My skincare.

The morning.

Four steps, thinnest to thickest. Three minutes. The only non-negotiable is the last one.

1. Rinse, or a short foam washNothing happened to your face overnight except your own pillow. Water is enough most mornings. If you wake up oily, a brief foam cleanse and move on — no scrubbing, no hot water.
2. Toner, on a damp faceStraight from the hands, not a cotton pad — pads waste most of it and drag on skin that's mid-retinisation. The point is to leave the surface wet for what comes next.
3. Hyaluronic acid, while still dampThis is the whole trick. HA is a humectant: it moves water toward wherever there's more of it. On damp skin it pulls that water in. On bone-dry skin in dry air it can pull from deeper down and leave you tighter than before. Apply within seconds of the toner, then seal it.
4. MoisturiserThe seal. Without it the previous step slowly evaporates and takes some of your own water with it.
5. Sunscreen — SPF 50, and actually enough of itRoughly a quarter teaspoon for the face alone, which is far more than instinct says. The two-finger rule works: two full strips squeezed along your index and middle fingers. Most people apply a third of what the SPF on the bottle was tested at, and get a third of the protection. Reapply if you'll be outside for hours.

If you are running late, skip steps one through four. Do not skip five. A day with only sunscreen is a good day; a day with everything but sunscreen is a wasted one — especially on tretinoin.

The night.

The double cleanse earns its place here for one reason: modern sunscreen is water-resistant by design, and a foam cleanser alone does not fully remove it.

1. Oil cleanser, on dry hands and a dry faceWater first is the common mistake — it stops the oil binding to the sunscreen and makeup you're trying to lift. Massage for a minute, then add water to emulsify it to a milk, then rinse.
2. Foam cleanserTakes off the oil cleanser and anything left under it. Lukewarm. Thirty seconds is plenty.
3. Dry completely — and waitThe most-skipped step on this page. Tretinoin applied to damp skin penetrates faster and irritates far more. Pat dry, then leave it ten to twenty minutes. Brush your teeth. This single pause is the difference between tolerating 0.1% and giving up on it.
4. Tretinoin 0.1% — a pea, for the entire faceOne pea-sized amount total. Dot it on forehead, both cheeks, chin, then spread thin. Avoid the corners of the nose, the eyelids, and the corners of the mouth, which are where irritation starts. More does not work faster; it only makes you peel.
5. Hyaluronic acid, then moisturiserStraight on top on a good night. On a raw night, reverse it — moisturiser before the tretinoin as a buffer. That blunts the irritation and barely blunts the result.

Toner is optional at night. If the skin feels tight after the double cleanse, use it; if not, get to the moisturiser.

Tretinoin 0.1%.

0.1% is the top of the common range — most people are started at 0.025% or 0.05%. It is prescription-only in the US, and it is the reason sunscreen sits at number one on this page rather than number six.

1. Start at two nights a week, not seven. Build up only when a week passes without flaking. Getting to nightly over three months beats getting there in three weeks and quitting.
2. The first six weeks look worse. Retinisation — dryness, flaking, a purge of things that were already forming under the surface. It is not an allergy and it is not the product failing. It is also not a reason to exfoliate, which is the instinct and the trap.
3. Sunscreen becomes mandatory, not advisable. Tretinoin thins the stratum corneum while it works and leaves you measurably more sun-sensitive. Using it without daily SPF is running the engine with the oil light on.
4. One active at a time. No glycolic or salicylic acid on tretinoin nights, no scrubs, no benzoyl peroxide in the same layer. If you want acids, give them their own night — or skip them entirely, because tretinoin already does that job.
5. Buffer when you need to. Moisturiser before tretinoin, or mixed into the same layer, reduces irritation substantially and reduces efficacy only slightly. A buffered night you actually do beats a pure night you skip.
6. Give it six months before judging it. Texture and tone move at around twelve weeks. Fine lines take longer. Nothing about this product rewards impatience.
7. Not during pregnancy, or when trying. Topical retinoids are contraindicated. This one is not a judgement call to make alone — ask the person who prescribed it.

The mistakes, so you can skip them.

• Applying a quarter of the sunscreen the label was tested with, and believing the number on the bottle.
• Going to nightly tretinoin in week two, peeling badly, and stopping for a year.
• Hyaluronic acid on a bone-dry face in winter, then wondering why it felt tighter.
• An astringent toner on retinised skin, which is a way of paying money to undo the other product.
• Adding an exfoliant to fix the flaking that the exfoliant was making worse.
• Buying a seventh product instead of doing the six consistently for three months.
• Treating the routine as the point. The point is twenty years from now.

Consistency beats potency. It isn't close.

Honest notes

Affiliate disclosure. Some links on this page are affiliate links, which means Forma may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. It does not change what's on the list — the shelf was the shelf before there were links on it, and the two cheapest items on it are the two I'd keep longest.

Not medical advice. This is one person's routine written down, not a treatment plan. Tretinoin 0.1% is a prescription medicine with real contraindications — pregnancy among them — and skin conditions that look cosmetic sometimes aren't. If something on your face is changing, bleeding, or not healing, that is a dermatologist's question, not a website's.