Minimalist Skincare: Why I Make Six Things and Use Two
Minimalist Skincare: Why I Make Six Things and Use Two
I make six things and my own routine is two of them.
That’s an odd thing for someone selling six things to say. It started with a bathroom drawer I couldn’t shut.
How Routines Get Long Without Anyone Deciding
Nobody sits down and plans an eleven step routine.
It accumulates instead. Something’s not working so you add a product, a friend recommends what fixed her skin, an ad catches you at the end of a long week. Every addition makes sense on its own. None of them tells you to take something away.
Then your skin gets touchy and you can’t tell which of the eleven did it. That’s the real cost, and it has nothing to do with product quality.
The test that shows you the problem
Count what you put on your face this morning. Then name what each one is for, out loud. The ones you can’t answer for are the ones to look at first.
What the Extra Steps Are Actually Doing
Most of a long routine is water, and water is fine. It just isn’t what you think you’re buying.
A toner is mostly water, and so is an essence. A serum is water carrying a small amount of an active, and a light lotion is water held with a little oil. Layer four of those and you’ve hydrated once, four times over.
The last step does the different job. It keeps all that water from evaporating off, which is what a moisturizer is for. It’s also the step people skimp on, because it’s the least exciting thing to buy.
Why Skinimalism Suits Some Skin and Not All
I’d rather be straight about who this doesn’t serve.
If you’re treating something specific, shorter isn’t automatically better. A dermatologist who prescribed a treatment had a reason for the order. Cutting back around a prescription is a conversation for them.
Sunscreen also stays. It does a job nothing else on your shelf can do. Simplifying past it costs more than the drawer space is worth.
Minimalism earns its keep on skin that’s reacting to something unknown. If you’re picking which brands to keep, I went through that in how I’d choose a clean skincare brand. Fewer inputs means you can find the culprit. With eleven products, you never will.
What a Short Routine Costs
The money argument is the one nobody makes honestly, so here it is with numbers.
A drugstore routine of six products at roughly fifteen dollars each runs ninety dollars, and most of those get replaced every two or three months. That’s somewhere near four hundred dollars a year, for products that are largely water by volume.
Two products at forty dollars is eighty dollars, and a jar of tallow lasts two to three months on a face because you use a pea-sized amount. Call it three hundred a year. The per-jar price looks worse on the shelf and the annual number usually looks better, which is the opposite of how skincare is normally sold to you.
I’m not going to pretend that’s the whole story. Some cheap products are excellent and some expensive ones are water in nice glass. The point is that counting per jar tells you almost nothing, and counting per year tells you most of what you need.
If Your Skin Runs Oily or Breaks Out
This is where I’d send you elsewhere, and I’d rather say so here than after you’ve bought something.
A heavy fat on oily skin can feel like too much, and tallow is a heavy fat. Some people with oily skin do well on it because their oiliness came from dryness underneath, and their skin settles once it stops overcompensating. Others just find it heavy, and no amount of my explaining the fatty acid profile changes how it feels on their face at 2pm.
If you’re actively breaking out, a lighter formula usually serves better while that settles. Herbivore and Cocokind both make things worth trying, and neither of them is me.
What I’d avoid either way is adding a seventh product to fix what the previous six did. That’s the loop this whole post is about, and it runs the same on oily skin as on dry.
How I’d Cut Back Without a Bad Month
Slowly, and not in the order you’d expect.
Take away one product a week. Give it seven days before judging. Skin turns over on its own schedule, so a two-day verdict is mostly noise. Start with whatever you couldn’t name a purpose for.
Keep your cleanser, moisturizer and sunscreen throughout. Those three are the frame. Everything else is a guest, and you’re finding out which ones earn the room.
If something goes wrong when you pull a product, you’ve learned what it was doing. That’s worth more than a smooth month of not knowing.
The part where I'm selling you something
Tallow suits this approach because one fat covers a lot of ground, so it replaces layers rather than joining them. It also isn’t for everybody. Oily skin often wants something lighter, and that’s a fair reason to buy from someone else.
What Two Products Looks Like
Mine is Ageless in Honey Creme in the morning and Renewal Unscented at night, over a plain cleanser, with sunscreen when I’m out on the place all day.
That’s it. My skin’s better on those two than it was on the ten I used to buy. I’m one person and my skin isn’t yours, so take it as a data point. The principle underneath is what I’d defend: you can only judge a product when it isn’t competing with six others.
Where I’d Start Tomorrow
Open the drawer and pick up each thing in it.
Anything you can’t name a purpose for goes in a box, not the bin. You might want it back. Give it a week. Most people find their skin unchanged and their mornings shorter. A few find out what one product was quietly doing.
Either result is worth having.
If you want the two-product version
Ageless in Honey Creme is the one I hand people first, and Renewal Unscented is where I send skin that's had enough. Same fat underneath, so pick on your nose as much as your skin.