Elevate Your Beauty Routine: Insider Tips from Our Experts

My bathroom shelf had reached the stage where things at the back had expired without ever being opened. So I asked four people whose job this is — a dermatology nurse, a makeup artist who works weddings, a barber, and the woman who has cut my hair since 2014 — the same question. If you could keep three things, what would they be?

The answers

Nobody said serum. Three of the four said sunscreen first, without hesitating.

Sunscreen. All four. The nurse was blunt about it: everything else on the shelf is optimization, and this is the only one where skipping it does damage you cannot undo later.

Something that cleans, chosen for how your skin feels afterward. Not for the ingredient list. If it leaves you tight, it is the wrong one, whatever it cost.

One thing that makes you feel put together in ninety seconds. This was the answer that varied. For the makeup artist it was a cream blush. For my hairdresser it was a good comb and a cheap hairspray. For the barber it was a beard oil he buys in a bottle the size of a thumb.

What they all wanted to tell me instead

Every one of them, unprompted, steered the conversation to the same three things, which I suspect says more about the trade than the products do.

• Sleep shows up first and last. Two of them said they can tell within ten seconds of someone sitting down.
• Most people over-wash. Twice a day at most, and gently.
• Consistency beats strength. The weaker thing used nightly beats the strong thing used in panicked fortnightly bursts, which is the pattern nearly everybody actually has.

“Nobody has ever come back to me and said the new routine changed their life,” the nurse said. “They come back and say they stopped doing the one thing that was making it worse. That is usually it.”

The cull

I threw away eleven things. Four had expired. Three I had bought because somebody I follow said to. Two were duplicates of something I already liked, in a different scent. Two did something I have no evidence anyone needs done.

What is left fits on one shelf, cost less than what I threw out, and takes four minutes in the morning and three at night. My skin is not noticeably different. My bathroom is enormously better, and I have stopped buying things, which I think was the actual problem.