The Skincare Mistakes I Made Before Finding a Simple Routine

Skincare Mistakes I Made Before Finding a Simple Routine

At some point in my late twenties, I became the kind of person with seventeen products on their bathroom shelf and skin that looked worse than when I’d had zero products on their bathroom shelf.

I’m not exaggerating the seventeen. I counted once. There was a vitamin C serum I’d read about in three separate places. A retinol I’d bought because a YouTuber with perfect skin used it. Two different moisturisers — one for day, one for night, because someone told me that was the responsible thing to do. An exfoliating toner. A hydrating toner. A face oil. An eye cream. A clay mask and a hydrating mask. SPF that I only remembered to apply about four days out of seven.

My skin was perpetually irritated. Red in patches. Breaking out in places it hadn’t broken out since I was a teenager. And dry and oily simultaneously — somehow — which I didn’t even think was physically possible until I was living it.

I kept assuming the answer was more products. The right combination. A better routine. The thing I hadn’t found yet.

It took embarrassingly long to realise the problem wasn’t that I was missing something. It was that I’d added far too much.

Mistake One: Treating My Skin Like It Needed Fixing

Looking back, this was the root of everything else that went wrong.

I didn’t start with problem skin. I started with fairly normal skin that I gradually convinced myself was broken. Every article I read, every Reddit thread I fell down, every skincare influencer I watched identified a new problem I hadn’t known I had — dehydration, a compromised moisture barrier, hyperpigmentation, congestion, large pores. Each one came with a product solution.

The cumulative effect of treating a hypothetical problem parade was real damage. I was layering active ingredients without understanding that some of them actively conflict with each other. I was exfoliating more than my skin could recover from. I was chasing a “glass skin” standard that required my face to be in a constant state of being worked on.

The first genuinely useful thing I read came from a dermatologist’s blog — not a beauty brand’s dermatologist, an actual clinical one — that said something like: most people’s skin problems are either caused or worsened by over-complicating their routine. I read that and felt genuinely seen.

The fix wasn’t adding something new. It was stripping back to almost nothing and waiting.

Mistake Two: Layering Actives Without Understanding Them

This is where I did the most damage, and it’s also the most common mistake I see people make when they’re trying to build a “proper” skincare routine.

An “active” is an ingredient that actually does something — changes the skin at a cellular level. Retinol, vitamin C, AHAs (like glycolic acid), BHAs (like salicylic acid), niacinamide, benzoyl peroxide. These all work. They’re real, they’re effective, and they’re also not meant to be used all at once every day by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I was using a vitamin C serum in the morning, a niacinamide toner at night, and a retinol also at night — sometimes on the same evening. If you know skincare, you’re probably wincing. I did not know skincare.

Some combinations cancel each other out. Some increase each other’s irritation potential. Some require your skin to have adjusted first before you add a second active. I was doing none of this correctly.

The INCI Decoder website became genuinely useful here — you can paste in any product’s ingredient list and it tells you what everything does, what concentration it’s likely at, and whether there are any flagged interactions. I used it to finally understand what I was actually putting on my face, rather than just trusting marketing.

What I learned: if you want to use actives, pick one. Get your skin used to it. Run it for at least four to six weeks before considering adding another. Your skin needs time to adjust, and adding three new things at once means you have no idea which one is helping, which is hurting, and which is doing nothing at all.

Mistake Three: Over-Exfoliating and Calling It “Glowing Skin”

This one took me the longest to identify because the short-term effect of exfoliation is genuinely nice. Your skin looks brighter and smoother immediately after. What I didn’t notice was the two days following — the sensitivity, the redness, the weird texture that appeared after my skin had been sanded down past its comfort point.

I was using a physical scrub twice a week and a chemical exfoliant (glycolic acid toner) three nights a week. That is a lot. That is too much.

A damaged skin barrier — which is what chronic over-exfoliation produces — looks like: persistent dryness that moisturiser doesn’t fix, redness and sensitivity to products that never used to bother you, a sort of tightness or stinging that shouldn’t be there, and breakouts in new places. I had all of these and kept looking for new products to solve them.

The solution was counterintuitive: stop exfoliating entirely for four weeks. Just cleanser, moisturiser, SPF. Let the barrier repair itself.

By week three, my skin was calmer than it had been in two years. The texture issues that I’d attributed to needing more exfoliation were actually caused by too much of it. The redness was fading. The new breakouts had mostly stopped.

I now exfoliate once a week if my skin seems to need it. Often I skip a week entirely. The restraint feels almost irresponsible given where I used to be.

