Cheryl Cole's beauty secret: £2 High Street cream helps X Factor star keep her skin smooth

By Louise Eccles
Last updated at 2:14 AM on 5th March 2011

It doesn't cost much to look this good: Cheryl's favourite beauty products cost less than £3

Her wardrobe may be crammed with designer clothes and her passport full of exotic stamps, but peek inside Cheryl Cole’s bathroom cabinet and you could be in for a surprise.

Despite her multi-million pound fortune and A-list lifestyle, the glamorous Geordie has admitted that her favourite skin cream is a tub of E45 – costing just £2.

The affordable product is already the UK’s best-selling moisturiser, but is likely to become even more in demand after the X Factor judge confessed it is a key part of her beauty regime.

When asked if she has regular facials to maintain her flawless complexion, Miss Cole, 27, told a magazine: ‘I wish, but I just don’t have the time. My skin can get very dry so I use E45 moisturiser. You don’t have to use mega-expensive products, you just need to find the right products for your skin type.’

Retailers were rushing to order extra supplies of the 60-year-old formula after Miss Cole’s revelation.

At Superdrug, which already sells 20,000 E45 products every week, skincare buyer Joanna Hutton said: ‘While new technological wonder-products come and go, there’s nothing like an old favourite like E45 which doesn’t need to promise to change your life, just moisturise your skin wonderfully.

‘We know from previous experience that when Cheryl Cole gives a beauty product the okay then sales can rocket.

‘We’re expecting even more customers than ever will put aside their fancy creams and pick up E45, and will be rushing more stock out to stores to cope with the demand.’

A spokesman for E45 said: ‘To hear that Cheryl Cole uses E45 as a moisturiser of choice is very exciting.

‘In today’s over-crowded beauty market full of increasingly hi-tech products, E45’s strength lies in its trusted non-greasy formula which offers an effective way to keep the skin soft and healthy.’

Last year, Ellnett hairspray credited Miss Cole’s voluminous hairstyle with a ten per cent rise in sales.

The manufacturer is owned by L’Oréal, which hired the Girls Aloud star to promote the brand in 2009.

E45, THE MAGIC MOISTURISER

E45 moisturiser contains light liquid paraffin, white soft paraffin and anhydrous lanolin – a waxy substance obtained from the wool of sheep and sometimes called wool fat.

Miss Cole suffers from dry skin, which results from lack of water in the stratum corneum, or outer layer of skin cells.

Oil in the stratum corneum helps retain water seeping up from deeper layers of the skin, while broken-down skin cells slow down evaporation.

But when this layer becomes dehydrated it loses its flexibility and becomes cracked, scaly and sometimes itchy.

E45 works by adding a layer of oil to the surface of the skin to prevent the water from evaporating.