My entire skincare routine: 5 products, nothing else

The honest pitch: I tried the multi-step skincare thing. Toner, essence, serum, eye cream, ampoule, moisturizer, oil, SPF, the whole regimen. I did it for about four months. My skin looked the same as it did when I used three products, and my mornings took 20 minutes instead of 4. So I cut it back.

This is what I actually use. Five products, twice a day, no rituals. If you’re tired of skincare being a hobby, this is the post.

What I mean by “minimal”

A product earned a spot in my routine if:

It does one job clearly and does it well
The ingredient list is short enough that I can read it without zoning out
It works without needing two other products to “activate” it
It’s available at a normal store or on Amazon, not a quarterly drop from an indie brand with a 6-week waitlist
It costs somewhere between drugstore and “I had to think about it”, no $90 serums

If a product needed an entire ecosystem to work, it didn’t make the list.

The five

1. Cleanser: gentle, non-foaming, morning and night

The job: take off the day (or the sleep) without stripping my skin.

I use a simple non-foaming gel cleanser. The ones that foam aggressively almost always have sulfates that leave my skin feeling tight, which then makes me reach for more moisturizer to compensate, which is the whole loop minimalism is supposed to break.

What to look for: short ingredient list, no sulfates, no fragrance, no “brightening” or “anti-aging” claims tacked on. Just a cleanser.

Skip: anything labeled “deep cleansing” or “purifying.” Marketing words for “this will dry you out.”

2. Actives: one per slot, not three layered in the same step

This is the place where minimalist routines usually fall apart, because the internet will tell you that you need a vitamin C and a niacinamide and an exfoliating acid in the morning, plus a retinol and a peptide and a hydrating ampoule at night.

The principle I actually follow is simpler: one active per slot. Not one active total, one per time of day, not stacked.

For me, that’s:

Morning: a vitamin C serum, applied after cleansing, before moisturizer and SPF. Vitamin C buffers some of the oxidative stuff sunlight does to your skin, which is the actual reason it’s a morning product. Most people use it for “brightening” but the sun-buffering is the part with real evidence behind it.
Night, as needed: retin-A when my skin starts to feel rough. Not on a strict 3-nights-a-week schedule, just when my skin tells me. Some weeks it’s twice. Some weeks it’s not at all.

That’s it. No AHA on Tuesdays, no niacinamide layer, no “actives sandwich.” Two actives, two slots, intuitive frequency.

Three reasons this works better than the layered version:

Most actives do overlapping work and you can’t tell what’s doing what when you stack them
Stacking is the fastest route to a compromised skin barrier
A simpler routine is one you’ll actually do for years, which is what actually moves the needle

Skip: any routine that calls for three or more actives in the same step. If a brand sells you a “morning serum cocktail,” that’s marketing, not skincare.

3. Moisturizer: boring, fragrance-free, twice a day

The job: hold water in your skin. That’s it. That’s the entire job.

I use a basic fragrance-free moisturizer with a short ingredient list. The fancy ones with peptides and growth factors and snail mucin are fine, but the evidence that they outperform a plain moisturizer is thin, and they cost three to five times as much.

What to look for: ceramides or glycerin or hyaluronic acid as a main ingredient, no fragrance, nothing labeled “anti-aging” because that word means nothing on a moisturizer.

Skip: anything with “parfum” or “fragrance” high on the ingredient list. Even if you don’t react now, you might later, and there’s no upside to it.

4. SPF: every morning, the one I’ll actually wear

The job: not get skin cancer. Also: not undo every other thing in this routine.

This is the only product where I’d tell you to spend slightly more if it gets you to actually wear it daily. The most effective sunscreen is the one you put on without thinking about it. If a $15 sunscreen feels like glue and you skip it half the time, the $32 one that feels nice is the cheaper product on a per-application basis.

I rotate between a few Korean SPFs. They’re better formulated than most US options, higher filter standards, lighter textures, no white cast. Not a trend recommendation; the formulations are genuinely better.

What to look for: SPF 30 minimum (50 if you’re outside a lot), broad spectrum, a texture you don’t hate. Mineral or chemical is a personal preference, both work.

Skip: sunscreen sticks for face. They never go on evenly enough to actually protect you.

5. A face oil: winter only, on the nights my skin feels tight

This is the only seasonal product on the list. In dry months, roughly November through March, depending on where you live, I add a few drops of oil at night, on top of moisturizer, when my skin feels tight.

Two oils I rotate between:

Rosehip oil. Reliable, slightly orange in the bottle, sinks in fast. Good for general winter dryness.
Turmeric oil. Less common, but a few drops calm down redness and that wind-burned look you get in February. Don’t overdo it, turmeric will tint things if you use too much.

Both are single-ingredient or near-single-ingredient products. If your “face oil” has a 50-ingredient list pretending to be an oil, it isn’t actually doing oil things. Read the back.

Skip: “luxury facial oils” with botanical names you can’t pronounce and an $80 price tag. The plant didn’t get more expensive because you read about it on Goop.

