The night cream I finally stopped overthinking
On the years I spent searching for the perfect night cream — and on the simple inexpensive cream that, eventually, turned out to be the answer.
I had, for about fifteen years of my adult life, been searching for the perfect night cream. The search took various forms. The expensive serums layered in elaborate orders. The luxury jars from established department-store brands. The small independent brands with science-y claims and clean ingredient lists. The Korean and Japanese ten-step routines. I had probably spent, over the course of those fifteen years, four or five thousand euros on night creams.
About two years ago, after a particularly disappointing experience with a forty-five-euro cream from a brand I had hoped would be different, I stopped. I bought, on a friend's recommendation, a small jar of a basic cream from a French pharmacy that cost nine euros. I have, in the two years since, used nothing else. The skin has not noticed the change. The skin, by some measure, has actually improved.
What I learned, slowly, from the search
That the marketing of skincare is, mostly, designed to keep you searching. The category is structured around the assumption that there is a better cream around the corner, a more advanced formulation, a more effective active ingredient. The endless searching is, itself, the small ongoing transaction that the industry is selling.
The truth, in my own experience, turns out to be much simpler. The skin needs basic hydration. The skin needs basic protection. The skin needs to be left alone, mostly, to do what skin does. A simple inexpensive cream that provides the hydration without irritating the skin will, for most people most of the time, do everything that the expensive creams claim to do, at a tiny fraction of the cost.
If you have, like me, spent years searching for the perfect night cream, consider stopping. Buy the cheapest simple cream from a pharmacy that you can find. Use it for three months. Notice whether anything actually gets worse. In my own experience, the answer was that nothing got worse, and several small chronic irritations actually got better. The search, after fifteen years, was over. The small relief of having stopped looking has been, in itself, one of the small structural improvements in my relationship with skincare.