Lacto-PDRN™ 4% + B9 Eye Cream: The Eye-Opening New Era Of Eye Cream By The Ordinary Has Arrived!

At 8.15 on a humid Penang morning, Nina is already running on borrowed time. At 22, her days are a choreography of lectures from nine until three, four hours selling fast fashion at Gurney Paragon Mall, dinners with friends, followed by revision and assignments that routinely trespass into tomorrow. 

Sleep is the first luxury sacrificed. By dawn, the mirror tells the truth: puffiness, crepey-looking texture and a tired eye contour no concealer quite persuades into submission. Friends have urged her to buy an eye cream; the price tags have always made her swallow hard.

Enter The Ordinary’s Lacto-PDRN™ 4% + B9 Eye Cream: a clinically tested proposition that feels almost provocatively democratic. Priced at RM50, it promises immediate firming and radiance alongside longer-term improvement in eye-area ageing. 

Eye creams may once have occupied the gilded end of the beauty cabinet; now consumers want evidence, not ceremony. The appetite is there; scepticism remains.  

And rightly so. The skin around the eyes is merely four to five cell layers thick, compared with around 16 on the cheeks, with fewer oil glands and relentless movement from blinking and expression. 

It is among the first places to advertise fatigue and age. If eyes are the windows to the soul, the periocular area is their frame—and neglecting it is rather like commissioning a masterpiece and leaving the gilt unfinished. 

Here, The Ordinary brings biotechnology to the dressing table. Lacto-PDRN™ is a vegan alternative to conventional fish-derived PDRN, produced through controlled fermentation of Lactobacillus rhamnosus; its bacterial DNA is subsequently broken into short fragments. 

PDRN—polydeoxyribonucleotide—is studied for its potential role in skin repair and regeneration. But the beauty-insider caveat matters: topical PDRN should not be equated with injectable procedures or treated as a miracle. What matters here is the formula’s own clinical evidence. 

The supporting cast is purposeful. Vitamin B9, or folic acid, supports skin renewal, elasticity, hydration and texture. Caesalpinia spinosa gum and Kappaphycus alvarezii extract create a flexible film that gives the eye area an immediate smoothing, tightening effect. 

The result: biotechnology for the longer game, film-forming technology for instant gratification. 

The Ordinary’s in-house clinical testing reports visible eyelid lifting from first use, immediate tightening and reduced-looking under-eye bags, 17% smoother-looking crepey upper-eyelid texture and 18% less visible under-eye fine lines after eight weeks, plus a 72% increase in skin hydration after two hours. 

It is designed to sit beneath make-up. Individual results vary—but measurable claims are what contemporary consumers demand. 

For Nina, the ritual is uncomplicated: after cleansing and her usual skincare, gently tap a small amount around the eye contour, avoiding direct contact with the eyes, morning and evening, then follow with moisturiser and, by day, sunscreen. Under make-up, it becomes the quiet preparatory step that makes concealer look less like camouflage. 

And there is an important distinction: while the formula addresses puffiness, hydration, texture and visible ageing, no eye cream can magically erase sleep deprivation or every form of dark-circle pigmentation.

The move feels bigger than an eye cream. Co-launched in August 2016 by Brandon Truaxe and Nicola Kilner under DECIEM, The Ordinary challenged beauty’s old equation between prestige and price: ingredient-led, clinically minded formulations, radically accessible pricing and little patience for marketing theatre. 

It taught consumers to interrogate ingredients, efficacy and value, turning DECIEM’s philosophy of function, design and authenticity into a global phenomenon. 

A decade later, Lacto-PDRN™ 4% + B9 Eye Cream is a manifesto in a tube. The Ordinary has taken an ingredient at the centre of beauty’s latest frenzy, stripped away the mystique, made it vegan, targeted it to one of the face’s most vulnerable zones and priced it for the curious rather than the privileged. 

Nina cannot manufacture more hours of sleep. But she can, at last, afford to make the hours she has look considerably more awake.

Lacto-PDRN™ 4% + B9 Eye Cream by The Ordinary (15ml) is available now in all The Ordinary stores, Sephora outlets, and online (Shopee and TikTok Shop). 

*Photos courtesy of The Ordinary.