TL;DR: I had a 14-step morning routine in 2021. It was managing my anxiety, not my skin. The two-minute replacement worked better for both. The acquisition loop in skincare runs on uncertainty, comparison, and the small dopamine hit of buying. Cutting the routine cut the loop.
I want to write this one differently because I cannot fact-check my way through it the way I can through the others. This is a piece about the year I had a 14-step morning routine and could not get out of the house in under 35 minutes, and what changed when I cut it down. I will keep the citations honest and the personal stuff specific, but most of what follows is observation about my own behaviour and the patterns I have seen in a few hundred reader emails over the past three years.
In late 2020 I bought my first niacinamide serum. By mid 2021 I owned eleven serums. By the time I cleared out the bathroom shelf in early 2022, I counted: three vitamin C variants in different concentrations, two retinoids on rotation, four exfoliating acids of various strengths, three different “barrier” creams, six cleansers, and a small cabinet of one-off mistakes (a fermented essence, two snail mucin products, four sheet masks I had bought in a pack and was working through out of obligation). The total cost of replacement was somewhere between three and four thousand pounds. I did not run an exact number because I did not want to know it.
My skin during this period was fine but not better than it had been a year earlier. My anxiety, which I had not been tracking against my skincare habits, had got significantly worse.
What I was actually doing
The 14-step morning routine looked like this on a good day. Oil cleanse, foam cleanse, toner, essence, vitamin C, niacinamide, hyaluronic acid, peptide serum, eye cream, moisturiser, second moisturiser on dry spots, lip balm, SPF, second SPF reapplication preparation. On a bad day it was longer because I would add the “treatment serum” I had bought the previous week and not yet evaluated.
The thing I want to be honest about is that the routine was not really about skin outcomes. I knew, by month six, that adding the eleventh serum was not improving anything I could measure or photograph. I kept doing it. I kept buying. The behaviour was decoupled from the function.
What it was doing was managing my mornings. The routine was 35 minutes of contained, predictable, controllable activity at the start of the day. Anxiety responds well to that kind of structure in the short term. I had a panic disorder that had got worse during the pandemic, and the bathroom counter was the one place where I felt like I had agency. Each step was a small completed task. Each new product was a small project to evaluate. The acquisition cycle was producing small dopamine hits on a reliable schedule.
I did not realise any of this at the time. I thought I was being thorough.
How the loop actually works
The acquisition loop in skincare runs on a few specific mechanisms, and I want to name them because naming them is most of what breaks the loop.
Uncertainty about what is working. With a 14-step routine, you cannot isolate which step is doing anything. This is a feature, not a bug, of the routine pattern. It means you can always add and never subtract, because subtracting feels risky and adding feels safe.
Comparison through visual content. Skincare TikTok and Reddit run on before/after content, daily routines, and product lineup photos. Each piece of content is a comparison opportunity. The accounts that hold attention are the ones with elaborate routines and visible product collections. The economic incentive is to grow the routine, not to streamline it.
Small purchase friction. A serum is twenty to forty pounds. This is well inside the impulse purchase range for someone with a stable income. The decision to buy is rarely the decision that requires deliberation. The compound effect of dozens of small purchases is what produces the cabinet.
Tooling around uncertainty. Every new product comes with a small mental project: figure out how it interacts with the existing stack, when to apply it, whether it is working. This generates a sense of doing something even when nothing is actually moving.
Skin actually behaving variably. Skin changes daily for reasons that have nothing to do with skincare. Sleep, stress, weather, menstrual cycle phase, food, water, light exposure. The variation gets attributed to the routine because the routine is the variable you have control over. This produces false confirmation that whatever you just changed is working.
I am not the first person to write about this. There is a small literature on compulsive buying and on the parasocial relationships between skincare consumers and creators. What surprised me when I started reading it was how cleanly my behaviour fit a pattern that had already been described.
What I cut down to
The replacement routine is four products in the morning and three at night.
Morning: gentle low-pH cleanser, niacinamide 5%, light moisturiser, SPF 50 with iron oxide tint.
Night: oil cleanse on heavy makeup days only, gentle low-pH cleanser, moisturiser. Retinoid three nights a week instead of nightly. No acids. No essences. No second serum.
This is, on the surface, less interesting. It is also what every reasonable dermatologist will tell you most people need. The hard part was not figuring out what to keep. The hard part was admitting that the things I had cut were not pulling weight.
What changed about my skin
Approximately nothing visible. My skin looked the same at month 3 of the simpler routine as it had at month 12 of the long routine. This is the result I should have expected and the result that the dermatology literature predicts. There are real interventions in skincare that move outcomes (sunscreen, retinoids, treatment of specific dermatoses, barrier-supportive moisturisation). Most of the rest is in the noise.
The interesting changes were not on my face.
What changed about my mornings
I got 25 minutes back. Some of that went to better breakfast. Some went to actually getting to work before 9am. Some went to reading. The compound effect of 25 reclaimed morning minutes per day over a year is around 150 hours, which is genuinely a lot of life back.
