The Spreadsheet Era

It started, as most things in my life do now, with a text. My friend Dana, after the birthday-dinner conversation in January: "ok but can you just literally tell me what to buy. my face is a disaster and I trust you." Then her sister. Then a coworker of the sister. By late February I had a spreadsheet with tabs, and this week I want to tell you about it — because building shortlists for other people taught me things a year of tending my own face never could.

The spreadsheet

Each tab is a person. Columns: what their skin is doing right now (the pharmacist's question, always first), their one named goal, their sensitivity level, what they've reacted to before, and how much fuss they'll realistically tolerate — that last column, "fuss tolerance," turned out to be the most important one in the sheet. Then, from all of that: a shortlist. Three to five products, each mapped to a habit, each with a one-line "why" and an honest timeline written next to it. Niacinamide — the spot, twelve weeks, I mean it.

Not "the best products." The best products for the person in the row. Dana's calmer-skin shortlist and her sister's dark-spot shortlist share exactly one item: sunscreen. Of course they do.

What other faces taught me

Three lessons from two months of amateur curation, in ascending order of importance:

• Everyone asks for products; everyone needs decisions. Nobody who texted me lacked information — they arrived clutching screenshots, half-carts, saved videos. What they wanted was what I'd wanted in that Seoul pharmacy: someone to shrink the wall. The relief in their replies — "oh thank god, only four things" — was the exact relief I'd felt in August. Recognizing it from the other side was strangely emotional.
• The interview matters more than the answer. My recommendations got dramatically better when I stopped asking "what do you want to fix" (people recite ads) and started asking what their skin was doing, what had burned them before, what they'd actually keep up on a bad week. The right questions, in the right order, did most of the curating before I touched the product columns.
• People don't abandon habits; they abandon shame. Follow-ups revealed the pattern: the shortlists survived, the results came slowly and honestly — and what people kept thanking me for wasn't the glow. It was that nothing on the list made them feel behind, or old, or like a renovation project. Reassured people continue. Overwhelmed people quit. That's the entire retention curve of skincare, and almost nobody designs for it.

The habit: curate for someone you love

This week's practice, offered sincerely: be the pharmacist for one person. Ask the questions — what's it doing, one goal, what's burned you, honest fuss tolerance — and build them a shortlist of three to five, with the why and the real timeline written down. You'll discover how much you've absorbed, and you'll feel the peculiar satisfaction of making a wall smaller for someone standing where you stood.

I should say: the spreadsheet has eleven tabs now, and I've started sketching what it would look like if the interview could happen without me in the room. Just sketching. (The notebook has a name scribbled on the cover, though. It has for a while.)

Next week: six products, one goal — the anatomy of a shortlist that works, and why the grouping matters as much as the contents.