What I Learned From Stripping Back My Skincare Routine to Just 4 Products
Somewhere between a new baby, healing, and a version of myself I didn’t quite recognise yet, I stopped having the energy to perform my skincare routine.
And I mean perform, because that’s what it has become. A ten-step ritual I followed not because it was working, but because I didn’t know who I was if I stopped.
Stripping it back to four products wasn’t a choice I made. It was a surrender. And my skin? My skin got better.
My skin was glowing, and I was undergoing radiotherapy. Bearing in mind my skin had already taken a battering from chemotherapy and the stresses of surgery. I had no idea how it was still glowing.
On top of everything, I still had to be a mother, and that rearranged everything: my sleep, my body, my sense of time. I didn’t have thirty seconds between steps anymore. Some mornings, I didn’t have thirty seconds at all.
So I stopped. Not intentionally, not as some bold wellness experiment I planned to write about. I stopped because I was surviving, and twelve products on a bathroom shelf started to feel less like self-care and more like one more thing I was failing at.
I put most of them in a box. Kept four. I washed my face, moisturised, and had ONE good serum and put on SPF. That was it.
My skin has never been calmer. My mornings have never felt more like mine. And I’ve been sitting with a question ever since: was all of that ever really for my skin, or was it for something else entirely?
The 4 products I kept
I want to be honest here, I didn’t choose these four products based on a dermatologist’s recommendation or a carefully curated list. I chose them because they were the ones I reached for instinctively when everything else felt like too much. Looking back, that instinct turned out to be right.
A gentle, creamy and hydrating cleanser. One that didn’t strip my skin or leave it feeling tight. For melanin-rich skin, especially, a harsh cleanser is often the first thing quietly working against you, disrupting your barrier before your day has even begun. I needed something that felt like care, not correction.
A good hydrating serum, one that would restore moisture to my skin. Chemotherapy tried to take everything from me, including my skin texture. I was once an oily skin babe, but chemo quickly changed that. My skin was now normal to dry skin, which meant I needed more moisture and hydration.
A ceramide-rich moisturiser. When your skin barrier is under stress, and stress is exactly what mine was, ceramides help it hold itself together. Not metaphorically. Literally. They’re the lipids that keep moisture in and irritants out. My skin had been crying out for this, and I hadn’t been listening.
SPF. Every morning, without negotiation. As a Black woman, I spent years believing the myth that melanin was protection enough. It isn’t. Sun exposure is one of the leading causes of hyperpigmentation on dark skin, the very thing so many of us are trying to treat. The right SPF, one that doesn’t leave a white cast or sit heavy, changed my skin more than any serum ever did.
That was the whole routine. Four steps. Five minutes, if I was taking my time.
What happened when I stopped
The first thing I noticed wasn’t that my skin got better. It was that it stopped getting worse.
I’d been so busy adding new serums, new acids, new tools that I hadn’t stopped to ask whether any of it was actually helping. Or whether some of it was the problem. When you’re layering five actives, and your skin is reactive, you don’t know what’s causing the reaction. You’re just guessing, tweaking, and spending. It becomes a cycle that looks like self-care from the outside but feels like anxiety from the inside.
When I stripped everything back, my skin had a chance to breathe. To regulate. To show me what it actually needed, rather than what I thought it needed based on a beauty influencer’s morning routine filmed in a bathroom that looked nothing like mine.
Within a few weeks, the redness I’d had for months began to settle. The congestion around my jawline, which I’d been trying to treat with salicylic acid, which I now know was too harsh for my barrier at the time, started to clear. My skin felt softer. Less angry. More like skin that was being nurtured than skin that was being managed.
I cried about it, if I’m honest. Partly relief. Partly grief for how much time and money I’d spent chasing something that had been asking for less all along.
The thing nobody says about skincare and motherhood
There’s a version of postpartum beauty content that’s very shiny. Glowing new mothers, talking about their restored routines, their bouncing-back bodies, their somehow dewy skin. I don’t think that content is lying, exactly. It’s leaving something out.
Because the truth of new motherhood, especially in those first heavy months, is that you are not the same woman you were. Your hormones are rewriting themselves. Your identity is shifting in ways you don’t have language for yet. And your skin, which is intimately connected to all of it, is shifting too.
What served your skin before may not serve it now. What felt like self-care before may feel like performance now. And that’s not failure. That’s your body asking you to pay a different kind of attention.
Burnout does the same thing. A big life transition does the same thing. The skin doesn’t lie; it’s just easy to misread what it’s saying when you’re trying to fix it with more.
Sometimes the reset isn’t a new product. Sometimes it’s the absence of one.
What I think we’re really chasing
I’ve thought about this a lot, and I built the elaborate routine in the first place. What I was really looking for underneath all those steps.
I think I was looking for control. For the feeling that I was doing something right. That if I followed the formula carefully enough, if I researched deeply enough, if I spent enough on the right things, I would arrive somewhere. At glowing skin, yes. But also at a version of myself who had it together.
And that’s nothing. That desire makes complete sense. Especially for Black women, who have historically been excluded from mainstream beauty spaces, told our skin was a problem to be solved rather than a heritage to be honoured. Building an intentional skincare practice can be an act of reclamation. I believe that.
But there’s a difference between ritual and rigidity. Between self-care and self-pressure. And I had crossed that line somewhere without noticing.
Stripping back my routine didn’t just reset my skin. It reset my relationship with it. I stopped looking at my face as something to fix and started looking at it as something to tend. Gently. Consistently. Without the expectation that more effort would always mean more results.
If you’re in a season of less
Maybe you’re reading this in a similar place. A life that feels rearranged. A routine that used to feel nourishing but now feels like another obligation. A bathroom shelf full of products that were supposed to solve something, but haven’t quite.
I’m not here to tell you to throw everything away. I’m here to say that simplicity is not a compromise. It is not giving up on yourself or your skin. Sometimes it is the most intentional choice you can make.
Start with what feels like relief, not discipline. A cleanser that feels kind. A moisturiser that feels like enough. A sunscreen you’ll actually wear. Build from there slowly, only when your skin asks for it, not because an algorithm told you it was time.
Your skin is not a project. It is part of you and right now, in this season, that might mean it needs the same thing the rest of you needs.
Rest. Simplicity. A little more grace.
What does your skincare routine feel like right now, ritual or obligation? I’d love to hear where you are. Leave a comment below or find me on Instagram. I read everything.
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