The modern skincare routine is an engineering project. The average routine recommended by mainstream beauty media in 2024 involves between seven and twelve steps: cleanser, exfoliant, toner, essence, serum, eye cream, moisturiser, SPF, possibly a primer, possibly a mist, possibly a face oil on alternating days depending on skin type. Each product targets a specific concern: hydration, brightening, anti-ageing, pore minimisation, redness reduction. The routine takes between ten and twenty-five minutes per session. Many practitioners do it twice daily.

The industry that produces and sells these products generates approximately $200 billion in annual revenue globally. The number of distinct products it sells has expanded continuously for three decades. The research question worth asking is not whether the products work — some of them do, for specific concerns, within specific parameters — but whether the concerns they claim to address existed before the industry created the framework for identifying them.

The Problem Creation Machine

Cosmetics marketing operates through a specific mechanism: the identification or construction of a skin concern, followed by the provision of a product that addresses it. “Skin barrier” was not a concept in mainstream consumer skincare vocabulary in 2010. By 2022, it appeared in the marketing language of hundreds of products and dominated skincare discourse across social media platforms. Ceramides, the ingredient associated with barrier repair, moved from the ingredient lists of prescription dermatological products to mass-market moisturisers in approximately four years. The concern and the solution arrived together, sold by the same industry.

The mechanism is not unique to skincare — it operates in pharmaceuticals, in nutrition, in personal finance — but skincare applies it with particular efficiency, because the skin is simultaneously visible, legible to others, and subject to continuous natural change that can always be characterised as requiring correction. The skin you have at 35 is different from the skin you had at 25 in ways that are inevitable and that the industry has systematically redefined as problems.

The Dermatologist’s Simpler Prescription

Dermatologists — the medical specialists who address skin conditions professionally — consistently recommend a considerably simpler routine than the one the skincare industry promotes. The core of evidence-based skincare is three steps: a gentle cleanser, a broad-spectrum SPF, and a moisturiser appropriate to skin type. Retinoids, available by prescription in most markets, have the strongest evidence base for addressing the anti-ageing concerns that occupy the most expensive segment of the consumer skincare market.

The gap between dermatological consensus and consumer skincare routine complexity is not primarily driven by evidence. It is driven by the economics of a market where the margins on a “serum” are considerably higher than the margins on a basic moisturiser, and where the aspiration of a seven-step routine involves seven separate purchase decisions rather than three.

The Ingredient Churn

The ingredient cycle in skincare moves with unusual speed. Niacinamide, hyaluronic acid, vitamin C, retinol, AHAs, peptides, snail mucin, tranexamic acid: each has had a moment of peak visibility in which it appears in every product and every social media conversation, followed by gradual normalisation as the next ingredient cycle begins. The rotation is not primarily driven by new clinical evidence about ingredient efficacy. It is driven by the industry’s need for novelty, which is the same force that drives fashion cycles in clothing.

The routine that a consumer assembled in 2019 based on the best current advice will, by 2024, have been informed that its ingredients are outdated, potentially in conflict with each other, and missing the currently essential actives that have since been identified. The anxiety this produces is productive for the industry: it drives replacement purchases and routine expansion.

What the Routine Is Actually For

The most honest account of the contemporary skincare routine is that it serves two overlapping functions: some genuine skin maintenance (hydration, sun protection, addressed concerns that benefit from specific actives) and a daily ritual of self-care that has psychological value independent of its cosmetic effects. Research on ritual behaviour consistently finds that the act of deliberate, self-directed care — regardless of its specific content — has measurable positive effects on mood and wellbeing.

The ten-step routine may not be delivering ten times the skin benefit of a three-step routine. It may, for the person who does it, be delivering something else: the twice-daily interval of attention to one’s own body, the sensory experience of the textures and scents, the satisfaction of a completed sequence. These are not the benefits the industry sells, but they are the benefits many users actually receive. The product is not always the point.