When you know nothing about it and don't dare ask

There’s a particular awkwardness around this subject. You get the feeling that everyone else knows, that the vocabulary is technical, and that it’s too late to ask basic questions.

Let’s settle this right away: almost no one knows, and the vocabulary is largely decorative.

What is technical and what isn’t

What’s genuinely technical is making a stable emulsion. That’s not your concern.

What concerns you comes down to a few simple facts: skin is made of oil and recognises oil; nothing spreads over dryness; rubbing removes more than you think; and a face takes weeks to respond.

Everything else — the names of molecules, the percentages, the product categories — is commercial vocabulary you can safely ignore.

What people who “know” actually know

Most of the time: what worked for them, and the names of a few ingredients.

That’s useful for them and almost impossible to transfer. When someone speaks to you with confidence about what to use, they’re describing their own face. They’re not describing you.

It isn’t arrogance. It’s the only information a person can have on this subject from their own experience.

The three questions no one dares ask

“Do I need all of this?” No. Three things are enough for most people: remove the day, give a little back, protect yourself from the sun.

“Is it serious if I do nothing?” No, not in any dramatic sense. A face left in peace does perfectly well. What causes damage is more likely excess zeal: the rubbing, the stripping, the constant changes.

“Is it too late?” No. The way a face moves through the years ahead follows the same rules at any age.

Why the awkwardness exists

Because the subject has been made complicated. A shelf selling a hundred products needs a hundred products to seem necessary, and that requires a vocabulary that distinguishes between them.

It isn’t a conspiracy: it’s how a market normally works. But it creates an impression of complexity that has no real foundation.

What you actually need to know

One thing only, and it isn’t technical: what your own face is asking for.

Whether it produces too much, or loses too much. Whether you need to give back to it or take away from it. That’s the question that decides everything else, and it requires no prior knowledge.

It only requires one piece of information, and that information can’t be learned: it has to be obtained. It’s read from the very beginning, from the nature that is yours — and once you have it, you know more than most people who’ve been reading about this subject for ten years.