A dual retinoid serum from Paula's Choice that pairs retinaldehyde with a newer form of adapalene, designed to help smooth skin and clear congestion and breakouts.
Two retinoids in one bottle, retinaldehyde plus a newer form of adapalene, is the detail these gurus keep returning to. Many point to it as a standout for congestion and acne, though others caution that anyone prone to monthly breakouts may want to skip it. The one thing to keep in mind: early use can be rough for others, so easing in slowly may help, and the price is a sore point for some.
Synthesized from 6 expert reviews · most recent take October 2026
"Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Dual Retinoid Treatment, this one's really nice, it contains both retinal as well as adapalene, which is a newer retinoid, so this one's really nice. It is on the pricier side, but I'm really enjoying it."
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"The nominees for favorite retinoid are the [Paula's Choice] pro- retinol dual retinoid serum"
"The first few times I used this did not go so great my face was very angry however I kept uh took a little bit of time off and then I went back to it and now my skin seems to handle it better"
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"This one's really nice. I'm going through it, and I can tell it's getting pretty close to the end. It's also fluorescent yellow, and it's the most expensive one on the list, but it's pretty nice. Paula's Choice has become pretty expensive lately. I really enjoy this one. I probably wouldn't repurchase it, because to get the same effect I could probably just combine a few other products. Anyway, it's a really nice product, but it's expensive unless you get it on sale."
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"My skin is still kind of freaking out from that Paula's Choice new dual retinoid product I tried. I tried it for one night, and my skin has not freaked out at any product like that in a while."
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"This is my current favorite retinoid serum, the Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum. This one contains two different retinoids, [...] which help slow aging, fight wrinkles, smooth skin texture, firm skin, even out skin tone, and clear up skin as well. The star of the show for this one is adapalene. It's a next-generation retinoid that provides the anti-aging and acne-clearing benefits of regular retinoids, but [...] without the flaking, dryness, redness, and irritation."
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"These are a couple of really nice options for wrinkles and fine lines and retinoids"
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"It's pretty expensive too, coming up on 70 bucks. I'm kind of scared to use it, so maybe I'll keep testing it only on areas of my face that aren't breakout prone, like my forehead, which is always fine. It's not a very long ingredient list. For other exciting ingredients, there's jojoba oil, retinal, vitamin E, a sacha inchi ferment, and castor seed oil. I have a feeling castor seed oil is going to be an issue for some people. I believe the adapalene percentage [...] in this product is 0.1%."
"Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum is a dual retinoid treatment. It contains 0.1% retinal as well as adapalene, which is a member of the retinoid family. So far there are only two or three products on the market with adapalene in them that I'm aware of. One is Paula's Choice, the other one is from Skinfix, and there might be a third one out there now, but I have not tried that one. The Paula's Choice one also contains mushroom vitamin E and Haba seed oil."
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"Paula's Choice came out with one. [...] It is wonderful. It's a really nice retinoid, but it's non-drying and non-flaky and doesn't cause issues. It helps with fine lines and wrinkles. This stuff is really wonderful. So if you haven't checked it out, it is certainly well worth your time. [...] Yeah, really nice product."
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"In terms of performance, my first several uses of this product were not fun at all. I really almost just totally quit using it, except for the fact that I spent so much darn money on it and I knew I could go over it. There's a little bit of a purging period with this one, so they're not fun, but after the first five or six times I used it, my skin started to acclimate and appreciate it a little bit more. I think that's probably what it is."
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"I've just started using it, and it's still kind of a newer product. My skin purged the first several times I used it, and you usually don't have that experience. Most products don't make me break out, and this one did. I'm not exactly sure why, because I had used adapalene on its own, and I've used retinol, and I still use retinal often. It does have a lot of ingredients, though, and it's got a ton of acnegenic ingredients in it, so I would say this one's more for anti-aging."
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"This one contains 0.1% retinal as well as adapalene, a member of the retinoid family. As far as I'm aware, there are only two or three products on the market with adapalene in them, and this is one of them. It also contains mushroom, vitamin E, and jojoba seed oil. It does get kind of expensive, I think it's around $70."
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"So, this one contains adapalene. It also contains retinal, vitamin E, Saccharomyces ferment for soothing, and pomegranate, which is a great anti-aging ingredient. This one's really quite nice, but it is on the more expensive side of things. But it is pretty effective. So, if you like the combo of retinal and adapalene, it's nice. There are some nice hydrating ingredients in there to help prevent some of that retinization and things, but yeah, it's kind of on the expensive side."
