I made a decision in my 30s, that I would no longer spend my life at war with my own face.
It wasn't a principled stance at the time, it was a quiet observation where I watched the women around me… aunties, neighbors, women at the beauty counter, women in waiting rooms, even my own mother. Smart women. Funny women. Women who had done extraordinary things with their lives and yet so many of them spoke about their own face, skin, or bodies like it was a problem to be managed. As women we're pinned that our lives are a countdown we're losing all the while, 24/7, we have things shoved into our minds that something that needed to be fixed before someone notices.
It showed up in the smallest ways. The way a woman would catch herself in a mirror and flinch and mention how horrible she looked that day. The way a conversation about a photograph would turn immediately to self-criticism and words like "I look too fat!" or "I look so old!" as if society's programming had done its job and every woman was getting an A+ for showing up just the way the world wanted them to. Then we get to a point where compliments were deflected almost reflexively: "Oh, I've aged terribly" as if getting older were something to confess.
After my childhood, teens, and 20s spending time picking myself apart… suddenly I didn't want that anymore. Just as I hit 30, suddenly I was surrounded by the best of the best in the beauty industry. Top makeup artists, facialists, and wellness influencers launching their products. Before I had a chance to even second guess it, I had a circle of women who promoted self-love, treating your skin how you'd want to be treated, and almost instantly I decided, mostly quietly, that I was going to love the skin I'm in. Whatever my face looked like at forty, or fifty, or eighty… it would be mine, and I would not apologize for it.
What I didn't account for
What I didn't expect was how hard that conviction would be to hold in a world specifically designed to erode it. The skincare industry is built on a particular kind of insecurity. Not just "your skin could be better" — but "your skin as it is, right now, at this age, is a problem." Every "firming" serum, every "rejuvenating" cream, every "lift and correct" anything, the language itself is a verdict. And I found, that even knowing this intellectually didn't make me immune to it. Storytime, after I had moved out of Los Angeles (to a country less focused on looks and checking yourself in the mirror) I had gotten stuck in there during the global chaos years. I remember doom-scrolling online at every perfect picture and I texted my laser girl saying "Do I need botox and filler?!" She responded "No you need to get out of LA." She was right, the moment I was out the need to be something I wasn't faded.
By my early thirties I had a full shelf. Twelve products. A seven-step routine that I approached with a kind of grim discipline. At the start it always felt more like a serotonin boost than a skin routine, and when that hit wore off, out of the blue I'd stop. A lot of it was beautiful — genuinely well-formulated, luxurious in the way that good skincare can be. And some of it felt like it worked, but I was tiiired. Not because the routine was wrong, but because the reason for it felt wrong. It felt like performative acceptance (is that a real thing?) as if I was showing up to a battle I'd already decided I didn't want to fight, until magically one day I put down my sword and gave in.
So I stripped it back. All of it…
The process of stripping back
I did it product by product, le sigh. And… forgive me for getting a lil emo as I recall throwing away a $400 moisturizer, and a ton of other products that were gifted, because I. JUST. COULDN'T. DO. IT. ANYMORE. !. And as I shed one final tear for the products that met their untimely grave let me tell you what I learned.
What I noticed was this: my skin didn't fall apart. In fact, it calmed down. The tightness I'd attributed to "just how my skin is" — gone. The occasional reactivity after trying something new, no longer something I could blame on ambient factors, because there were almost none. My skin found its own rhythm. It started telling me things about itself that I couldn't hear through all the "you need this and this and THIS or you're gunna get OLD" noise.
I got to a point where I asked myself what I was actually missing. The answer was: almost nothing. A gentle exfoliant, two or three times a week. A face oil, morning and night. Everything else was either redundant or filling a gap created by something else I was using.
The two products I kept
The first is The Golden Secrets Youth Beauty Face Oil. I've been using it throughout my entire 30s and it would be my deserted island item without hesitation. It's a rich, fast-absorbing oil rooted in Ayurvedic tradition — 24k gold, rosehip, sea buckthorn, turmeric, plant stem cells — and it does exactly what a face oil is supposed to do: nourishes the barrier, restores radiance, and makes your skin feel genuinely fed. Not temporarily plumped, not filmed over, but genuinely fed. Not to mention the founder Jesse Golden is a gem in her own right, and the role model that we all needed from day 1!
