The Pharmacist Who Told Me to Buy Less

By my third week in Seoul, I'd worked up the courage to go back into a beauty store. This time I went smaller: a neighborhood pharmacy with a modest skincare wall and a pharmacist in her fifties with the best skin I'd seen outside of an ad.

I showed her my phone — a screenshot list of eleven products the internet had assured me were essential. Vitamin C, two acids, retinol, a peptide serum, three different toners. She scrolled, handed the phone back, and said: "This is too many. Your skin will be angry."

Then she asked the question that rearranged my whole approach: "What is your skin doing right now?"

Not "what do you want to fix." Not "what's your budget." What is it doing — today, this week. I told her: red around the nose, tight cheeks, little bumps on the jaw, and generally cranky. "Then it is telling you it's irritated," she said. "You don't give more to irritated skin. You give less."

Less, chosen carefully

She sold me exactly two things: a cream with centella (a calming plant extract I'll write about properly this winter) and a sunscreen. When I reached for a brightening ampoule on my list, she shook her head. "Later. Maybe. When your skin is calm, you can add one new thing. Only one. Wait two weeks. Then decide."

One new thing. Two weeks. It's the opposite of everything the algorithm feeds us, and it's exactly how dermatologists think: introduce a single variable, observe, then adjust. Add five products at once and when your face erupts — or glows — you'll have no idea which one did it.

The habit: patch test, then wait

Here's the practice she gave me, which I've followed with every product since:

• Before a new product touches your face, apply a small amount to the inner forearm or behind the ear, once a day for three days. Watch for redness, itching, stinging.
• If all is calm, introduce it to your face — alone, nothing else new — and give it two full weeks before judging or adding anything.
• One new product at a time. Always. No exceptions, even for exciting ones. Especially for exciting ones.

Is it slow? Yes. Deliberately. My skin in my forties is not a testing lab, and neither is yours. Every sensitivity flare I'd had in the previous two years traced back to piling on new things at once because a video made me feel behind.

I walked out of that pharmacy with two products and a strange feeling I eventually identified as relief. Someone with expertise had made the wall smaller for me. I've thought about that feeling almost every day since — but that's a story for much later in this journal.

Next week: why every single person in Seoul seemed to be wearing sunscreen, indoors, in the rain, possibly in their sleep.