The routine, in 4 minutes

Morning:

Cleanser (or just water if I cleansed thoroughly the night before)
Vitamin C
Moisturizer
SPF

Night:

Cleanser
Retin-A or moisturizer (depending on what my skin needs)
Oil if it’s winter and skin feels tight

That’s it. No essence, no toner, no eye cream, no second serum, no spot treatment, no overnight mask. Skin looks the same as it did when I owned 14 products. I have my mornings back.

What’s actually on my shelf

Categories are useful for deciding. Names are useful for shopping. So here’s the real list, with the caveat that a couple of these rotate and I’m not going to pretend they don’t.

Cleanser: La Roche-Posay Toleriane Purifying Facial Cleanser. Fragrance-free, sulfate-free, non-comedogenic. The large 13.5oz bottle runs $18 to $20 and lasts long enough that I stop thinking about it.

Vitamin C, morning: Goodal Green Tangerine Vita C Dark Spot Serum, around $20. This is the cheaper replacement for the $65 one that oxidized on me. It comes in a tinted pump bottle, which matters more here than the price does.

Retinoid, night, as needed: generic tretinoin. I also have Differin (adapalene) in the drawer, but the tretinoin is what I reach for. Neither one is nightly. “As needed” is doing real work in that sentence, and if your skin isn’t already used to a retinoid, going slowly isn’t optional.

SPF: currently SKIN1004 Madagascar Centella Hyalu-Cica Water Fit Sun, SPF 50+. Before that I finished a bottle of Beauty of Joseon Relief Sun, also SPF 50+, also good. Both run about $20. These are the Korean sunscreens I mentioned keeping after the 10-step experiment ended. They’re more pleasant to wear than most of what I’d used before and they cost less, which is not a combination you get often.

Moisturizer: this is the slot that rotates. Hydrating gels and cream moisturizers, whatever is working at the time, sometimes with a few drops of rosehip or another oil mixed in when my skin is dry.

Four slots are settled. The moisturizer is the one that moves, and after a few years of this I’ve stopped treating that as a problem to solve.

What I tried and quit

In the spirit of not pretending I arrived here gracefully:

Korean 10-step routines. Tried for four months. The cumulative effect was that I had nicer-smelling skin and an extra hour per week of skincare time I’ll never get back. (The Korean SPFs stayed. The 10-step part didn’t.)
Sheet masks. They work fine. I just couldn’t get past the amount of plastic packaging per 15-minute hydration session. A good moisturizer does most of what they do without the trash.
Gua sha. Bought the stone, watched the videos, did it for three weeks. Made no observable difference and I kept losing the stone. It’s somewhere in my house. I’m not looking for it.
A $65 vitamin C serum. Oxidized in two months because vitamin C is unstable and most of the formulations don’t survive light or air. I now use a much cheaper one in a tinted pump bottle, and on mornings when I remember.
Eye cream. I bought four different ones. None of them did anything that my regular moisturizer wasn’t already doing. The “eye cream” category is mostly the same ingredients as moisturizer, sold in a smaller jar at four times the price.
Slugging. Putting a thick layer of petrolatum on your whole face overnight. It works, but it ruins your pillowcase, and I value my pillowcase.

The honest part

I’m not anti-skincare. I’m anti-skincare-as-a-personality. There are people whose skin genuinely benefits from a longer routine, chronic conditions, aggressive treatments, prescription regimens. If that’s you, this post isn’t telling you to throw out your tretinoin.

But the average person reading skincare content on Instagram doesn’t have a chronic condition. They have a marketing problem. They’ve been told their three-product routine is incomplete because there’s no toner, no essence, no second moisturizer, no eye cream. None of those things were missing. The brands just needed somewhere to put new SKUs.

Five products, used consistently, for years, will do more for your skin than 12 products used inconsistently for six months. That’s the trade.

The cost, honestly

The 11-product version (what I was doing):

Roughly $280 to fully stock
Roughly $90/month to maintain (some products run out faster than others)

The 5-product version (what I do now):

The cleanser, the vitamin C, and the SPF run about $20 each
Add a moisturizer and a retinoid and it lands around $90-110 to fully stock, though the retinoid swings a lot depending on whether it’s a copay or paid out of pocket
Roughly $25-35/month to maintain

Year-one savings switching: ~$700. And I get 15 minutes back every morning, which over a year is roughly 90 hours. That’s a workweek and change.

Where to start

If you have a bathroom drawer full of half-used products and you want to simplify:

Identify your five. One cleanser, one or two actives (one per slot), one moisturizer, one SPF, one optional oil for winter.
Use up what you have first. Don’t throw out half-full bottles to “start clean.” That’s the same consumerism wearing a minimalist hat.
Replace one at a time as things run out. Same approach as the pantry swaps, slow, no ceremony.
Give it 8 weeks before deciding. Skin turns over slowly. A new routine needs about two months to show its real results.

That’s the simpurely approach. Smaller decisions, made once, that compound into a calmer bathroom counter.

Want a printable version of this routine plus the “what to look for” notes? It’ll be on the email list soon, [sign up here] (link placeholder).

New here? Start with 12 Trader Joe’s Swaps That Quietly Upgraded My Pantry or My Entire DIY Cleaning Setup, or follow along on Instagram @simpurely.