The Skincare Industrial Machine Is a Problem
Part 2: How to Emancipate Yourself
Part 2: How to Emancipate Yourself — The Workbook
In Part 1 — Meet the Machine we did the accounting: 13 products a day, $600 a year, daily exposure to chemicals of concern, and a satisfaction rate that would bankrupt a farm. If those numbers made you want to change something, this is the something.
There are three steps — none of them difficult, but an honest inventory is always harder than shopping for a solution.
What You'll Need
- A small notebook and your favorite writing implement
- A stack of sticky notes
- A full page of paper for your full accounting.
- One week of ordinary life
- At the end: a cup of tea or a nice pour-over, and half an hour of quiet
Step 1: Take Inventory — of Two Things
You’re going to track for one week. Take your little notebook and use one end for A and flip it over for B .
Side A: What you actually do. Make a column for each day, Monday through Sunday, with room for a couple of entries per day. Every time you do skincare — lotion after the shower, hand cream, pumice on your feet, face wash, sunscreen, all of it — it counts. At the end of each day, jot it down and estimate how many steps you took and how many products you used.
Side B: How you actually felt. Flip the notebook. Same Monday–Sunday layout, but leave more room — you’ll want a few sentences per day. Each evening, write down how you felt before, during, and after your body care. Tired? Rushed? Was there too little time, too much, or just enough?
If it wasn’t enough, was that exhaustion or time pressure? Did you feel refreshed afterward? Frustrated? Self-critical? (Nothing like a magnifying mirror on your pores to ruin a decent evening.) You are not judging right now- just recording the facts.
If the week was unusual — houseguests, a sick kid, a work crunch — run it a second week for a truer picture.
The Accounting
Now make your tea. Give yourself the half hour.
Pull every product out of your cabinet and set it all on the table. Move the single-purpose things — the masks, the pumice, the once-a-month stuff — off to one side. Look at what’s left: these are your daily products.
Do they make you feel good? Do you love the scent or skin feel? That’s worth acknowledging- there is value in that.
Now sort the daily products into three piles: cleansing, moisturizing, and sunscreen. (Is toner cleansing? You decide! ) How many products are in each pile?
The Sticky Notes
Look up the cost of each daily product. How long does a bottle last you? How many do you buy a year? Write your annual cost on a sticky note and stick it to the bottle.
Once you have figured out the cost of all of your products add them all up and write them down on your note paper. Estimate how many masks and other items you buy for occasional use and add this to your total. You now have accounted for your skin care expenses.
Now the labels: Download an ingredient-scanning app — we like ones that scan even the tiny curved labels well and link you to actual sources rather than assigning a score or rating. We prefer options that actually scan the ingredient label rather than the bar code.
Companies do not change their bar code each time they re-formulate, so the ingredient label is the more reliable source of information. (Good options: Switch Natural- that’s the one I use, EWG’s Healthy Living app, which draws on their Skin Deep database, or Yuka.)
Scan each product. In your second pen color, write the number of ingredients of concern on each sticky note. The ones we watch for: synthetic fragrance (“parfum” — a legally protected mystery box), parabens, phthalates, PEGs, phenoxyethanol, formaldehyde-releasing preservatives, BHT, methylisothiazolinone, silicones, and anything from the PFAS family (look for “fluoro” or “PTFE” in the name).
One more nuance: a chemical of concern in a leave-on product (lotion, sunscreen, lip balm) matters more than the same chemical in a rinse-off product, for obvious reasons.
While you’re at it, check expiration dates. Chuck anything expired — especially eye products.
Now You Know Where You Are
Go back to your notebook, Side B. Did you spend the “right” amount of time each day? What did you feel when your routine was done — satisfaction or frustration? Do you need more time? More energy? Or maybe you feel just fine with a less multi-step, ambitious routine that’s good to know too.
If you could have a perfect skincare experience, what would it look like? If you could have more time to yourself in the evening, would you spend it on skincare or something else?
How much time and money do you actually want to spend on skincare? Not what your routine currently looks like— what you’d choose if you were choosing.
Consider if you cherish the time alone with the door shut more than the actual skincare routine. Some of us do not get enough alone time, and an elaborate skincare routine provides us with time to focus on ourselves. If this feels true, make a mental note: There are other ways to create ritual and space without applying product to our body that we don’t need, that doesn’t do what they promise, and that possibly even harms our health.
Write down two numbers: minutes per day, dollars per year. That’s your real budget. Everything on the table in front of you either fits inside it or doesn’t. Most people who do this exercise discover the same thing: they’d happily spend less money on fewer, better things.
One more thing may have come up during your inventory week while filling out Part B.
Are you spending more money and time than you want on a routine that doesn’t actually feel like it cares for you? Women often don’t get enough genuine time to themselves, and an elaborate beauty routine can become the only socially sanctioned way to claim twenty minutes behind a locked door.
If that’s part of what your routine is doing for you — honor that need. There are other ways to take care of yourself: a cup of tea and a book while you soak your feet, or ten minutes in the garden without anyone asking you for anything.
We need alone time, and we have to be the ones advocating for ourselves. Never has there been a day when I got asked “Would you like some time to yourself right now?” I waited too long to assert my own needs, but you don’t have to wait. Make it a priority, set a timer, write a reminder, have a talk with family members, whatever it takes to kick-start a new routine like this. It’s too important a need to leave to the beauty industry to fill with a pseudo solution.
