Three steps, not ten: the beginner’s skincare routine

Nobody has ever run a trial showing that ten steps beat three. The ten step routine arrived as a retail idea and stayed because it sells more bottles, and in the years since, the evidence has quietly gone the other way. The step with the strongest research behind it is the one most of us in India leave out.

So here is the whole thing. A basic skincare routine for beginners is a cleanser at night, a moisturiser, and a sunscreen in the morning. That is complete. It is not a starter version of something bigger, and for most people it is where the routine should stop.

Everything after those three is optional. Add things one at a time, and only when you can say out loud what the thing is for.

Only one of the three has a proper trial behind it

In 2013, the Annals of Internal Medicine published something unusual for skincare, which is an actual randomised controlled trial on ageing. Hughes and colleagues followed 903 adults in Nambour, Australia, for four and a half years. One group was asked to put on broad spectrum SPF 15 or higher every morning, on face, neck, arms and hands. The other group got the same sunscreen and used it whenever they felt like it.

After four and a half years, the daily group showed 24% less photoageing than the group who used it when they remembered.

Notice what that comparison actually is. It is not sunscreen against nothing. It is sunscreen every day against the same sunscreen, used casually. The difference came from the habit, not the bottle.

Four and a half years is nothing in the life of a face. The effect showed up anyway.

Now hold that against the rest of a ten step routine. Essences, first serums, second serums, sheet masks, ampoules. There is no equivalent trial for any of them, and for most there is no trial at all. That does not make them useless. It does mean that if you are going to be strict about exactly one thing, the research tells you which one, and it is not the step anyone gets excited about.

The Indian numbers are worse than the Australian ones

This is where most beginner routines, written for a reader in London or Los Angeles, stop applying to you.

Bera and colleagues (2021), writing in Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, measured the ultraviolet index over India’s four biggest cities. Their paper is really about what the covid lockdown did to air quality, and they found UV index dipped slightly in 2020. But to find that, they first had to measure a normal year. These are their figures for March to May 2019, before any of that:

• New Delhi, 9.2 to 12.19
• Mumbai, peaking at 13.23
• Kolkata, 11.13 to 13.03
• Chennai, 13.84

On the World Health Organization’s scale, 8 to 10 counts as very high, and anything above 11 is extreme. Three of those four cities sit in the extreme band for a quarter of the year.

There is one more thing worth knowing. Nambour, where that sunscreen trial ran and where sun protection is a national health campaign, sits at 26.6 degrees south. Delhi is at 28.6 degrees north. Near enough a mirror image.

So we will say this plainly. A routine built for Indian conditions that treats sunscreen as the optional fourth step has the order backwards. If you buy one product this month, buy that one.

We sell a mineral hybrid sunscreen and we would like you to buy it. We will also say, just as plainly, that any broad spectrum SPF 30 or higher does this job if you apply it properly and apply it again. A 300 rupee bottle from the chemist downstairs is fine. The brand on it matters far less than whether it is on your face at two in the afternoon. There is more on reapplying under sun protection.

The cleanser is the step most likely to be doing harm

Cleansing is the one step where enthusiasm actually works against you, and it is where beginners usually overcorrect.

Your skin sits at a pH of roughly 5. Traditional soap sits around 9 or 10. Hawkins and colleagues (2021), in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, set out why that gap matters. Washing repeatedly outside your skin’s own pH range disrupts the acid mantle, raises water loss through the skin, and shifts the balance of organisms living on it. An earlier review by Ananthapadmanabhan and colleagues (2004) in Dermatologic Therapy had already shown the mechanism. Harsh surfactants do not politely remove only dirt and oil. They take structural lipids with them on the way past.

Which gives you a short specification. One wash at night, something close to your skin’s own pH, and no squeaky clean feeling afterwards. That tight feeling is not cleanliness. It is a barrier that has lost more than it should have.

In the morning, water is usually enough. If your skin is oily you might want a second wash, and a gel or foaming cleanser is the right shape for that. But oily skin is not dirty skin, and treating it as though it were is how people end up oilier by lunchtime.

The moisturiser does less than the box suggests, and that is fine

A 2023 review in Skin Pharmacology and Physiology by Rajkumar, Chandan, Lio and Shi describes the three things a moisturiser actually does. Occlusives slow water escaping. Emollients slot into the lipid matrix between skin cells. Humectants pull water up from deeper layers.

Notice what is missing from that list. Nothing there rebuilds, repairs or renews anything, whatever the packaging says. A moisturiser supports a barrier that is doing its own work, and in a dry Delhi December it supports it quite a lot. In Mumbai in August it may be doing very little, and a lighter gel cream is not a compromise. It is the correct product for that humidity.

The same review notes something useful about humectants. In genuinely dry air, with nothing in the atmosphere to draw from, they can pull water out of your skin rather than into it. That is why a hyaluronic acid serum under nothing else is a mistake people make every winter. Put something occlusive on top, or the humectant works against you. More on that under dryness.

When a fourth step earns its place

Add a fourth step when you can name the problem it is for.

Pigmentation that is not shifting. Texture you can feel. Early lines you want to slow down. Those are real briefs, and there are real actives for them. What does not qualify is “my routine felt short”.

The cost of adding products without a reason is not only money. Every extra product is another chance at irritation, and when something does react, you will have no idea which one did it.

So add one thing. Give it eight to twelve weeks. Then decide.

When three steps is not the answer

Three steps is a floor for healthy skin. It is not a treatment plan.

If you have cystic acne, eczema that keeps coming back, sudden or patchy hair loss, melasma that has not responded to anything, or a reaction that is spreading rather than settling, none of that is a cosmetic problem, and no routine on this page will fix it. Please see a dermatologist. A prescription will often do in weeks what a shelf of serums will not do in a year, and the consultation usually costs less than the products bought while avoiding it.

If your skin is reactive but nothing has been diagnosed, start with two steps instead of three, a gentle cleanser and a sunscreen, and bring the moisturiser in a fortnight later so you can tell what you are responding to. It is worth patch testing anything new on a small area first. There are notes on working out a trigger under sensitivity.

And if you have used the same three products for a year and your skin is fine, there is nothing wrong with your routine. There is something wrong with an industry that keeps telling you there is.