🇫🇷France

Paula's Choice vs Principia

Paula's Choice and Principia are skincare brands that offer serums, cleansers, moisturizers, toners, and precise formulas. The American brand is known for hyaluronic acid, glycerin, and vitamin c, while both are widely loved for thoughtful cleansers. Paula's Choice fits oily skin and acne-prone skin best, whereas the other brand suits balanced to oily skin. They differ primarily in their exact product types and key ingredients, where glycerin significantly increased skin hydration and restored barrier function.

Paula's Choice is an American skincare brand founded in 1995 and owned by Unilever since 2021.

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This page compares some of the most popular Paula's Choice and Principia products; for every product of both brands, with a fit score for your own skin, use the Lovi app.

Questions and answers

Paula's Choice or Principia: which is better?

Paula's Choice offers a much wider selection of fragrance-free products on this page that fit skin types like oily and acne-prone skin best, whereas Principia features only a single cleanser with lower fit levels for those skin types.

What is the difference between Paula's Choice and Principia?

Paula's Choice offers a wide selection of fragrance-free cleansers, serums, and treatments with high Lovi fit levels for oily and acne-prone skin, whereas Principia features only a single cleanser on this page with lower fit ratings for those skin types.

Paula's Choice or Principia: which cleanser is better?

Paula's Choice offers a better cleanser selection on this page, with formulas achieving a Superior fit for oily and acne-prone skin types. In contrast, the Principia cleanser listed achieves only an Average fit for those same skin types and warrants caution for dry skin.

Which is more affordable, Paula's Choice or Principia?

Reviewers mostly mention high prices for the products on this page from Paula's Choice, while affordability information for Principia is not available here.

Which causes fewer breakouts, Paula's Choice or Principia?

Paula's Choice offers a wide selection of products on this page rated Superior or High for acne-prone skin, while Principia only features one cleanser rated Low for acne-prone skin. Paula's Choice helps target breakouts effectively with key ingredients like salicylic acid and niacinamide.

The British Journal of Dermatology, 2002Antioxidants, 2021

When were Paula's Choice and Principia founded and who owns them?

Paula's Choice was founded in 1995 in the United States and is owned by Unilever, whereas Principia was founded in 2020 and is owned by Viziera Participações Ltda.

Do any products from Paula's Choice or Principia contain added fragrance?

Every product on this page from both Paula's Choice and Principia lists no fragrance in its ingredients.

Which skin types do the brand-focused routines for Paula's Choice fit best?

The brand-focused routines for Paula's Choice fit oily skin, acne-prone skin, and oily acne-prone skin best.

Research behind their key ingredients

Behind this comparison

Lovi compares products by their fit scores, calculated from the full ingredient list with brand-independent rules our dermatologists and cosmetic chemists build and review, and personalizes every pick with AI trained on the real results of millions of users. Lovi trains its fit score models on a proprietary dataset built from more than 10,000 expert-labeled products and more than 100,000 simulated examples, following an internally consistent methodology presented at Cosmoprof, AMWC, and Skin of Color Update.

How does it fit your skin?

Scan your face, then any product: Lovi shows how well it fits you and what fits even better.