Rethinking Your Routine
If you’re happy with what you spend, what’s in your products, the time it takes, and how it all makes you feel — wonderful. No change is needed.
If not — simplify. Remember the dermatologists’ three steps from Part 1: wash, moisturize, sunscreen. Pick out the products from your table that accomplish just those three things. For each one, ask yourself a few simple, but important, questions.
Most importantly:
Am I comfortable with all of it, not just what's on the front of the jar?
And is the price fair for what's actually inside?
Could I find out who grew, produced, or supplied the key ingredients?
Does the company offer specific answers or only broad claims?
Is the container doing a job, or is it just making the product look fancier or more expensive?
Is it reusable, recyclable, or even compostable?
Source: Fraga Farmstead Creamery, 2026.
Box up everything else. Anything that passes all three tests has earned its spot in your routine.
After a month, if you haven’t missed anything in that box, let it go. If you’re unhappy with a keeper’s cost, ingredients, or packaging, leave the sticky note on the bottle and improve it after you finish the bottle. Using things up is the cheapest sustainability program ever invented.
A few simple switches we recommend:
- Cleansing: a good facial soap and a small stack of merino wool or linen washing swatches — use a fresh one each day, launder the week’s worth together. No plastic, no single use.
- Moisturizing: simple anhydrous balm or a plain, short-ingredient-list cream is preferable to lotions. Lotions require stabilizers, preservatives, and emulsifiers- none of these ingredients do anything for your skin, but they are required in products containing water to keep them shelf-stable.
- Sunscreen: a mineral (zinc oxide) sunscreen. Miss having a “full face”? A tinted mineral sunscreen does double duty.
- Serums: often contain water, preservatives, stabilizers, and emulsifiers, along with “actives” like hyaluronic acid, niacinamide, collagen, and peptides. These ingredients tend to follow trend cycles.
CBD is a good example. Early hype based on promising lab results didn't translate as clearly to results in living humans, and eventually faded.
How necessary, effective, or potentially damaging these compounds are to the skin barrier remains debated, as does how much is simply marketing hype.
For a deeper dive, this podcast episode covers skincare ingredient hype cycles with beauty science experts.
- Facial Oils: an adjacent category, but more approachable and easy to DIY. They're simply blends of high-quality oils and, because they contain no water, don't need preservatives. Applied to damp skin, they help seal in moisture and feel wonderful.
They also have one of the widest gaps between ingredient cost and retail price: less than an ounce can sell for $60 to $100. But they're not magic potions, just high-quality, sometimes exotic oils that are increasingly available in small quantities.
If you love face oils, take heart: they're easy to blend yourself for a fraction of the cost. We'll cover how in Part 3!
Now, write your conclusions on the paper in front of you. Now you have a plan. You know what you like, you know what you need, and you are back in control.
Step 2: Replace Goods — and Shop Differently
You did the math in Part 1: roughly $5 worth of ingredients in a $55 jar. So when it's time to replace that empty bottle, step away from the beauty aisle. It's engineered to make you buy more than you came for.
The biggest advertising budgets buy the best shelf space. Instead:
- Shop your local co-op. Co-ops often have stricter ingredient standards than conventional retailers. Markups still exist, but the products have been screened and knowledgeable staff can be a valuable resource.
No co-op nearby? PCC Community Markets, the amazing consumer-owned food co-op based in the Pacific Northwest, has published it’s standards and they are unusually useful!
The list isn’t a declaration that every ingredient on the list is good or every restricted ingredient is dangerous. Instead, they take a “precautionary approach," looking at human health, environmental persistence, contamination concerns and the availability of reasonable alternatives.
- Go to your farmers market. Talk to the person who made the product. Ask what's in it, why, and where the ingredients come from.
Farmers markets can cut out layers of markup while connecting you with carefully vetted makers and exceptionally well-made products. You might even make a market friend—or inspire their next product.
Local to Oregon? Come find us at farmers markets in and around Portland!
- Email a company. Ask where an ingredient comes from. A truly transparent company should be able to tell you how and where it sources key ingredients, not just point you toward a generic sustainability statement.
- Check your water before switching hair care. Shampoo bars can be a great low-waste, economical option, but soap-based bars don't always play well with hard water and can leave buildup. Soft water? A soap bar may work beautifully. Hard water? Consider a syndet bar or an acidic rinse.
One Last Thing, and It’s the Best Part
If you finish the inventory and decide to change something, here's what you should know: your body can start responding quickly.
When 100 teenage girls switched to products free of phthalates, parabens, triclosan, and oxybenzone, urine testing showed levels of those chemicals dropped 27–45% in three days.
In a 2023 study, healthy women who swapped paraben and phthalate-containing personal care products for 28 days showed significant changes in cancer-associated gene expression in breast tissue, measured by biopsy before and after.
Three days. Four weeks. One cabinet.
Both studies are cited in full in Part 1 — Meet the Machine. They're small, and they don't tell us what happens long-term. But they're real, peer-reviewed, and worth hearing: the cabinet you built over years is something you can start changing this week.
That's the whole reason to do the inventory. Not guilt. Not fear. Just knowledge of where you are, and the freedom to decide what happens next.
Next up: How to DIY your skincare routine and what we look for in our ingredients.
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