What you can stop buying without a second thought

Here is a list, and it is deliberately uncomfortable. It does not target any particular category of products: it targets reasons for buying.

What was bought for a problem that has gone away

Look at what arrived on the shelf to answer something temporary — a season, a reaction, a difficult month. The problem has passed. The product has stayed, and it continues to be applied out of habit.

It does no harm. It takes up space in a routine and it keeps you from seeing clearly. It is the easiest layer to remove, and often the thickest.

What was bought on someone’s recommendation

Not on a bad recommendation — on an excellent one, made sincerely by someone for whom it had worked.

This is the least transferable piece of information there is. The person described to you what their face was asking for. Yours may be asking for the opposite, and that cannot be seen from the outside.

What duplicates a function already fulfilled

Two things that do the same thing. This is very common and almost invisible, because both were bought at different times for different reasons.

Look at your routine by function rather than by product: what cleanses, what prepares, what nourishes, what closes. You will often find two occupants for the same position.

What contradicts something else

The most costly category, and the hardest to see.

One product that takes and one that closes. One that refines and one that loads. One that strips in the morning and one that repairs in the evening what the morning stripped away. Each product is defensible on its own; together they cancel each other out, and the face arbitrates between two logics that never consulted one another.

Removing one of the two almost always produces an immediate result, and it is spectacular for something that consists of removing.

What was bought to reassure oneself

This is the category no one talks about, and it is real.

There are purchases that answer an anxiety rather than a need. They work: the anxiety drops at the moment of purchase. It rises again three weeks later, and you have to start over.

You can recognise them by one detail: they are almost never finished.

The single reason we keep going

All these categories have one cause, and it must be named plainly.

We buy by hypothesis because we have no criterion. Without a criterion, every purchase is a defensible attempt, and nothing ever allows us to stop — since nothing allows us to say that what we already have is enough.

The criterion is not found on the shelf and not in the mirror. It lies beneath: what your face does by nature, what it truly asks for, which way it is going. This information cannot be deduced from any observation, because two opposite logics produce the same signs.

It is read from the beginning. And the day you have it, the list above takes care of itself, in a single evening, without regret.