A skincare routine in five steps

Most people we meet are using too many products, applied in the wrong order, and have changed the whole routine twice in the last three months. A short routine used consistently beats an elaborate one used erratically, every time.

Here is the version we give people at the end of a consultation. Five steps, and on any given day three of them take under a minute.

One: cleanse, once or twice a day. A gentle, non-foaming cleanser in the morning and something that properly removes sunscreen and makeup in the evening. If your skin feels tight and squeaky afterwards, the cleanser is too harsh. That tight feeling is not cleanliness; it is a compromised barrier, and a compromised barrier sits behind a surprising share of the sensitivity, redness and breakouts we are asked to treat.

Two: an antioxidant in the morning. Vitamin C in a stable formulation is the usual choice. It will not do anything dramatic on its own; what it does is reduce the oxidative load your skin carries through the day and support the work your sunscreen is doing. Apply to dry skin, before moisturiser.

Three: moisturiser, matched to your skin rather than to your self-image. Oily skin still needs it — the drying routines people put themselves on to control oil frequently make oil worse. Look for ceramides, glycerin or squalane. If you use a retinoid, this step is not optional.

Four: sunscreen, every morning, all year. This is the step with the strongest evidence behind it and the one most often skipped between October and April. Broad-spectrum SPF 50, applied properly — most people use roughly a third of the amount the tested rating assumes — and reapplied if you are outdoors for long stretches. If you have any pigmentation concern, use a tinted mineral formula containing iron oxides for the visible-light protection.

Five: a retinoid at night, three nights a week to begin with. This is the active with the deepest evidence base for texture, fine lines, pigmentation and acne, and it is also the one people abandon fastest, because they start every night at full strength, get four weeks of flaking, and conclude their skin cannot tolerate it. Start low, apply to dry skin, buffer with moisturiser if you need to, and build up over two months. Skip it the night before and the night after any in-clinic treatment.

That is the whole routine. Anything else — exfoliating acids, niacinamide, peptides, a targeted pigment corrector — is an addition to a stable base, added one at a time, with six weeks between changes so you can tell what is doing what.

Two things that are not steps but matter more than most products. Give any change three months before judging it; skin turns over slowly and the honest assessment is at twelve weeks, not at two. And take a photograph in the same light every month, because gradual improvement is essentially invisible day to day.

A note on cost, since it comes up. The two steps with the strongest evidence behind them, sunscreen and a retinoid, are also among the cheapest things on the shelf, and there is no ingredient in a two-hundred-dollar serum that is unavailable at a quarter of the price. Spend where the evidence is and treat the rest as optional. We will happily go through what you already own and tell you which of it is doing nothing.

What we would gently discourage: daily physical scrubs, layering four acids, a new routine every time an advertisement is convincing, and treating a barrier problem as an acne problem. If your skin is stinging, red and reactive, the answer is almost always to do less for a fortnight.

Bring your current products to your appointment — the actual bottles, or photographs of the ingredient lists. It is far easier to build a sensible routine from what you already own than to hand you a list and hope.