You Don't Need 10 Steps. You Need the Right 3.

Spend a few minutes on Instagram and you'll find someone with a skincare shelf that could stock a small boutique, a twelve-step routine, and a very specific order in which everything has to be applied. It looks impressive. It also looks exhausting.

And somewhere in the back of your mind you wonder: is that what I should be doing?

It isn't.

A lot of that content is entertainment, which is fine — but it's also advertising, whether that's explicit or not. The complexity serves the content, not your skin. More steps means more products to feature, more reasons to post, more things to recommend. The incentives of social media and the incentives of actually taking care of your skin don't line up particularly well.

More products don't mean better skin. For a lot of people — especially those whose skin has gotten more sensitive over the years — more products mean more chances for something to go wrong, and less ability to figure out what's actually helping.

The people I work with who see the most consistent improvement are almost never the ones with the most elaborate routines. They're the ones doing a few things well, every day, with products chosen for their specific skin.

If your routine is basically nothing, or you've tried things that didn't work and given up, I want you to know that even two or three well-chosen products will make a real difference over time. Not overnight — skincare doesn't work like that. But over weeks and months, the right cleanser, a moisturizer that suits your skin, and daily SPF will genuinely change your baseline. Texture smooths out. Tone evens. Your skin starts to look more like itself. Once that foundation is stable, adding one targeted thing — a vitamin C serum, a gentle retinoid, a niacinamide toner — has something to build on. That's when you start to see real progress.

Why a consultation is worth the investment

I'll be honest, this is what I do, so I'm not a neutral voice here. But the real value of a consultation isn't a product list. It's that someone actually looks at your skin, asks about your habits and your budget and your life, and builds something that makes sense for you specifically. Most people I work with have spent more on products that didn't work than a single consultation costs. Once you know what your skin actually needs, you stop wasting money on things it doesn't.

Two or three right products. That's usually where we start. And it's usually enough.

Aaron Ellis is a certified skincare consultant specializing in adults 50 and over in St. Petersburg, FL. Complimentary information calls available at bornradiant.com/contact