Where to begin when you know nothing

If you have never had a routine and the subject feels vast, hold on: it is far smaller than it appears. Most of what is said about facial care is addressed to people who have already begun.

There are three things, not thirty

Cleanse, nourish, protect from dryness. That is all. Everything else is a variation, a refinement, or a way of selling something more.

A face needs what the day has deposited to be removed. It needs a little of what it loses to be given back. And it needs not to be mistreated in between.

If you do only this, properly, for a year, you will be ahead of most people who own fifteen products.

What not to do at the start

Do not begin with five things at once. It is the first impulse and the worst idea: five simultaneous novelties will teach you nothing, because you will never know which one did what.

Do not take what a friend recommended. She is sincere, she is right — for her. It is the least transferable piece of information there is.

Do not scrub. It is the most tempting gesture and the one that damages the most faces. A face is washed gently, with the fingers, in lukewarm water.

The honest timeline

Nothing shows in a week. This is important to know, otherwise you will conclude too quickly.

Allow three to six weeks before a change says anything. Allow several months before it holds. It is long, it is dull, and it is the price of reliability.

It also means you have time. Nothing urgent is decided this week.

What no one will tell you at the counter

That the most important question is not what to use, but who it is made for.

Two faces can look exactly the same and require the opposite of each other. One shines because it produces a lot. The other shines because too much has been taken from it and it compensates. They are advised the same thing. It relieves the first and sinks the second.

You cannot know which case you are by looking at yourself, and no one at the counter can tell you either. It is not ill will: that information is simply not found there.

The true starting point

It comes earlier than the purchase of a first product.

Every face follows a logic — what it produces, what it loses, what it needs. This logic is stable, it was there long before you asked the question, and it decides what will do you good.

It cannot be read in the mirror. It is read from the beginning, from the day you arrived. Starting there spares you the ten years of trial and error that almost everyone goes through.