Veloskin Soothing Gel

Veloskin's range of classy cyclist-focused skincare products includes chamois cream, shaving cream, moisturiser and this – a Soothing Recovery Gel for use on post-ride skin. Smartly packaged and smelling really nice, it can provide relief to sore skin after a day in the saddle, though it's not ideal for post-ride massages, and it's a bit on the expensive side.

• Pros: Smells good, pleasant tingling sensation, great packaging
• Cons: Absorbs too quickly for effective muscle massage

Veloskin describes its Soothing Recovery Gel as being for helping skin recover from the demands of cycling. No matter how good your shorts and chamois creams, if you ride far enough you're going to get some sort of discomfort, and so anything that might help with this is worth investigating. I therefore was keen to give this stuff a try and see how it performed.

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Like the rest of Veloskin's range, the Soothing Recovery Gel comes packaged in a very smart black tin with great visual design. Once the lid is off, I noted that gel is exactly the right word for the contents: it has a gloopy consistency a lot like hair gel, and as such you probably don't want to try to handle too much at once, as it's liable to fall off your fingers onto the floor or your clothes. It's not thick and sticky like a chamois cream, for example.

Smearing the gel onto my undercarriage after a hard ride, I found it was quite quickly absorbed into the skin which meant that I could get dressed almost immediately after application without my underwear getting sticky.

Now, at this point, I have to pass on a warning, so you're not surprised like I was. The gel has a substantial menthol content, which produces a quite pleasantly cool, tingling sensation on the skin. However, this sensation only kicks in about five minutes after you've applied the gel and forgotten about it. As such, it was only when I was dressed and wandering around my kitchen that I suddenly found my eyebrows shooting up as an icy tingle crawled along my perineum.

At least now you'll be ready for this and might make a slightly less surprised face when you experience it! Veloskin specifically warns female users to be careful where they put this gel, as you really wouldn't want that tingly menthol sensation anywhere too intimate.

> Read more road.cc reviews of skincare & embrocation products here

Luckily (for me) I didn't suffer any truly serious saddle sores when testing this product, so I can't say how it would aid skin that was literally broken. I suspect, given the warnings to female users, I wouldn't want to put this gel onto saddle sores that were proper wounds. But it did seem to offer some comfort to my aching red skin after a century ride and, the following morning, I felt 100 per cent again. Exactly how much of this was the gel and how much was the passing hours is difficult to say, but given the list of moisturising and soothing ingredients, I'm prepared to believe the gel played a useful role.

The disappointment I had with the Soothing Recovery Gel was that, although Veloskin says it is "great for self massaging your legs after a long ride", I found it didn't work so well for this. As noted above, the gel's tendency to be absorbed quickly is really useful for not getting sticky clothes after applying it, but this tendency also works against using the gel as a massage lubricant. When I tried to massage my calves and quads after a hard ride, the gel was absorbed into my skin so quickly that I had to keep reapplying more every 30 seconds or so to keep the massage going, and got through an awful lot of gel. I'll stick to using an oil for this.

That one gripe aside, I did find the Soothing Recovery Gel a pleasant product to use. It smells nice and is absorbed quickly. It's quite expensive compared with other options like Crotch Guard, which I've used in the past for post-ride skin repair, but it's also really pleasant and feels like a premium product. If you do find you suffer from chafing then you might want to give this a try and see if it helps you recover faster.

Verdict

Smells good, absorbs quickly, with a pleasant tingle, and soothes and cools the skin effectively