T here are too many lists. You know this. I know this. The internet is a filing cabinet of ranked products, each one declared essential by someone who was sent it for free and given four hours to have feelings about it. I have spent years not writing this column because I didn't want to add to that particular pile.
Then I ran out of three of these in the same week. Not by design — I had simply underestimated how quickly things go when you use them every day without thinking about it. Replacing them took me approximately four minutes, which is unusual. I usually stand in an aisle for twenty minutes second-guessing myself into buying something I don't need. The fact that I didn't hesitate felt like data. So here we are.
I'm aware this is a list piece. I have made my peace with that.
{/* ---- II. The five ---- */}The five.
The cleansing balm in a glass jar. Not the kind in a tube. Not the kind that comes in a pump. A glass jar with a wide mouth and a screw lid, the kind where you have to put your finger in to get to the product, which is either a design flaw or the whole point depending on your relationship with slowness. I have been using a balm in this format for six years. The brand has changed twice. The format has not. It goes onto a dry face in the evening — pressed, not rubbed — and it takes everything off: the SPF, the pollution, the general exhaustion of the day. The cloth afterward is cotton flannel. The second cleanse is a gel. But the balm is the beginning of everything.
I'm not loyal to a brand. I'm loyal to a step and the format that makes the step work.
The vitamin C serum. Two drops. Every morning. Pressed into the skin after cleansing, before anything else. I do not rub it in — rubbing is for people who are in a hurry, and your skin can tell. The formula I use is a fifteen percent L-ascorbic acid in a water base, which is not exciting to read but is the actual relevant information. I have tried oil-based versions. I have tried derivatives. I keep coming back to this because it works on the one thing I care about: the small area of unevenness on my left cheekbone that I have been looking at every morning since I was twenty-four. It is, six years later, considerably less interesting than it used to be.
The SPF I actually wear. No white cast. No perfume. A texture that sits on the skin without announcing itself, which is a quality I want in most things. I have strong opinions about SPF that I have suppressed for several columns now, and the short version is this: the best sunscreen is the one you put on, which sounds obvious until you consider how many expensive options I have abandoned at the back of a bathroom shelf because they smelled like a hotel lobby or turned my forehead the colour of a plastered wall. This one goes on last, every morning, even in winter, even in Istanbul in January, which is grey and cold and not remotely sunny, and I wear it anyway because that is not actually the point.
The lip balm I've been using for years. I'll tell you what it is because there's no dignity in being coy about a lip balm: it's Aquaphor. The ointment, not the lip-specific version in the elegant little tube, because the ointment comes in a larger container and costs less and is the same thing. I have it on my desk. I have it in my coat pocket. I have it in three bags and I have no memory of putting it there. I do not use it because it is luxurious. I use it because my lips are dry and this is the thing that fixes that. I have tried the expensive versions. They do not fix it more.
The mascara I keep coming back to. One coat. That's it. I don't layer. I don't tightline. I don't use a primer or an activating serum or whatever the current scaffolding system is. I apply one coat of a tubing formula — the kind that comes off with warm water and doesn't leave the dark rings under my eyes that I used to wake up with, which I had assumed for years was just my face — and that is the entire eye routine. I have switched mascaras four times in the last three years. I have come back to this one all four times. I consider this reasonably definitive.
{/* ---- III. What didn't make the list ---- */}What didn't make the list.
The toner I used for three years and then didn't, because I realized one afternoon that I had no idea what it was doing. I still have most of a bottle. I keep it as a reminder that length of use is not the same as evidence of effect.
The oil I was convinced would be on this list. It had two good years. Then a reformulation that the brand did not announce, because brands never announce reformulations — they just change the packaging slightly and hope you don't notice. I noticed. The new version sits on the skin differently. Not wrong, exactly. Just not right enough to justify the space it takes up in a five-item list.
The eye cream. All of them, collectively. There are twelve on my shelf, which is eleven more than I need, and the one I use most is a face moisturiser decanted into a small pot that I keep by the mirror. The eye cream category is, in my view, mostly optimistic fiction sold in very small containers at very large prices. I include this disclaimer because I have a moral obligation, having written a products column, to be honest about the category I find least defensible.
Everything else I own but didn't mention is either aspirational, sentimental, or bought on a Tuesday afternoon in a state I can only describe as mild hopefulness. None of that qualifies.
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