Your Skin Doesn’t Need Skin Care-PopularCottage

Do the Math: A 3-Step Skin Care Routine That Works

Walking down the skin care aisle may lead you to believe that in order to achieve the appearance of a gorgeous, glowing complexion, you have to stock up on a ton of skin care products. While high maintenance skin care routines certainly exist—and work—a simple three-step skin care routine can be just as beneficial. At the end of the day, three of the most useful skin care products you can use are a facial cleanser, face scrub, and moisturizer. So, if you’ve been feeling overwhelmed about how to approach your skin care routine, take a deep breath and keep reading for a simple yet effective three-step skin care regimen. You’re welcome in advance!

STEP 1: cleanse

One of the most important parts of caring for your skin is ensuring that it’s clean. Throughout the day, dead skin cells, dirt, oils, and impurities can build up on the surface of your skin, and if you don’t wash your face, this can lead to clogged pores—which can lead to breakouts. Choose from one of three facial cleansers below, all of which are formulated to transform from clay to mousse.

L’Oréal Paris Pure-Clay Detox & Brighten Cleanser: This facial cleanser is suitable for all skin types and its formula is enhanced with charcoal. It helps purifiy the surface of your skin of dirt, oil, and pollution, and use after use, you’ll notice that dull skin appears brighter.

L’Oréal Paris Pure-Clay Purify & Mattify Cleanser: This facial cleanser formula is enhanced with eucalyptus and suitable for all skin types. Have oily skin? This one could be for you! This facial cleanser helps remove excess sebum (a.k.a. oil) from the surface of skin for a refreshed look and feel.

L’Oréal Paris Pure-Clay Exfoliate & Refine Cleanser: This facial cleanser is suitable for oily and combination skin, and its formula is enhanced with red algae. It goes beyond daily cleansing to exfoliate.

STEP 2: exfoliate

If your complexion is looking a little lackluster these days, you could be in need of some exfoliation. Exfoliating is the process of sloughing dead skin cells from the surface of your skin. Choose from one of the three face scrubs below, and add your chosen face scrub to your skin care routine three times a week post-cleansing.

L’Oréal Paris Pure-Sugar Nourish & Soften Face Scrub: This face scrub leaves skin feeling softer and smoother and looking more refined. Immediately, skin feels smooth and comforted, while skin feels nourished with continued use over time.

L’Oréal Paris Pure-Sugar Purify & Unclog Face Scrub: This face scrub effectively removes dirt, oil, and impurities from the surface of skin and polishes away dead skin. With continued use over time, pores look tighter, unclogged, and less visible.

L’Oréal Paris Pure-Sugar Smooth & Glow Face Scrub: This face scrub gives skin a glowing appearance immediately and leaves skin feeling baby-soft, smooth, and comforted with continued use over time.

STEP 3: moisturize

After cleansing and exfoliating, the best thing you can do for your complexion is to slather on moisturizer while your skin is still damp, as this can help lock in that moisture. To keep your complexion hydrated, smooth on a moisturizer formulated with hyaluronic acid, like the L’Oréal Paris Hydra Genius Daily Liquid Care for Normal to Oily Skin, L’Oréal Paris Hydra Genius Daily Liquid Care for Normal to Dry Skin, or L’Oréal Paris Hydra Genius Daily Liquid Care for Extra Dry Skin.

Interested in using an anti-aging moisturizer? Consider adding the L’Oréal Paris RevitaLift Cicacream Face Moisturizer Pro-Retinol & Centella Asiatica to your skin care routine. This lightweight, protective cream helps skin feel softer and smoother immediately, while minimizing the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles with continued use over time. Smooth the cica cream onto your face morning and night for best results over time.

Think you might have a bit more time to dedicate to your skin care routine? Check out our article, The High Maintenance Girl’s Guide to Skin Care.

I'm a Beauty Editor—These Are the 7 Things I'm Spending My Money on This Year

One of the questions I get asked the most is What are the most important skincare products? And while this question doesn’t sit particularly well with me (when it comes to specific product recommendations, they’re different for everybody), I do appreciate that when we’re all strapped for time and cash, it’s really all anybody wants to know.

While I’m still going to need to test and trial products for work, when it comes to my skincare mainstays, I’m switching things up. In a bid to definitively answer beauty’s million-pound question, I’m vowing to clear out my stash and just use the products that really are the most important.

