I see that a lot of younger men do have an interest in skincare. Like videogames, I’m glad that this totally normal thing that used to invite teasing is cool for men to be into. However, I’m 34 and many of my contemporaries missed this boat. We aren’t on Tiktok all the time and the influencers our age are often focused on different subjects even if they have great skincare regimens themselves.
This is part of a beginners guide on how to take care of your face. Learning about skincare is fraught with bad incentives and hyper-specific, product forward information. Rarely is information about what different kinds of products are for, simple. I have specific products I use and like, but I’ll refrain from focusing on which ones, because it changes over time and there are a lot of different brands that might work better for your specific skin.
Today’s focus will be on commonly held, bad ideas regarding skincare. These are a mixture of direct instructions I have received and advice I’ve heard bandied around.
Wash your face with soap twice a day.
Do not wash your face with soap twice a day. If you don’t have a bunch of sweat or dirt or grime built up, there isn’t enough gunk built up to justify a second wash. I’d guess if you wash your face with a washcloth twice a day it stings. In fact, if at any point something you are doing stings or burns, stop (provided this isn’t a side effect of something you’ve been prescribed).
I wash my face at night before bed. In the morning I feel a little sleepy gunk has built up, but I dab it with a clean washcloth that’s been moistened with warm water to get rid of that feeling. A washcloth by itself can be abrasive, so you don’t want to wipe it across your face, you want to dab it.
A quick aside, your skin needs different things in the morning and night. In particular, you don’t want to use anything with an SPF rating at night unless you’re in the arctic circle on your night shift. I’ll follow up with more in a future skincare guide.
Skin oil is always the cause of oily skin.
This one got me hard as a teen. I was fighting acne with strong salicylic acid products. My face burnt, my skin flaked and my nose often went numb. Your skin naturally produces oil and counterintuitively, if you’re using products that dry out your skin to reduce how much oil is present, your skin can kick oil production into overdrive. Now I might have genuinely needed all that salicylic acid to fight my teen acne problems, but if you’re dealing with oily skin as an adult, this could be the culprit.
(New) This injectable peptide will fix / improve my skin.
I’m glad the injectable peptide fade missed me as a teen. Everything I say here will be covered more entertainingly in the linked video. Your body produces peptides naturally. It determines how much to make based on how many are in your system already. If you add external peptides, your body will reduce how much of the naturally occurring version to make, and you’ll be forced to take more unregulated intravenous foreign drugs to achieve the desired effect. I just have to say from a pure and simple, pain and monetary cost benefit standpoint, most good skincare regimens can achieve a desired effect while being cheaper and remove needles from the process. Why’d it have to be snakes needles.
A moisturizer will make the biggest improvement to your skin.
A good moisturizing regimen probably will have the most immediately positive affect on how your skin looks in the short term, but sunscreen is what will keep you looking good over the long term. Take it from someone in their mid 30s, folks who more consistently wear sunscreen through their teens and twenties look significantly younger by 30. If you’re in a rush in the morning, make sure you hit sunscreen.
There are facial sunscreens and daily moisturizers with SPF ratings that do not make your face greasy. I recommend trying a few and sticking with one you like. If you find it gives you acne, or you don’t like its feel, try something else, but find something you like.
Now I know I initially illustrated the importance of sunscreen by sharing how much not wearing it can age you, but it can improve how aged you look even if you start later. UV damage takes a while to accumulate, and sunscreen can give your skin time to heal.
Sunscreen is a no-brainer because it will have a long term positive effect on anyone and everyone’s face regardless of when they start wearing it. So please start doing it.
My skincare brand is objectively better for yours.
Skin needs are really specific. Different complexions, colors, thicknesses, oiliness and whatnot all have a factor in what products will work best. My skincare regimen has changed significantly over the years and with each change, I’ve made improvements for the skin I have. As an adult I’ve gotten compliments on my skin regularly, and I’m pretty happy with my regimen, but my skin will continue to change as I age and I might be forced to change my product “stack” over time.
The tidal wave of Korean media that hit Netflix in my mid-twenties got me to look more into Korean and Japanese men’s skincare products. These were the most welled groomed men I think I’d ever seen in my life. I was compelled to learn more about what they were doing for their skin. There are instances where more objectively advanced formulas for sunscreen are approved in Korea and not stateside, and there does seem to be more of a culture of grooming for men in Korea and Japan, but I don’t know if these formulas are intended for my skin type.
I got into my current brand of skincare products because I’m a photography dork, and I learned about one the biggest film manufacturer’s beauty product lines through a photo blog. That led me to their shop in Ginza on a trip in 2025, and finding that I loved their SPF 50+ daily moisturizer more than any face sunscreen I’d used before. I love a lot of their other products despite them being a bit pricey. However, for a night moisturizer, I still use the cheap sensitive skin milk that I picked up while browsing Muji for the first time in 2018. Nothing has felt or performed better at any price. I love that stuff.
Was any of this a scientific process? No, basically my love of certain film stocks was somehow transmuted into interest in an unrelated chemical division’s products. I’m glad it’s worked out, but it’s likely there is something out there that performs better for my skin at a better price. Heck, my favorite whisky manufacturer has a skincare line. If that line found me at 25 that might be what I use today.
In Conclusion
Thank you for reading, I’ll follow up soon with an outline of a skincare regimen that I do like. As much as it’s good to know what to avoid, sometimes it’s nice to have a model that behaves as scaffolding.