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"Their dual retinoid serum is also 20% off, and this one's really nice. It actually uses retinal as well as bakuchiol, which is kind of a third-generation retinoid. It's fragrance-free and, for the most part, non-drying. It also has an oil in it, plus vitamin E and sacha inchi ferment."
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"This bottle is virtually empty. I can feel how light it's getting. But it's really nice for anti-aging purposes. It is creeping up there in price, so if price is a concern, there's a lot of other alternatives out there worth checking out. But this is one I just really like. It has no fragrance in it, and it still has some hydrating ingredients in there in addition to the retinoids for fine lines and wrinkles. So it's a really nice product, but it is getting pricey."
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"The Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum is $68, and [...] it's one of their newer products. It's expensive, but the star of the show is adapalene."
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"In addition to the adapalene, it also contains retinal. It's got haba seed oil, vitamin E, Saccharomyces ferment, and pomegranate extract. This stuff is lovely. I absolutely love it, but it is expensive. I find this to be a nice non-irritating retinoid product. A lot of them can be kind of drying, especially the ones that contain retinol or adapalene, but $ [...] 68 is pretty pricey."
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"Another one I like is the Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum. It contains adapalene, which is a newer, [...] third generation retinoid, [...] and it also contains retinol, so it's got two of those retinoid ingredients, and it's really nice. It's very yellow. There's a little spot, but it's really nice, and for the most part it's non-drying. If you use retinoids, you can apply some good moisturizers before and after to help prevent the dryness. So, I really like this one."
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"This is about four days after the one-time application of the Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum, and my skin totally freaked out. It hasn't freaked out on a product this much since I can't even remember. [...] This one doesn't even get a place in my worst products list yet, because I've only used it once and my skin freaked out. I guess I'll try it again in a couple of weeks and see how brave I am. It really sucks when you go through a terrible reaction like that."
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"Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Dual Retinoid Treatment, this one's really nice, it contains both retinal as well as adapalene, which is a newer retinoid, so this one's really nice. It is on the pricier side, but I'm really enjoying it."
"This would be probably your next best option. The adapoids in this is hopefully a kind of precursor for adapalene, which is the over-the-counter one that's amazing for acne. There's also granactive retinoid triolein in this, which is kind of like the adapoids, where both of those ingredients live in the future, but there is a lot of potential upside with that ingredient as well. [...] If you're more advanced, go with the Pro."
"Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum is a high potency retinal, and it's stronger than a retinol and adapalene, because [...] retinals tend to be more potent than retinols. It comes in a pump, and as you can see, it's yellow. It's much more lightweight, I would say, in texture. This one has the percentage disclosed. [...] If you're a beginner and you just want to know what to try, I would try this one."
"I've been using the Paula's Choice Pro Retinaldehyde Dual Retinoid Treatment [...] for like 3 years, and I love this one for my robust collagen stimulation. It's really helping with my anti-aging journey, and because it's dedicated to folks who go through inflamed pimples, it's also keeping my skin clear, not only of pimples and congestion but also from hyperpigmentation. [...] I really credit this product with keeping my skin clear over the last 3 years."
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"It's a dual retinoid treatment. I'm a few months shy of my second year consistently using this. This is my collagen-stimulating product of choice. It uses retinaldehyde, but it also uses a novel form of adapalene, which is another form of retinoid that's particularly good for congestion-prone and acne-prone skin. I'm very prone to clogged pores, and that has been a struggle for me throughout my adult skincare journey, just trying to keep those under control."
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"This is Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum, a dual retinoid treatment. I've been using this one for going on close to two years now. [...] It's been my main retinoid for a while."
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"I cannot believe it. I am extremely grateful to this product, but I'm also just a very big fan of it. This is a combination of retinaldehyde, and there's also a little touch of a novel form of adapalene, which is another form of retinoid that is a little bit better adapted for skin that is more prone to acne. That's kind of a really magical combination for my particular skin. My skin is combination, as I talked about earlier, but it is congestion prone."
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"I am very, very impressed with this. This is really the retinoid that I would recommend if you have skin like mine and you're really looking for that additional benefit of clearing your skin of congestion and acne. This is really the place. This is a strong retinoid because there's two in here, and it's very, very strong. I would not recommend this for beginners necessarily. If you've never used a retinoid product, this would be something to work up to."
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"Now, if I could only pick one skincare product that made the biggest difference to my personal skin this year, my MVP product if you will, it would be this one. Gold star to Paula's Choice, you knocked it out of the park with this one. So this does have retinaldehyde in it. It's 0.1% retinaldehyde, which is an over-the-counter retinoid, right? But they do have an additional retinoid in here, so don't just latch on to that 0.1%. There's more to this product."