The second is the Eminence Strawberry Rhubarb Dermafoliant. A certified organic powder exfoliant that you mix with a few drops of water in your palm, work gently into the skin, and rinse off. A couple more deets: Strawberry and rhubarb for antioxidant and brightening support. Rice starch for gentle physical buffing. Willow bark as a natural source of salicylates. I use it two or three times a week. And let me be real with you, this is my 2nd deserted island item (this is my world so I get to pick 2) because this bottle of magic dust has CARRIED me through my 20s, 30s, and now 40s. Dry cracking skin or lips? It smoothes it in one sesh. Pores feeling like they're showing out? Gone without harsh chemical cleansers.
And this might be a little TMI nearing skin psycho, but if I book a trip and somehow forget it… it's being ordered and 2-day shipped to wherever I am in the world; I wish I was exaggerating but I'm not. The price is reasonable for a certified organic product that performs the way it does, and because it's a powder format, a little goes a long way; and it lasts a long time. It scores an 8.3/10 in our database, with a 9.0 for price value. So if you didn't realize before this, our rating systems are entirely unbiased, because if I had it my way I'd give this 10+++, with 5 Gold Stars, and I would marry it if I could. (Anyone get that joke or is it just me, the 40 year old, set as a live bait for the 20 somethings to devour me in the comments.)
Oil. Exfoliant. That is the whole routine on most days. Some mornings I add OSEA's Ocean Cleanser, and that's it. So in theory my trashbag full of high end products gave me one of the richest things in the world… clarity.
So! Let's get down to the nitty gritty. What happens when you stop adding
Here is the thing nobody tells you about stripping your routine back: it's not a loss. It feels like one at first, in the same way clearing your calendar feels like emptiness before it starts to feel like time. But the clarity that comes from a minimal routine is one of the most underrated tools in skincare.
When your skin acts up, you know what changed — because almost nothing changed. When a product works, you know which one, when something doesn't work, you don't spend six weeks trying to figure out which of nine products it was. You stop spending money on things that are filling gaps created by other people's opinions. You stop standing in front of the mirror at 11pm wondering if one more product will "fix you."
I had removed the noise. And what I found underneath it was that my skin — my actual skin, doing its actual job — was more than fine. It just needed to be left alone to reclaim its dignity and self-produced radiance.
Simple is not giving up
There is a particular condescension that can come with "less is more" skincare advice. As if simplicity is what you do when you've given up, when you can't afford better, when you just don't care.
I want to push back on that.
Simple is not lazy, it's strategic. When you strip a routine to its essentials, you learn exactly what your skin responds to — because there's nothing else it could be. The women I know with the most beautiful skin in their 50s, 60s, and 70s+ tend to have the most boring routines. They found their things decades ago and stopped looking, which newsflash!… That's wisdom earned by paying attention.
My skin going into forty might not be perfect to everyone but it's perfect to me. I have moments just like anywhere where I wish I would have smiled a little less on that one side, but it marks my cheeky (she's always up to something) smirk. My skin is dryer in winter and slightly uneven in summer. It is, in other words, completely normal, completely mine, it feels good to live in.
The products I use nourish it. They support the barrier. They help it do its own work. None of them are at war with what my skin is doing naturally. None of them are trying to reverse something that doesn't need reversing.
On watching other women
I still notice it. The way women — particularly women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond — will look in a mirror and say something unkind about themselves. Not out of vanity. Out of preemptive apology. As if they know their face has done something wrong and they want you to know they know it too.
I understand where it comes from. It is decades of accumulated messaging and I'm not judging it. But it breaks my heart a little every time.
Your face is not a problem, it is a record. It carries light and weather and years of expression and sleep and stress and joy.
What inspired me to build this site and Skincare Dossier is genuinely trying to separate the conversation about skin health from the conversation about looking younger. They are not the same conversation. Hydration matters. Barrier integrity matters. Protecting your skin from oxidative stress matters. Not because any of those things will make you look twenty again. I felt having a space where it's less "anti-aging" marketing jargon and more skin-positive is something I felt was not just a cool thing to do, it's necessary.
What I'd tell my twenty-year-old self
Build your routine around what your skin actually needs, not around what the industry says a person your age should be worried about.
Find one oil that makes your skin feel genuinely nourished. Find one exfoliant that keeps it clear without stripping. Drink water. Sleep well and take naps. And don't let the f^ck boys ruin your glow.
And whatever you do: don't spend forty years apologizing for your own face.
