I recently fell in love with Micellar Water. Having tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get a skincare routine to stick I have finally found one that might just manage it.

I hate washing my face. There, I said it. I’m pretty good when I’m in the shower. I have a fairly basic everyday face wash and I almost always remember to use it. Unless I’m… on holiday, at a friends house, in a massive hurry.

The same thing applies to moisturiser. I know it’s good for my skin, I haven’t got rid of it even though I recently (OK over a year ago) down graded it from something expensive and lovely to Simple Protecting Light Moisturiser, (SPF 15 since that’s quite important).

I’m generally better at this stuff in the winter, but I’ve always felt that moisturising without washing my face first was a bit silly, and, as I mentioned I’m somewhat loathe to wash my face. The whole process is irritating: water, face-cloth, face-wash, making sure you’ve got all of it off, drying up afterwards… and my skin always feels a bit rubbish afterwards, even with the moisturiser.

Woman's lips covered in what appears to be flour.

Queue dried out flakey skin (thank you very much winter) that turns into slightly oily spotty skin, rinse and repeat. It didn’t look awful but it could definitely have looked better. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do and avoided the mirror for a bit before finally giving in and asking the internet for advice about skincare. I’ll be honest, I was expecting to find pages with hour long skincare regimes that take 20-30 bottles of goodness knows what each time and I wasn’t disappointed. I have a toddler, a dog and a life. I really don’t have the time or patience for all that. So I was relieved to discover that other people don’t have the time/inclination for all that stuff either. Having read 5 or 6 posts on the subject of minimalist skincare regimes all of which said pretty much the same thing, I settled on following pretty much the advice provided by Quartzy because their recommendations contained products I’d actually heard of at prices that didn’t make me want to run away and Lifehacker who talk a lot of sense in their Science Based Guide to Skincare mostly around not caring too much about it.

The routine I have come up with is simple:

Morning

Evening

  • micellar water
  • moisturiser

The second moisturiser should really be a “night moisturiser” but that was getting a bit complex for my tastes so I just use the same one at both ends of the day and if I’m showering then the micellar water gets swapped out for my usual daily face wash.

In case you were wondering the actual products I use are whatever is cheapest (usually on offer) at the time that I buy it. I’m new to this. I’m not going to spend £100’s on product.

I am sure if there were any beauty bloggers reading this they’d be screaming at their computing devices about how I’m doing this wrong. No doubt I could do better. But, as with most self care, the important thing is not that I do it 100% right, but that I do it.