A friend messaged me recently, asking for skincare recommendations. A cleanser, a serum, anything I’d trust. Just tell me what to buy.
It’s a question I’ve been asked for most of my career: in treatment rooms, on shop floors, in training sessions and, more often now, over coffee. And my answer usually begins with a question of my own.
My career began in beauty, in treatment rooms and clinics, before moving into education with brands such as Mecca, Sephora and Dermalogica. At Sephora, I designed a skin training programme for teams across Australia and New Zealand, built around how to consult before you recommend. It taught me something I still come back to: the right product depends entirely on asking the right questions first.
What is your skin like day to day? What is it doing right now? What are you already using? Without those answers, even a beautiful product is only a guess.
Why it feels so complicated
So why does skincare feel so complicated? Mostly, it’s the noise.
Products promise more than their job. A cleanser sits on your skin for under a minute before it’s rinsed away. Its real role is to gently remove makeup, sunscreen, oil and the day, without stripping or irritating your skin. It may also promise to brighten or plump, but in that short time, those claims matter far less than how well it cleanses. The same is true of moisturiser. How well the formula suits your skin comes first. Everything else is a bonus.
The language is made to sell, not to explain. Serum, essence, ampoule, booster, concentrate. None of these have fixed definitions, so one brand’s essence can be another brand’s serum. If the difference has ever felt unclear while you’re standing at a counter, that’s because often there isn’t a consistent one.
Advice rarely comes with context. A routine is an answer to someone else’s skin. It shows you what worked for them, but not why, and without the why, it’s very hard to know whether it will work for you.
And skin changes. With the seasons, with travel, with stress, with the first cold weeks of a London winter. A routine that felt right in summer may need adjusting by January, and that’s simply part of caring for skin.
The order of things
Beneath all of that noise is a much simpler order, and it’s the same one I’d use in any consultation.
Skin type guides your foundation steps: cleanser, moisturiser, sunscreen.
Skin condition guides your treatment steps: serums, exfoliants, targeted treatments.
Personal preference guides the brand.
Your skin type tends to stay fairly consistent, so once your foundation steps are right, they usually stay right. They’re rarely the most exciting part of a routine, but they’re the part I’d never skip.
Skin conditions change over time, whether that’s dehydration, breakouts, pigmentation, sensitivity or ageing, so your treatment steps can change with them. This is where ingredients matter most, because you’re matching the ingredient to the condition.
Brand comes last. Once you know what you need, choosing between brands comes down to texture, feel, scent and the products you genuinely look forward to using. Price can reflect better formulation, particularly with vitamin C and vitamin A, where stability really matters. But more expensive doesn’t automatically mean more effective.
Most of the confusion comes from starting at the other end: the brand first, then the product, and the skin last of all.
Where it really begins
My friend got her answer in the end. It was a long one, and it didn’t mention a single product. It started, as it always does, with her skin.
Because to know what to use, you first need to understand how skincare works. And that begins with the difference between your skin type and your skin condition.
Your skin type is what your skin is. Dry, oily, combination or balanced, it’s largely consistent and shapes the everyday basics. Your skin condition is what your skin is doing right now: dehydrated, congested, sensitised, uneven. It can shift from one month to the next, and it’s what your treatment steps are there to address.
The two are easily confused. Dry skin lacks oil, and that’s a skin type. Dehydrated skin lacks water, and that’s a condition, which means any skin type can have it, oily skin included. They can feel surprisingly similar, but they need quite different care.
Once you can tell the two apart, the shelf starts to make sense. You know which products are doing the everyday work, which ones are there for a reason, and which ones are simply noise.
That’s what I want this space to be. A place to decode the parts of beauty that feel more complicated than they need to, and to share what years in treatment rooms, on training floors and behind the scenes of beauty brands have taught me. Not more products or more steps. Just a clearer understanding of your skin, so that choosing what goes on it feels less overwhelming and more your own.