Before we get into this, I would like to highlight that just because I am “getting rid” of certain products in my main line-up doesn’t mean I’m ditching them altogether or that they’re no good. I will, of course, still keep hold of them for when their time comes. Without further ado, here’s a roundup of the products that I’m going to invest some more time and money in this year, and the ones I’m bidding adieu to (sorta).

Your Skin Doesn’t Need Skin Care

My skin wants for nothing. It is lavished daily with all the buzziest beauty ingredients: ceramides and peptides, antioxidants and antimicrobials. Exfoliating enzymes, epidermal growth factor, stem cells, and squalene oil. Pre-, pro-, and post-biotics, plus a pore-clearing cleanser that balances my pH level. Collagen, of course, and hydrating humectants: glycerin, hyaluronic acid, lactic acid. Finally, a face oil—one that’s biocompatible and full of essential fatty acids.

You may scan that list and think: in this economy? But let me assure you, no plastic bottles were squeezed in the making of this skin care routine. I haven’t used an essence or eye cream in years. I don’t need to. You don’t need to. The human body produces all the aforementioned chemicals on its own. It uses them to self-moisturize, self-exfoliate, self-protect, self-heal, and even self-cleanse.

Where do you think beauty brands get their big ideas, anyway?

The notion that skin care products are largely unnecessary isn’t new. “Commercials tell us to remove the oil from our skin with soap, and then to moisturize with lotion,” wrote physician and public health expert James Hamblin in a 2016 article for the Atlantic on how he quit showering “Evolutionarily, why would we be so disgusting that we need constant cleaning? And constant moisturizing and/or de-oiling?”

“[S]kin has withstood millions of years of evolution without the aid of tinctures and balms,” agreed Krithika Varagur in a 2018 piece for the Outline, arguing that pummeling your face with ingredients is “violence” and “perfect skin” is unattainable anyway.

Even dermatologists concur. “Most skin-care products are kind of a scam,” said Jules Lipoff, an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, in a 2019 article for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The beauty industry plays upon our insecurities, superstitions, and our tendency to enjoy the complicated.”

Despite what marketing campaigns may say, your routine need not involve multiple bottles of various actives—or even a single fancy cleanser. You can count on your own body to produce most of what your skin needs by itself. Not convinced? Let’s go on a little tour through some of the important things it can do without assistance—the skin care that your skin, and mine, gets every single day without intervention.

The Skin Moisturizes Itself

Don’t call it grime. That light layer of “oiliness” on your skin is actually sebum, which “helps seal in moisture and prevent the skin from becoming dry,” Devika Icecreamwala, a board-certified dermatologist in California, tells Slate. The much-maligned substance—technically a “wax ester”—contains nourishing lipids, fatty acids, cholesterol, glycerol, and squalene and is continuously excreted through the pores (the original refillable packaging). On the surface, sebaceous fluids mingle with omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids, vitamin E, and your very own ceramides to form the skin barrier, also known as the stratum corneum. This layer slows the evaporation of cells’ hydration.

Most of that hydration exists within the skin—water-loving hyaluronic acid molecules, for example, live in the deeper portion of the dermis—though a small percentage is absorbed from the environment. Water meets oil and voilà: moisturizer. The skin obtains this external hydration via its own natural moisturizing factors, or NMFs. “The components that make up NMF are excellent humectants,” says Ranella Hirsch, a board-certified dermatologist and founder of Atolla Custom Skincare. You’ll recognize them from the labels of your beloved beauty products: glycerin, lactic acid, amino acids, urea, and sodium pyrrolidone carboxylic acid.

These chemicals promote hydration by “attracting water into the corneocytes,” Hirsch explains— “corneocyte” being the scientific term for “dead skin cell.” Yes, that means your skin needs “dead” skin cells in order to function—and that your favorite exfoliant, by sloughing them off, may be making it harder for your skin to stay moisturized. (Keratinocytes, the supposedly “fresh, smooth” cells that sit underneath the “dead” ones, aren’t the right shape and size to store NMFs.)

