Why the best advice fails on half the women who follow it

Take any serious piece of skincare advice, given by someone competent, and read the responses. You will find the same thing every time: half the people transformed, half the people polite, and a minority who found it frankly bad.

We explain this gap away as individual variability, which is an elegant way of explaining nothing.

Two faces, one sign, two opposite needs

Let us take the most ordinary case. Two people shine by midday. The advice is the same for both: an absorbent clay twice a week.

The first produces by nature. Her face pushes, makes, starts again; the excess is the by-product of real energy. Unloading it brings relief, and the advice is excellent.

The second shines because she has been stripped. Her surface has been taken too often and she compensates as best she can. Unloading it pushes her further down, and the same advice is bad. She will do more of it, since she was told it worked.

Neither of them applied the advice badly. The advice was addressed to only one of them.

Why the world of skincare cannot resolve this

Public advice addresses an average. There is no average face — there are five general ways of functioning, and an average of five distinct logics resembles none of the five.

The result is structural: all mass advice is right for part of its audience, lukewarm for another, and counterproductive for a third. And because the people for whom it worked speak louder than the others, the misunderstanding reinforces itself with every cycle.

This is also why the debates are never settled. Should you exfoliate or not, oil or not, cleanse once or twice: each camp is right, each for half the world, and no one says so.

What this implies for someone exacting

That the quality of the source is not enough. You can follow only competent people, read only what is serious, set aside everything that is chatter, and still get it wrong — because the sorting you do concerns reliability, not destination.

It is a powerful filter applied to the wrong variable. It eliminates charlatanism, which is already a great deal, but it does not eliminate what is excellent for someone else.

And excellent advice sent to the wrong address is harder to detect than bad advice, because it withstands every examination. You will find nothing to reproach it for. You will simply notice, in two years, that it has produced nothing.

The only missing filter

You would need to be able to ask, before anything else: this advice, what nature of face is it addressed to, and is it mine.

The first part of the question can often be guessed by reading attentively. The second cannot — and that is where everything stops. You cannot deduce your own underlying logic from what you observe, since what you observe is precisely what that logic produces, mixed with everything else.

That logic has a name, it is stable, and it can be read elsewhere than in the reflection: from the beginning, from the nature that was set in motion on the day you arrived. It is the variable missing from an otherwise correct line of reasoning.