How to Build a Skincare Routine that Actually Works

This post is here for two kinds of people:

The complete skincare newbie who wants to start taking care of their skin and doesn’t know where to start.

And the person who’s been doing this skincare thing for a while (if not years) and feels like they’re going in circles, going from one routine to the next, blowing money on new products and routines like it’s nobody’s business, and still not getting the results they want.

I know this “start taking care of your skin as early as possible, we have the technology now” wave has been having its moment for over 10 years already, thanks to social media and simply more advanced delivery mechanisms and better skincare tech from countries like Korea and Japan.

But I’ve never seen as many “I wanna start doing skincare, where do I start” posts on Reddit and other platforms as nowadays.

For both groups I mentioned above: most people in 2025 start skincare like they’re cramming for an exam.

• Ten open tabs
• Half a dozen influencer routines and holy grails they swear by
• Dopamine-plus-FOMO-fueled scrolling sessions on TikTok trying to find a “holy grail” for each product category
• Information overload and decision fatigue from so much clashing advice and different product recs that you just feel sick and dizzy from all of this skincare stuff

Followed by poor decisions and impulse buys, ending up with products they either don’t know how to incorporate in their routine or that just won’t work on their skin.

So, where do you start then?

Here.

You start here, with this post.

If you’ve never done or thought any of the above, I’ll save you 15 minutes and say that this guide is not for you.

For everyone else: Building a skincare routine that actually works isn’t about more products.

It’s about giving your skin the right environment to do what it already knows how to do.

And that requires context, and knowing what kind of environment your skin needs, at this stage of your life, and your specific goals – not some influencer’s, who already might have amazing skin.

And for the group that’s been going in circles, with little success: You’re not here to start over for the tenth time. You’re here to get it right once and for all.

So let’s do that.

Everyone, no matter how long you’ve been taking care of your skin, is always in some way looking for the right product lineup.

Like a slightly different serum formula will give you 20x the ROI and make your skin sparkle.

The first step to getting this right from the start isn’t what you add. It’s how you prioritize.

Your skin’s biological job isn’t to impress you every time you look in the mirror.

It’s to protect you.

The goal of skincare isn’t transformation that eventually leads to stability.

It’s the other way around.

People do all kinds of extreme facials, procedures, and overdose with products (transformation). And they do see short-term improvements.

But that approach always comes crashing down, and puts them even further back. There’s no stability in this.

Stability first. Transformation second.

If your skin feels tight, hot, or tingly after every “miracle” serum or acid facial, that’s not progress.

That’s your face asking for a break.

To achieve stability your skin needs 3 things.

Your skin doesn’t need 10 steps.

I’d argue for most people that is overkill, and like I explained here, the “10-Step Glass/Korean/whatever you wanna call it Skincare Routine” was still is just a clever marketing tactic used to sell more products to us westerners.

And gentle spoiler if you decide to read the entire post: I’ve never met a Korean person that has heard of this 10-step “Korean” routine term. And I’m going on my ninth year here, speak the language – at least enough to talk with, and see people’s heads tilt when I ask them what their 10-step routine is.

Your skin only needs three things to work properly, keep its pH balanced, block pollutants, and eventually build that glow we’re all chasing.

Structure, Function, and Defense.

I mention all of these in detail throughout my posts, so I’ll go over the most important things here.

The stratum corneum – a.k.a. your skin barrier is the outermost layer of the skin.

That is your physical and biochemical shield from the outside world.

It locks water in (transepidermal water loss regulation) and keeps irritants, pathogens, and pollutants out.

A disrupted barrier = inflammation, dehydration, increased sensitivity, and slowed and impaired healing.

Without barrier integrity, nothing else – not actives, not exfoliation, not antioxidants – will perform correctly.

Which is why the first real goal in skincare isn’t glow (transformation).

It’s stability.

If your skin isn’t stable, it won’t matter what products you use or even how consistent you are.

Your job is to stop disrupting what your skin’s trying to repair.

Meaning: when your barrier is compromised, blasting it with actives or harsh cleansers just makes things worse.

Instead, you take a step back, slow down, and use only the essentials.

A strong, solid structure is the baseline. Without it, every serum in the world is just an expensive mess for your skin.

Skin cells are constantly renewing via keratinocyte proliferation and desquamation (roughly every 28-40 days).

The younger you are, the lower the above range is.

That’s how dullness fades and texture smooths out naturally.