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"You've seen me use this before, and I'm obsessed. I absolutely love this. This is actually still my first bottle. I'm going pretty strong with it, but I can feel that I'm getting to the end, and I'm planning to purchase another bottle. The first bottle was gifted, just FYI, but I'm going to buy this because it's really helping. I want to be like, oh my skin is so clear, but hello, there's a pimple there, and I have a little tiny whitehead that's healing right there. I don't know what happened."
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"Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum is a new release I fell in love with, because it really is the product for me. When I stopped using tretinoin early in the spring, I went through a lot of different retinoid products, and a lot of them I truly do love, but this was the one that really endeared me to it. Not only did I just love and enjoy using it, I saw so many good benefits from it. I'm not talking about it in the past tense, either."
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"If it sucked, I'd go out and buy something else, right? But no, I love it. I really feel like this is a great fit for where I'm at right now with my journey with retinoids. [...] I did stop my tretinoin back in May. It was a pretty quiet thing, and there's really no reason [...] like it was ruining my skin. I just started to feel like using tretinoin was a barrier to reviewing the types of products I was interested in for my channel, simply due to content."
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"I've gone through quite a few tubes of it, and I'm very loyal to it. Moving to it isn't stepping down in strength. I don't even like that language, [...] because it's just a different type of retinoid, a different retinoid for a different situation, a different lifestyle, something that suits me better. It's not less, it's not down, it's not a step back, it's just different."
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"If you asked me to credit one product with the majority of my skin success, it would be this one. They're using 0.1% retinaldehyde, which is an anti-aging ingredient. It exfoliates the skin, it helps to brighten the skin, it stimulates collagen, and it keeps the skin a little bit younger."
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"You know I adore this. This is what's helping keep my skin clear. [...] I've been using it about five to six days a week, and my skin has acclimated to it really well. I do try to take at least one rest day a week, but my skin has been feeling really strong. It hasn't been feeling sensitive or irritated, so I usually just keep chugging along, and I'll try to put a rest day in between. I just find that it helps me to have that, but I've been doing really well with this one."
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"I really love this. This product has transformed my skin from 2024 until now. It's done nothing but good things for my skin, and it's consistently maintaining good skin for me. [...] I started out using it about three or four times a week. Right now I am probably using it a little too much, up about five to sometimes six days a week. I'm going to need to cut that back down for the colder months. Quite honestly, I can feel my skin starting to get a little dry right now."
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"In here is a more novel retinoid called adapalene, another retinoid that is particularly good at targeting inflamed acne and inflamed clogged pores. I actually started using this in my skincare routine in summer of 2024, and I haven't looked back since. I really do credit this product for accelerating the benefits for brightening my skin, because I really don't have any hyperpigmentation at all. I had a little bit here on my cheek, and I had one pimple."
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"I tried a few retinal serums, some that were great and some that were not, but I ended up with Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum, which is a dual retinoid treatment. There is also a novel version of adapalene, which is another type of retinoid. It recently came to market over the counter, but it has mostly been available by prescription, and it's usually used for folks who suffer with acne."
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"It really helps to take down inflammation, redness, and swelling, and that makes it really good for acne-prone skin. I'm, as I mentioned, prone to congestion that can sometimes turn into active pimples, and this really helped clear up my skin in a way that my tretinoin and even previous retinaldehyde products didn't quite do. Those things did clear up my skin, but this took it the extra mile."
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"I cannot believe it's been that long." I started using this in August of 2024 and I haven't stopped using it since. [...] This is the empty, this is my second bottle, and this is my third bottle. I started the third bottle in September, so it's 13 months. So two bottles a year, basically. There is such a good value to this, which is good because this is not cheap, [...] but I think it's totally worth it, at least for me personally."
"I've been using this over the last seven months and I have been raving about this product. It really is one of the products that I credit with my skin glow up. This does contain retinal, spelled with an A, which is related but different than retinol spelled with an O. These two ingredients are part of the retinoid family, which also includes tretinoin, which you may be familiar with. All of these retinoids actually convert into retinoic acid on the skin, where they do all of their magic."
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"I absolutely love this. I'm using it multiple times a week now. I did take a couple of days off for deep winter just because things are so dry, so I'm probably at around three to four days, but there was a point in early fall where I was almost at six days. And sometimes I forget my rest day and go seven days straight. My skin loves this so much, and it's so acclimated to it now. I've been using it consistently for a year and a half, I think. [...] This is my retinoid of choice. Love it."