Mistake Four: Using the Wrong Cleanser for Years

I washed my face with a “deep cleansing” foaming face wash for the better part of three years because it made my skin feel squeaky clean afterwards. That squeaky feeling, I now know, is your skin telling you it’s been stripped of its natural oils and is in mild distress.

Squeaky clean is not a goal. It means your cleanser has disrupted your pH balance and removed the oils your skin produces deliberately. Your skin then overproduces oil to compensate, which leads to that lovely combination of being simultaneously dry and oily that I described at the start.

I switched to a gentle, pH-balanced cleanser — I use the CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser, which is boring and cheap and probably the most consistently recommended skincare product by actual dermatologists — and the oily patches on my forehead reduced within a fortnight. Not because the cleanser was magic. Just because I’d stopped stripping my skin twice a day.

The rule of thumb that actually helped: if your skin feels tight or squeaky after cleansing, that cleanser is too harsh. Your skin should feel clean but comfortable. That’s it.

Mistake Five: SPF as Optional

I want to talk about this one separately because it’s the mistake with the most actual long-term consequences, and it’s the one I’m most frustrated at myself for making.

I wore SPF when I remembered. When it wasn’t cloudy. When I thought I’d be outside. Which in practice meant maybe half the days of the year, applied inconsistently, often too little.

UV exposure is the single biggest external factor in skin ageing. It also happens on cloudy days, through windows, in winter. Daily SPF, applied properly (more than you think — about a quarter teaspoon for the face), is the most evidence-backed thing you can do for your skin’s long-term health. More than retinol. More than any expensive serum.

I started using Altruist SPF 50 daily because it’s genuinely affordable (less than £2 for a generous tube), doesn’t leave a white cast, and sits well under whatever I apply after it. The ISNTREE Hyaluronic Acid Watery Sun Gel is another one I rotate in that feels almost like nothing on the skin, which removes the “I hate how SPF feels” excuse I used for years.

I keep SPF on the bathroom shelf next to my toothbrush. The visual proximity means I don’t have the choice to “forget” it.

Mistake Six: Buying Based on Marketing Rather Than Ingredients

This is where most skincare money goes to die.

I bought products because they had impressive packaging. Because they promised “clinically proven” results in quotes that meant nothing. Because they had a nice smell. Because they were expensive and I assumed price correlated with quality.

It mostly doesn’t. The dermatology community has a fairly consistent view: the gap between what cheap skincare can do and what expensive skincare can do is far, far smaller than the gap between their prices.

The Ordinary changed how I thought about skincare purchasing. Their products list the active ingredient and its concentration on the front of the bottle. You buy the ingredient, not the brand story. Their niacinamide serum costs a few pounds and does what £60 serums do. Their glycolic acid toner is consistently recommended by dermatologists. The lack of mystique is the point.

Learning to read ingredients lists — or at least using INCI Decoder or CosDNA to read them for me — meant I stopped being sold things I didn’t need by descriptions I couldn’t evaluate.

What My Routine Actually Looks Like Now

Morning:

• • Gentle splash of water (no cleanser in the morning unless I’ve been sweaty)

• • Light moisturiser — CeraVe Moisturising Cream

• • SPF 50 — Altruist or ISNTREE, depending what I reach for

Evening:

• • CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser

• • Niacinamide serum two to three evenings a week (The Ordinary, 10%)

• • Retinol once a week — I built up slowly over four months from once a fortnight

• • CeraVe Moisturising Cream

That’s it. Six products, used across two routines, with restraint on the actives.

My skin is calmer, clearer, and more consistent than at any point in the seventeen-product era. Not because I found some magic combination. Because I stopped doing so many things to it.

What I’d Tell Someone Starting From Scratch

Start with three things: a gentle cleanser, a basic moisturiser, and SPF. Use them for a month. See what your skin actually looks like when it’s not being constantly treated for problems it may not have.

If there’s a specific concern after that — acne, dullness, texture — add one thing at a time and give it six weeks before judging. Skincare changes are slow. Slower than any before-and-after photo suggests.

Don’t buy anything with more than about eight to ten ingredients until you understand what the ingredients do. Don’t trust anything that promises results in five days. Don’t assume expensive means better — check the active ingredients and their concentrations instead.

And maybe most importantly: your skin is not a project. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be healthy, consistent, and not irritated by the things you’re doing to it.

That realisation, more than any serum I’ve bought, was what actually changed everything.