The Skin Exfoliates Itself

Don’t worry, your skin doesn’t just endlessly pile up with “dead” cells. Once corneocytes have fulfilled their purpose, the skin self-exfoliates through a “natural shedding function called desquamation,” says board-certified dermatologist Joshua Zeichner. It takes the average skin cell 28 days to cycle from creation to desquamation. That process is activated by bodily enzymes that loosen the bonds between corneocytes and the barrier.

Your microbiome—the symbiotic collection of 1 trillion bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms living on and in your skin—offers another form of very natural self-exfoliation. Certain microbes “are voraciously eating up as much dead skin as possible,” writes dermatologist Monty Lyman in The Remarkable Life of the Skin. Corneocytes, then, can be considered innate prebiotics (substances that nourish bacteria), since they feed your innate probiotics (live, microbiome-dwelling bacteria), which in turn produce postbiotics (beneficial materials secreted by said live bacteria, like ceramides and antimicrobial peptides). Sebum is also an innate prebiotic, by the way. Microbes slurp it up, thereby balancing your oil levels.

The Skin Protects Itself

By nature, the skin is vulnerable to outside aggressors like pathogens, pollution, and sunlight. Not to worry: It has self-protection down to a science thanks to the surface’s acid mantle. Thought to be a byproduct of the microbiome, the acid mantle is “composed of natural oils and amino acids, which create a protective film to cover the skin,” says Icecreamwala. Sweat contributes to the acid mantle as well, helping it maintain a pH of around 4.4—the ideal level for neutralizing opportunistic bacteria, viruses, and more.

Lipids on the skin’s surface work to mitigate the effects of pollution, too. Antioxidant vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids decrease the oxidative stress caused by free radicals. Additionally, studies show that P. acnes—commonly and unfairly known as the “acne-causing bacteria”—produce antioxidant proteins that protect from free radical damage.

The Skin Heals Itself

“The skin is an amazing organ that repairs itself from trauma,” says Zeichner. When wounded—whether in the form of a scrape or cut, sunburn, free radical exposure, or an infected blemish—the skin kick-starts a complex healing process that “recruits” certain cells to care for the injured area, Icecreamwala elaborates. “One type of these cells is fibroblasts, which produce collagen and elastin to replace the damaged skin.” In the case of sun damage, the skin sends enzymes and proteins to compromised cells to initiate DNA repair. The skin barrier has inherent photoprotective properties as well, which can help shield against the sun in the first place. (Do help your skin out with sunscreen though—that’s one traditional product dermatologists say you should definitely use.)

The Skin Even Cleanses Itself

Your lymphatic system is continuously ridding skin cells of waste products and toxins. You’re naturally equipped with pore-clearing cleansers, too: sweat and sebum. These substances “wash” the pores as they pour through, pushing out buildup and neutralizing opportunistic bacteria. Like almost every other creature on Earth, you’ll want to rinse off sometimes. Water works just fine.

Messing With the Skin Can Upset It

“Today we have never used so many products and yet, our skin has never been worse,” says Elsa Jungman, a skin pharmacologist and microbiome expert. “The more ingredients we use, the more it can damage our skin barrier and microbiome, and the more we remove the essential nutrients [it needs] to function properly”—aka, all those inherent cosmetic chemicals. This can lead to flare-ups of inflammatory conditions like acne, rosacea, eczema, and psoriasis, which leads to the use of more products to fix the problems caused by the first products, over and over again.

That said, sometimes your skin needs support (or your brain needs a fun spa day). A few choice products can be fine. In general, these should facilitate your skin’s own functions rather than wrestle them into smooth and shiny submission. My personal routine consists of cleansing with manuka honey, a prebiotic that feeds the microbiome, and applying mineral SPF to protect my skin from sun damage. When I need to remove sunscreen or makeup, I reach for plain jojoba oil, since it’s a close chemical match to human sebum. Jojoba makes an excellent moisturizer when applied to damp skin, too, so I’ll use some when my face feels particularly dry. Your routine may be different based on your body’s unique needs and any medical issues you might need to address. (And by all means, please get your moles checked.)

Giving up (most of) your skin care can seem scary, but it doesn’t mean giving up “good skin.” After a 28-day cycle sans products, your microbiome will repopulate, your skin’s inherent functions will reregulate, and you’ll likely find you never needed 10 steps, or five, or even two. Self-sufficient amalgam of oil and water and squalene and ceramides that it is, the skin can’t help but glow.