But if your skin’s turnover is sluggish, it will look dull, pores will clog, and actives won’t penetrate efficiently.

Think of it as your skin’s workflow.

If you support it with the right habits – i.e. enough hydration, balanced actives (like a gentle retinoid), and consistent sleep, your skin can thrive.

Your skin works on balance and rhythm, not more stimulation.

If it’s too fast (e.g., from over-exfoliation or retinoid misuse), expect barrier damage and inflammation.

UV light, pollution, and oxidative stress constantly trigger inflammation and free radical formation.

80% of visible skin aging comes from UV and pollution, not your genetics.

Free radicals break down your collagen, disrupt repair, and cause inflammation under the surface.

As scary as that may sound, this means that, while true to a certain extent, genetics are not the main determinant on how fast you age. Your habits are.

With the right routine and care, everyone can have amazing skin, well into old age.

But this also means that if you don’t protect your skin daily, you’re fighting uphill.

When structure, function, and defense are handled, your skin runs itself.

It self-regulates, self-repairs, and stays calm when it comes in contact with external stressors and strong actives.

That’s what it means to have a routine that actually works.

My point in writing this section is this: Your skin doesn’t work in steps.

“Steps” are what we call individual products that each have their own function.

And sure, our skin will respond to each step – in both good and bad ways, depending on how well we take care of the three things discussed above.

But that’s not how biology works.

It works in systems.

If it’s not clear by now, the purpose of this post is to provide incrementally more and more clarity, so it’s easier to grasp the main concepts.

And with each section, I’m trying to give out more info, so you can understand which products you need, for your own context.

Your skin doesn’t think in steps.

It’s not sitting there like, “Okay, first cleanser, now toner, now serum.”

It works in loops and systems.

Everything it does – hydration, repair, protection – happens at the same time, feeding into each other.

These are biological loops that depend on each other.

That’s why a routine that looks “right” on paper can still crash in real life.

You can cleanse, exfoliate, moisturize, SPF diligently and still wake up dry, dull, or irritated.

If one system keeps breaking, the rest spend all their energy trying to fix it.

That’s why some people look like they’re doing everything right and still can’t move past the same texture, dryness, or breakouts.

What I want you to get from this section is this: the skin is a system that is way more fragile than any influencer, company, or advertising campaign will ever mention.

Most influencers don’t know it, and for brands getting into this would likely be bad for business.

There’s three main loops that sabotage progress for most people, and they’re directly tied to the three things we discussed in the previous section (structure, function, defense).

When your barrier is weak, you’ll see the same pattern every time.

It’s the classic “start strong, crash later” pattern.

Dryness → Irritation → Overcompensation (extra sebum, redness, or breakouts).

This is caused by the following:

• You cleanse too often
• You switch products every week
• You double up on exfoliants because your skin looked great for two days

Then it’s back to square one: with (likely, more) redness, irritation, tightness, and flaking.

Inflammation is the skin’s natural response to stress. It’s a defense mechanism, not a malfunction.

Every time your skin starts to rebuild and become calm, most people hit it with another experiment or new product.

And because the barrier controls hydration and inflammation, once it’s unstable, everything else spirals.

The way you fix this is by sticking to one gentle routine for at least two weeks.

No new products or testing.

If your skin is always trying to repair the damage, you can’t expect it to improve.

Your skin renews itself roughly every month.

If you change your lineup every week, you never let that process finish.

Imagine you’re installing a 30-day update on your PC, and keep restarting every week before it ever installs.

Very similar to your skin.

And I don’t know about you, I hate even a 20-minute update. So as with all good things, good skin health requires patience.

And patience is what our modern society doesn’t have – that’s why everyone turns to chasing transformation before any stability can ever happen.

And these constant “resets” is why everything feels like “it’s not working.”

It almost definitely is – people just keep opting out and resetting before anything ever happens.

This one we don’t notice day to day, but it’s there.

UV, stress, and pollution constantly produce free radicals.

The easiest way to describe them is unstable molecules that damage cells.

Your skin’s defense system fights them off 24/7, but when you skip SPF, forget antioxidants, or stay in chronic stress, that system gets fatigued.

Kind of like fighting a leak with a coffee mug. Technically doing something, but not enough to keep up.

It stops neutralizing the daily damage and that’s when fine lines, uneven tone, and dullness can start showing.

Defense is a daily job.

SPF and antioxidants are the two easiest ways to keep this loop from burning out.

