My honest five-minute skincare routine at 44

I want to start by saying I have no business giving anyone skincare advice. I am not an esthetician. I did not use sunscreen for the entire decade of my twenties, a period I spent largely outdoors. My skin is what it is: forty-four, dry in the winter, still occasionally producing a hormonal spot on my chin the week before my period, which feels like a scheduling error nobody has corrected.

But people ask, and the honest answer is short enough to fit in a blog post, so here it is. Five products. About five minutes. Most mornings.

The morning, in order

I don’t wash my face with cleanser in the morning. I did for years, and my skin was tight and unhappy, and one dermatologist appointment in 2021 fixed that in about nine seconds when she asked why I was stripping a face that had been on a clean pillowcase all night. Now: warm water, hands, done.

• Water. Just water, splashed on, patted mostly dry with a towel I try to keep for my face only and which somebody in this house uses for other purposes anyway.
• A vitamin C serum. Three drops. I use a drugstore one now after four years of an expensive one, and truthfully I can’t see a difference. This is the step I would drop first if I had to drop one.
• Moisturizer. Thick, boring, fragrance-free, the kind sold in a tub. I put it on while my face is still slightly damp, which is the single most useful thing anyone has ever told me about dry skin.
• Sunscreen. SPF 50, every day, including the gray ones, including the ones where I don’t leave the house. This is the non-negotiable.
• A tinted balm on my cheeks and lips, if I’m seeing people. Same tube for both. I’ve been using the same shade for six years.

That’s it. If I’m running late I skip the serum and the balm and I’m out the door in ninety seconds with the two things that actually matter.

If I could only keep one product for the rest of my life, it would be sunscreen, and it wouldn’t be close.

The evening, which is shorter

Cleanser — a gentle cream one, not the foaming kind that squeaks. Then, three nights a week, a retinol, the mildest over-the-counter version, which I started at 42 and which took my skin about four furious months to accept. Then the same tub of thick moisturizer, more of it.

On the four nights I skip the retinol, I skip it because I forgot, not because of any strategy. I’ve decided to call that a routine.

What I stopped doing

I stopped buying things because of a photograph. This was expensive to learn. I have a drawer — an actual drawer — of half-used bottles I bought because a woman with beautiful lighting said they changed her life. Most of them did nothing. A couple made things worse.

I stopped chasing pores. Mine are the size they are. No product has ever changed them and the ones that claim to are mostly just drying my face out and making me look tired.

I stopped treating my skin like a project with a deadline. That one took the longest. There was a stretch in my early forties where I was doing something to my face every night — masking, exfoliating, layering four things — and my skin was the worst it had been since I was nineteen. Doing less fixed it. It took about six weeks of doing less and a lot of restraint.

What I actually notice at 44

The texture of my skin changed before the lines did. It got drier, and it got looser along my jaw, and neither of those things is fixable with a serum, and I have made a genuine peace with about eighty percent of that. The other twenty percent visits me under the fluorescent lights in a fitting room and I try not to give it too much airtime.

What helps more than any product: sleep, which I get less of than I should. Water, which I’m bad at. And — truly, I’m not being cute — going outside and moving around. My skin after a long walk looks better than my skin after anything I’ve ever bought.

I don’t want my face to look twenty-five. I want it to look like a well-rested version of exactly what it is.

If you’re starting from nothing

Buy a sunscreen you don’t hate the feeling of. Wear it tomorrow. That’s the whole beginner routine, and it will do more for you over ten years than every serum in my drawer combined.

Then, in a month, add a moisturizer you like enough to actually use. And then, if you want, in another month, one more thing. Slowly. One at a time, so you can tell what’s working.

Five minutes. Five things. A face that’s clearly forty-four and doing fine.