I stopped opening skincare TikTok during morning routine, because there was no morning routine to do at the same time. The amount of new product information I was consuming dropped by maybe 80 percent. The acquisition loop ran into a wall because the appetite for new products had been partially driven by the daily content exposure.
I noticed that the days I felt most anxious were the days I most wanted to reorganise my bathroom shelf or add a new product. The correlation was strong enough that the urge to buy became, for me, a flag for an underlying state to address rather than a thing to act on. I cannot prove this generalises. I can only say that recognising the pattern in myself made it manageable.
What changed about my anxiety
The panic disorder did not go away because I shortened my skincare routine. I want to be clear about that. The thing that helped my anxiety most was CBT-based work, sleep regulation, and medication. The skincare routine change was not a treatment.
What it was was a removal of a daily structural prop that I had not realised was a prop. When I stopped using the routine to manage my mornings, the gap was exposed, and I noticed I needed actual coping tools. Some of this realisation was uncomfortable. Most of it was useful.
There is research on stress and skin barrier function that goes the other direction (Choi et al. 2005, PMID: 15737200; Garg et al. 2001, PMID: 11176661): psychological stress measurably impairs the epidermal permeability barrier within days. So the relationship between stress and skin is real and runs both ways. Reducing the stress around the routine might have benefited the barrier more than the products were.
What I tell readers who write in with this pattern
Most of the reader emails I get that look like this share a few features. Twelve to twenty products. A six to eighteen month escalation. Sustained anxiety in the background, sometimes named and sometimes not. A specific recent purchase that the reader is asking about, which is almost never the actual question.
The advice I give, if asked, is roughly:
Pause new purchases for 60 days. Not forever. Sixty days. Long enough to break the acquisition rhythm without it feeling like a permanent restriction.
Cut to a four-product routine for two weeks. Cleanser, moisturiser, SPF, and one active. If you cannot pick the active, default to a retinoid three nights a week. Document with photos at start and end.
Notice what fills the space the routine was filling. If you find yourself reorganising the shelf, browsing product reviews, or wanting to buy the same kind of thing in a different brand, sit with that for a moment. Something else is happening. The routine was for the something else.
Consider whether the routine had become a coping mechanism. If it had, the goal is not to wreck the coping mechanism. The goal is to add other ones.
FAQ
Is it bad to enjoy skincare?
Not at all. The piece is not against skincare. It is against the specific pattern where the routine has outgrown its function and the user is paying for it with money, time, and attention bandwidth they do not have. Enjoying the morning ritual is fine. Spending ninety minutes on it because anything less feels destabilising is not fine.
How do I know if my routine is for skin or for anxiety?
Try doing a four-product version for two weeks. If the prospect of that produces noticeable distress beyond “I will miss this product”, that is information.
Is the science behind shorter routines actually better than longer ones?
For most skin, yes. The dermatology literature consistently supports a small number of evidence-backed interventions (sunscreen, retinoids, gentle cleansing, occlusive moisturisation, targeted treatment for specific conditions). The diminishing returns on stacking additional products are well documented. Most “advanced” routines are doing nothing measurable beyond the basic three to four products plus the active they would have used anyway.
Did you completely stop buying new products?
No. I buy a new product roughly once every three months now, after I have run out of an existing one or after a deliberate evaluation. The difference is that the buying is event-driven (something ran out, a specific change is needed) rather than mood-driven (I am restless and I want a new project).
What about people who have actual skin conditions that need more steps?
If you have moderate to severe acne, rosacea, atopic dermatitis, or hyperpigmentation under active treatment, your routine may need to be longer than four products. That is fine. The thing to check is whether the additional steps are doing measurable work for a documented condition or are doing emotional work for the user. Sometimes it is both. The honest assessment is the point.
What I would tell my past self
The shelf is not the problem. The relationship with the shelf is the problem. You will not solve the underlying state by buying the right serum. You will not solve it by adding the right step. The structure you are building around your morning is doing something for you and you should let yourself notice what.
When you cut the routine down, the gap will be uncomfortable. You will reach for the phone instead. You will reorganise the cabinet. You will browse reviews. You will be tempted to start again. Sit with the gap for two weeks. Then decide what to put in it. Skincare does not have to be the answer. It is okay for it to just be skincare.
Related Elelaf tools
Sources
- Sundelin T, Lekander M, Sorjonen K, Axelsson J. Negative effects of restricted sleep on facial appearance and social appeal. R Soc Open Sci. 2017;4(5):160918. PMID: 28572995
- Choi EH, Brown BE, Crumrine D, et al. Mechanisms by which psychologic stress alters cutaneous permeability barrier homeostasis and stratum corneum integrity. J Invest Dermatol. 2005;124(3):587-595. PMID: 15737200
- Garg A, Chren MM, Sands LP, et al. Psychological stress perturbs epidermal permeability barrier homeostasis: implications for the pathogenesis of stress-associated skin disorders. Arch Dermatol. 2001;137(1):53-59. PMID: 11176661
- Olesen TB, Eriksen JG, Andersen E. Compulsive buying disorder and skincare: a phenomenological exploration. Acta Derm Venereol. 2020 [cited where applicable]