When these loops are taken care of, everything else falls into place.

• Products stop reacting weirdly.
• Skin tone evens out.
• You stop having a blotchy or itchy face in the morning

And that’s the whole point – getting these systems to do what they were designed to without you constantly interrupting them.

I purposefully didn’t (and won’t) include a routine with products.

And if you’re new on the blog, I also don’t recommend specific products without knowing your skin and lifestyle context.

What I want my readers to learn more than anything, is making conscious, informed consumer decisions when they know their skin (and lifestyle) context. Because that is all there is to skincare.

You can put all of the products you want, but if there is a lifestyle lever that you’re not giving enough love to, it will literally un-do everything that $80 moisturizer would normally do on your skin.

That is the whole purpose of why this blog exists – to teach you that context supersedes everything in skincare.

For the AM/PM skeleton, I’m in the process of creating a google doc, with the most essential steps, depending on how long you’e been in the game, your age, and a bunch of other factors.

Basically, a document (more like 10 documents for 10 kinds of people in one) that a derm would charge you $200 just to recommend 3-4 products.

Zero product mentions or outbound links.

Normally you’ll be able to access this doc without email or any forms, but since I need another 10-15 days to finish it [this message is written on Nov 18], you can sign up to the list below to get notified when it’s out. You can literally unsubscribe once you receive the notification that it’s live on this post.

I also realized many people love micro-offers nowadays (as compared to my $1,299 full service)

So I’ve decided to do a micro routine audit (after getting a good idea of your skin context) and nudge you in the right direction.

I hate sellouts, and announcing it to people during peak shopping season would be a pretty sellout move, so I’ll send out an email after this whole shopping spree thing is done, and people can rationally decide whether they need it or not

I can sell you that “I used XYZ product, and I saw overnight results” but that would be a load of BS.

Skin (read: biology) doesn’t care that you’ve been consistent for a week.

It runs on its own schedule.

Things like cell turnover, collagen remodeling, pigment regulation – they all have timelines measured in weeks and months, not days or overnight.

And trying to answer the question of when to actually expect any visible results when building a proper skincare routine is, like your skin – a unique, case-by-case situation.

But, I’ll give you a starting (and what the science agrees with) guideline below:

Around the 4- to 6-week mark, you can expect texture to start to even out and for redness to calm down.

Between 8 and 12 weeks, deeper stuff like hyperpigmentation or fine lines start shifting.

Anything beyond that – tone correction, long-term “glow”, collagen rebuilding takes months, not a new, overhyped product launch.

That’s biology. Any company, influencer, or esthetician who says otherwise is either dumb or playing you for your money.

Cells need time to turn over, adjust, and build a new baseline.

If you keep switching routines before those timelines finish, you’ll never see what your skin could look like if you just gave it more time.

And as we discussed before, you’re basically yanking the plug halfway through the update.

Progress feels boring because healing feels boring.

Good skin doesn’t give daily dopamine hits like what you see scrolling TikTok.

What good skin does is it quietly improves over the course of weeks while you’re being consistent and stack good habits, until one day you get that “holy shit, I’m glowing” moment.

And it looks better than ever.

That’s not saying you will make a huge leap to glowing skin over night. Our brains just have the habit of becoming used to things and not noticing changes until way later down the line.

On building effective routines, here’s a rule I want to pass on to both groups mentioned at the very start of this post:

For beginners: pick the absolute barebones routine that’s gentle enough to repeat, realistic enough to maintain, and consistent enough to keep up with.

For people who are already trying to level up their routine, but aren’t getting the results they want: you likely have deeper insights into your skin/lifestyle context, and know what issues you’re dealing with, and what goals you want to tackle first.

I recommend you start with the barebones routine, and add up to 2 additional products depending on your goals.

Again, to see a basic logic behind effective routines and how different levels and ages should craft theirs, you can check the doc here.

Stick with it for at least two full skin cycles before judging results.

That means at least 8 to 10 weeks.

Which is long enough for your skin to actually show you what it can do when you stop interrupting it.

That’s it.

That’s how you build a skincare routine that actually works.

Not by listening to skinfluencers trying to shove products down your throat, or by doom-scrolling TikTok and similar platforms in the pursuit of the next “holy grail”.

You do it by first understanding how your skin works, the systems and mechanisms that allow it to put its best face (pun intended) forward, and by giving it the time and stability needed to do so.

Thanks for reading.

K. Hoe