...here's why. 

It may come in jars and tubes, but don’t assume Urban Decay’s Rehab Makeup Prep Line is skin care. “I don’t think it’s skincare actually,” says the brand’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Wende Zomnir. “I’m calling it makeup prep because I’m not promising anti-aging, or that your skin will look like ‘this’ in eight weeks — I’m promising that your makeup will look better today.”

Let’s backtrack a little: In February 2017, Urban Decay released its first-ever product line for bare skin. The collection includes The Rehab Makeup Prep Hot Springs Hydrating Gel, The Rehab Makeup Prep Pretty Gritty Skin Polish, The Rehab Makeup Prep Pore Refining Peel and The Rehab Makeup Prep Lip Love. There’s also a makeup removing counterpart available in spray and oil-stick form.

Zomnir is extremely passionate about the products, expressing that the hydrating gel is actually formulated with water from an a thousand year-old hot spring in Japan (incredible, right?). And she loves that each product offers immediate results: It’s essentially a version of see-now, buy-now, in beauty form. It helps enhance the canvas on which you apply your makeup, making it unlike typical skin care products on the market.   

“If using a scrub to exfoliate every day gives your skin long term benefits, that’s great,” Zomnir says. “But what I want to deliver to my customers is an instant result. This is the perfect hydration for makeup that everyone needs — but it’s a different way of thinking about it, because this is developed to work with makeup.”

First and foremost, Zomnir asserts that the Rehab line was inspired by a need for hydrated skin. “Even if you apply a moisturizer and then try to put makeup on top of it, it’s gonna be very smeary, slidy,” she says. “So the challenge here is to create something that would just dump pure hydration into dry skin, oily skin.”

Zomnir points out that out of all the products, the peel and scrub are especially crafted to smooth out the surface of your skin just before applying your makeup, so that you have an even texture at the start of your routine. “I always had this vision that if I had an event or something, I would be taking my time to make sure my makeup was perfect. And I wish I could just take five or 10 extra minutes and apply a mask that would make my skin look extra dewy, glowing, hydrated,” she says. To do this daily, Zomnir recommends the skin polish. “The polish doesn’t leave your skin stripped feeling,” she says. “It leaves your skin kind of hydrated, and then glycolic acid is kind of doing double duty with that sort of mechanical scrub, so it’s really getting down and sort of smoothing out the skin in different ways, which I think is really, really cool.”

If you’re looking for a deeper cleanse, the peel will be your BFF. “You just put it on and smooth it out,” Zomnir explains. “The edges will dry, and you’ll lift it up and you end up with cleared out pores. It’s pretty great.” This, too, also will leave your skin ready for makeup application.  

Once your skin is silky smooth, you can follow up with the gel pre-foundation. “You’re just left soft and plump and ready for makeup,” Zomnir says. “And you don’t have a greasy feel — you feel like the makeup is still gonna stick.” And once it’s time to take off the makeup, the Meltdown Makeup Remover set will take you back to bare.

While Urban Decay’s Rehab Line may not promise the fountain of youth or a complete change of skin texture in eight weeks, Zomnir still has a lot to offer: “I’m promising you that your makeup will look better and that these beauty hacks are going to work immediately,” she says. And for a gal living in this see-now do-now world, what more could we ask for?