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"This is the Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum, a dual retinoid treatment. It has retinaldehyde, or retinal, and [...] there's a little bit of a novel version of a retinoid in here, so there are two retinoids in here. This has been [...] my MVP favorite product from 2024. I love this stuff. It has cleared up my skin like nobody's business."
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"I am obsessed with the Paula's Choice Pro Retinaldehyde dual retinoid treatment, which I absolutely adore and which has done super amazing things for my skin. I have been using it for nearly eleven months, I work in zones with one pump, [...] and my skin tolerates it beautifully, though you always want to be careful with a retinoid."
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"The Paula's Choice Retinaldehyde Dual Retinoid Treatment is my product of choice for collagen stimulation. I've been using this since 2024 and it's giving me excellent results. [...] It actually contains two retinoids, [...] retinaldehyde and [...] a precursor to adapalene, which specifically targets inflamed congestion and breakouts inside the pore lining."
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"By four to five months in, my skin was not only clear but brighter than it had been in years. [...] It has actually just really solved so many problems I struggled with for so many years in one bottle, it's a really smart formula, particularly if you're going through those issues like I was."
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"My number one serum is the Paula's Choice Pro Retinaldehyde Dual Retinoid Treatment. [...] I've been using it since [...] August of 2024 without stopping, and I keep buying it and using it consistently because it has made the biggest difference in my skin, [...] probably the biggest difference in my skin this decade."
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"This is the retinoid product I personally use for going on 2 years for all of my anti-aging concerns and my collagen stimulating ingredient of choice. I'm prone to congestion and inflamed acne, [...] and this formula [...] is very good for inflamed pimples. It has really helped to clear out my skin, address texture, brighten up my skin, and it has been very great as a collagen stimulating ingredient."
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"I've been using this consistently since 2024 and in the two plus years I've been using it, it has genuinely transformed my skin. The secret is the two retinoids. Retinaldehyde for collagen stimulation. This is great as a preventative strategy at 37. Keeping that collagen structure strong resists the formation of fine lines, wrinkles, loss of elasticity, but can also improve the look of existing ones. It also brightens up your skin and it helps to clean out your pores."
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"I love to sing the praises of [retinaldehyde] and the product from [Paula's Choice] Pro [Retinaldehyde] dual retinoid treatment. I have [...] been using that product consistently, religiously, for over two years. [...] It works. And it really is the product that works specifically for my skin. It is the product that really suits a multitude of skin needs. At the end of the day, I know it's the hardest working product or ingredient in my routine right now for my well-aging goals."
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"I've been using the Paula's Choice Pro Retinaldehyde Dual Retinoid Treatment [...] for like 3 years, and I love this one for my robust collagen stimulation. It's really helping with my anti-aging journey, and because it's dedicated to folks who go through inflamed pimples, it's also keeping my skin clear, not only of pimples and congestion but also from hyperpigmentation. [...] I really credit this product with keeping my skin clear over the last 3 years."
"Paula's Choice is a great dual retinoid that I think is going to deliver you next-level results, whilst again maintaining a lower sensitivity profile than you might naturally expect."
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"Paula's Choice is a great dual retinoid that I think is going to deliver you next-level results, whilst again maintaining a lower sensitivity profile than you might naturally expect."
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"This is specifically great for people with acne prone skin. If that's not you, it's probably not worth paying the higher price point. [...] But if you have adult acne and you want a boost to anti-aging at the same time, this could be a holy grail combo that works really, really well for you. It's dependent on your individual skin types, but take it from somebody who is now in their 40th year on Skincare Planet Earth and still breaks out - this is a really nice product to help tackle that."
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"Paula's Choice, I do still think some of their original formulas are actually great and market leading. Their retinoid is probably one of their best, but the price in the UK has gone up 47% over the past three years, and that is just price gouging because the cost of producing it has not gone up by that much."
What the evidence says.
Independent of what the gurus think, this is what
the published research supports about the main active ingredients here.
Frequently asked.
What is Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum?
A dual retinoid serum from Paula's Choice that pairs retinaldehyde with a newer form of adapalene, designed to help smooth skin and clear congestion and breakouts.
Is Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum worth it?
The gurus mostly approve it, but with enough reservations to keep it in the middle at a Guru Score of 71%.
What is Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum's Guru Score?
Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum holds a Guru Score of 71%. That is our read on how warmly the experts talk about it, based on the verdicts of 6 expert reviewers we have collected.
Who is Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum best for?
Paula's Choice Pro Retinal Serum is generally suited to acne-prone skin.
Cheaper alternatives the gurus rate.
Lower-priced retinoids the gurus still rate highly, versus this mid-range pick.
