By the time I reach the bathroom sink, I would quite like to be finished for the day. I have answered the emails, cooked the dinner and found the small sock whose disappearance briefly threatened the stability of the whole household. Then I pick up a bottle and discover my face has apparently scheduled a performance review.
There is a correction to do. Something needs repairing other than my boiler. Prevention too, apparently. I have barely taken my earrings off and already there are outstanding action points.
It makes me laugh. Until I notice myself doing it. I came in to wash my face and somehow ended up looking for everything that is wrong with it. Before I've even chosen a product, I've accepted the terms of the appraisal. What's the problem? How quickly can I fix it? Am I doing enough?
Take Clinique’s “Smart Clinical Repair Wrinkle Correcting Serum.” That is quite a lot of authority in one name. Smart. Clinical. Repair. You feel somebody qualified has arrived. But the word I keep coming back to is “correcting.”
I understand wanting to soften a wrinkle. I want to soften one or two myself. What I'm less sure about is when it became a mistake. A spelling error needs correcting. So does an invoice sent to the wrong person. A small line beside an eye has simply appeared on a face that has been in use.
You can love the serum and still ask the question. What a product does is one thing. What its language encourages us to think about ourselves is another. Somewhere between the promise of smoother skin and the suggestion that something needs correcting, we've moved from choice into judgement.
I don't get to stand outside this looking disappointed in everybody else either. I founded and ran Linen Skin Clinic. I wanted skin science and slow living to belong in the same room; care that fitted around actual life, including the untidy bits. The idea was never to send somebody home with another reason to feel behind.
But a clinic is still a business offering change. That's an awkward tension. If I offer improvement, what am I suggesting was wrong in the first place? How do you describe a service without first persuading somebody to dislike the thing it might change? Softer colours won't settle that. Neither will calling everything a ritual.
Which is also why I find it irritating when people dismiss skincare altogether. You're allowed to enjoy it. A cream can feel lovely. Ten minutes alone in the bathroom, with nobody asking you to open a snack they've just watched you put away, can be a small luxury. Wanting to change something about your appearance doesn't make you foolish. You shouldn't have to defend the entire beauty industry before opening a jar.
It's the point where enjoyment becomes supervision that interests me. When you start checking whether the routine is working, then whether you're doing it properly, then whether the lack of improvement says something about you.
Estée Lauder gives us another example in its article ‘“Beauty Sleep” in a Bottle’. The copy presents Advanced Night Repair as a way to look as though you've had eight hours' sleep when you haven't. One heading reads: “No Sleep? No Problem.”
Well, there is a problem. There is still no sleep. And I say that as somebody who understands the appeal of looking slightly less exhausted after an interrupted night. You might have somewhere to be and no desire to explain why you've been awake since three.
But the sleep is still missing. The tiredness may still be there. What the product promises to manage is the visible evidence. It's a clever bit of advertising, and an oddly revealing one: have your difficult night, by all means, just try not to arrive looking as though you've had it.
That's a reading of the words, not a judgement about the formula. Still, I can't quite leave it alone. A tired face sometimes tells the truth about a night. Why must the truth be tidied away?
Nobody has to hand us a formal set of targets for this to feel like work. It begins with wanting to feel better. Then checking whether we look better. Then wondering why we don't look better yet. Before long, the mirror is where we go to check our progress, rather than simply see ourselves.
And unlike an actual appraisal, nobody has agreed on the job description. What is a satisfactory face? Compared with whose face, at what age, under which bathroom light? You can be delighted with one result and still discover a new thing to worry about in tomorrow's photograph. It's a remarkably efficient system for never quite finishing.
I'd like the beauty industry and its language to leave more room for people who want a particular change without signing up to a lifelong improvement programme. Maybe room for people whose skin isn't their main concern this week. A product can have a purpose without issuing a verdict on the rest of your face.
Tell me what the cream is for. Tell me what it might do, what it can't do and who might enjoy using it. Then let me decide. That's still selling skincare. It just doesn't require me to believe I've been neglecting the future of my entire face.
Perhaps the question to take back to the sink is a smaller one: what did I actually want when I came in here? Comfort? Five minutes to myself? A change I've chosen because I fancy it? All perfectly good answers. None of which need to become an obligation to be a better-maintained woman.
The sock has been found. The dinner is done. Surely, at some point, we ought to be allowed to wash our faces and be done for the day.
About The Author
Gemma Glass is a writer and researcher interested in ordinary life, human behaviour and the things we have made unnecessarily complicated. She previously founded and ran Linen Skin Clinic and writes Curious by Gemma Glass, a newsletter following the questions she cannot quite leave alone. The close readings are cultural interpretation; the essay does not assess product efficacy or make clinical claims. Clinique UK, Smart Clinical Repair Wrinkle Correcting Serum. Product name supplies the wording analysed in paragraphs four to six. Source Estée Lauder UK, “Beauty Sleep” in a Bottle. The page includes the eight-hour appearance framing and the heading “No Sleep? No Problem.
…“Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the super imposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society. But its impact is far worse” (Toffler 1970, 4). When his book was first published, the insights were revolutionary. Today we are living - almost word for word - many of the scenarios he predicted would arise as a natural consequence of our inability to adapt to the pace and direction of innovation…