeks and sunspots along the cheekbones.

I have a small vanity with a lighted magnifying mirror that I both love and regret. Mornings are short, with sunscreen every day without fail. Nights are longer and more deliberate. I have never had injections, lasers or surgery, and I am not an esthetician or a dermatologist, so nothing here is medical advice. When a cream says firming, my first instinct is to be polite about it, set it down, and quietly never pick it up again.

What made me actually open this one was my neck. The crepey texture had reached the point where I saw it in photographs before I saw anything else, and the line of my jaw had softened. The magnifying mirror did not need to be that honest, but it was. After a week of walking past the tube, I finally unscrewed the cap.

Gold Bond Age Renew Neck and Chest Cream is a 2-ounce tube of cream for the neck and chest, made for sensitive skin, with hyaluronic acid to help skin hold moisture and salicylic acid listed among the ingredients. The listing calls it clinically tested for the appearance of firmness, texture and elasticity. That is the whole claim. I liked that it did not promise to reverse anything, because I have been 34 and I have been 61 and I know which one this is.

I started with two fingers of cream, morning and night, working upward from the collarbone to the jaw. It spreads further than I expected and sinks in without leaving a film. My sunscreen goes over it in the morning without pilling, which matters more than it sounds, because a cream that fights your SPF gets abandoned by the second week.

At about ten weeks the crepey texture looked less crinkled. Softer and better hydrated. Not lifted, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Ten weeks is where I stopped being polite about it. The skin on my neck felt less like tissue paper and more like skin. Nothing about my jawline changed. I want to be plain about that, because I have read enough of these to recognize a moisturizer dressed up as a facelift.

Nine months in, the tube lives beside the sink. On my vanity that is genuinely competitive real estate. The rest of the nighttime cast is RoC Retinol Correxion Night Serum Capsules, which I have used for about 14 months and which I credit for smoother texture around the eyes. Mornings are TruSkin Vitamin C Serum first, then this cream, then CeraVe AM Facial Moisturizer SPF 30. In the kitchen there is a scoop of Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides in my coffee, and I cannot honestly separate that from anything else I do.

What I can tell you is what I noticed and roughly when. The skin on my neck and chest is better hydrated, and the crepey look is softer. It took weeks, not evenings. If you want a difference you can see after four nights, this is the wrong product and so is every other one. Gary, my husband, noticed nothing at all, which is his standard review of most things, so you will have to take my word for it or not.

Two complaints, both small. The Gold Bond tube is smaller than the job, because a neck and a chest take more cream than a face does, and I go through one faster than I would like. And the results are modest. Softer, better hydrated, a little less crinkled. My sunspots did not change from this cream at all, though the vitamin C serum has faded them somewhat over about 11 months.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to buy it if your complaint is texture and dryness on the neck and chest, and to skip it if your complaint is sagging, because a cream will not do that and no honest one says it will. I would tell you to give it ten weeks before you decide, and to use more on the chest than feels reasonable. I would tell you that sunscreen every morning matters more than any cream on this vanity. I would tell you I am not a dermatologist, so anything that worries you, a new spot, a change in a mole, a patch that itches, goes to a doctor and not to a tube. And I would tell you that skin varies from person to person. What happened on my fair, combination-dry 61-year-old neck is not a promise about yours.