Skincare After 40

I did everything my dermatologist's Instagram told me to. 4 months later my face looked 10 years older than when I started.

I need to tell you what actually happened, because I spent almost a year thinking it was my fault.

I turned 52 last spring. And somewhere around then I started catching my own face in the bathroom mirror and not recognizing it. Not wrinkles exactly. Worse than wrinkles. It looked tired. Flat. Like a photo of myself left out in the sun.

So I did what everyone tells you to do. I got serious.

I bought the retinol. The good one. The one every skincare account swears is the gold standard, the one thing that actually works, the ingredient you should have started using at 40. I read the reviews. I felt behind. I felt like I'd wasted years not using it.

The first week my skin tingled and I thought, good. That means it's working.

That's the sentence I keep coming back to. That means it's working. Because that's exactly what they teach you to think.

By week 3 the skin around my mouth was flaking. I told myself that was normal. Purging, they call it. Push through it. It gets worse before it gets better.

By week 6 my face felt like there was superglue drying on it. Tight. Hot. I put it on one night and it welted up along my cheekbones and I stood in the bathroom at 11pm pressing a cold washcloth to my face wondering what was wrong with me.

Not with the product. With me.

I thought I was using it wrong. Too much. Too often. Not enough moisturizer. I bought more products to fix the products. A barrier cream. A gentler cleanser. I kept going because everyone said this is the price of results and I didn't want to be the woman who quit before it worked.

I gave up. I told my husband I was done spending money on my face. And I meant it. I had made my peace with looking old at 52.

And I'd stopped looking. That's the part I want you to hear. I wasn't hunting for a fix when one found me. I was just getting my hair cut.

And I know how this sounds. Because it turned out the woman cutting my hair used to be a nurse in a dermatology office for almost 20 years. Convenient, right? I thought so too. Except she wasn't selling anything. She'd left that whole world years ago, and I think that was exactly why she was willing to tell me the truth about it.

I was halfway through the sad story before she stopped me and asked one question.

She asked what my skin was like before I started the retinol.

And I said, well, it was dry. Always a little sensitive. Got red easy.

And she just nodded slowly, like she'd heard this exact story a hundred times before. Because she had.

What she told me, sitting there with scissors in her hand

It reorganized everything I thought I knew about my own face.

Retinol doesn't clean your skin or feed your skin. Retinol tells your skin to tear itself down and rebuild faster. That's the whole mechanism. It forces the skin to shed and remodel. On thick, oily, resilient skin, skin that has plenty to spare, that can look like renovation. Smoother. Fresher.

But on skin that's already dry. Already thin. Already reactive. Already stressed and holding on.

There's nothing there to spare.

So it doesn't renovate. It demolishes. You're telling a barrier that's already struggling to strip itself down and rebuild, over and over, and it never gets the chance to. It just stays raw. Stays inflamed. Stays tight. And inflamed, stripped, tight skin does not look younger.

It looks older. That was the part that broke me.

The exact thing I bought to look younger was making my skin look older. Every day I used it, I was building the worn out, tired face I was trying to get rid of. I wasn't aging. I was reacting. And I'd been calling the reaction my age for almost a year.

I asked her why nobody tells you this. Why every single account, every review, every dermatologist's page just says start retinol, everyone over 40 should be on it, it's the gold standard.

And she said something I have not stopped thinking about since.

"Look, it works great on some skin. And it genuinely wrecks other skin. But you cannot sell that. Nobody puts on the box, amazing for half of you, ruins the other half. So they leave that part off. They tell every woman over 40 to use it, and the ones it was never built for find out the hard way. On their own face. Alone in the bathroom at 11pm, like I was."

She told me half the women she saw over 50 came in the same way I did. Barrier wrecked. Skin punished. Convinced they got old overnight. When what actually happened is they were sold a demolition tool and told it was skincare, and their skin was exactly the kind of skin it was never meant for.

I want to be fair here, because she was. Retinol isn't a scam. For the right skin it does what they say. If your skin is thick and oily and bounces back from anything, you probably love it and you should keep using it.

But if you're like me. Dry. Sensitive. Skin that reacts, gets red, feels tight. Then the strongest thing on the shelf is very possibly the worst thing you can put on your face, and nobody selling it to you has any reason to say so.

She told me to do the opposite of everything I'd been doing

She didn't sell me anything, by the way. She just told me to stop stripping my skin and start doing the opposite. Calm it down first. Let the barrier actually rebuild. She said your skin can't look fresh until it stops looking like it's under attack.

Calm first. Then glow. That's how she put it.

She pointed me toward centella. Cica. The thing Korean women have been quietly using for years, the reason half of them hit 50 with that soft, calm, glassy skin while the rest of us are peeling ours raw trying to get there.

Now, I wasn't chasing 20 again. I didn't want to be 20. I just wanted to stop looking so worn out and tired and older than I actually felt.

So I went looking. And the first thing I noticed is that most cica products are made for a completely different woman than me. They're made for 20 year olds with angry breakouts. Calming, calming, calming, like calm is the whole point.

For me calm was never the destination. Calm was the thing standing between me and looking fresh again. I didn't just want my skin to stop reacting. I wanted it to stop reacting so it could finally look like mine.

And the cheap ones. I almost bought one. But when I actually turned the bottle over and read it, most of them were the same thing. Centella and water. A little glycerin. That's the whole formula. Fine for an oily 22 year old. Not even close to enough for skin like mine, dry and thin and already worn down.

The one I ended up with was different, and I could read it right on the label

Which after everything is the only kind of proof I trust now.

It actually had asiaticoside in it. I looked it up, and this was the part that surprised me. It's not the calming part of centella. It's the part that does the work on aging. The actual concentrated compound, pulled out and put in on its own, not just a bit of leaf dropped in the water so they can print the word on the front. Most of the calming cica serums don't even have it. This was built around it.

This was made by someone who understood what skin like mine was actually up against. Not just red. Old feeling. Tired. Both.

And then there was the vitamin C. If you have ever been burned by vitamin C you need to hear this part, because I didn't know it for years and it would have saved my face.

There's more than one kind. The one everybody sells you, the one in most of the bright glowy products, is just straight vitamin C. "Ascorbic acid." Fine on tougher skin, apparently. On mine it was ACID. It went on and prickled and left me pink and raw, and I spent years thinking I just couldn't use vitamin C, that my skin was too sensitive for the one thing everyone swears by.

Nobody ever told me there was a gentler version. "Ethyl ascorbic acid." Same brightness, without the acid. And that was the thing that got me. Somebody had gone out of their way to use the kind that doesn't punish skin like mine.

That was when I stopped reading it as another pretty bottle and started paying attention. Not because of a promise on the front. Because of what it was so clearly built to do. Calm the skin down first. Then actually help it look brighter and less tired. Not just less red. Actually fresher. The barrier ingredients to rebuild what I'd spent a year stripping off. A few other things for tone and dullness I didn't understand until later. The cheap ones stop at calm. This one didn't stop at calm, and calm was never the part I actually cared about.

And it was light. A serum, not one of those thick heavy things that sit on top of your face and pill the second you put makeup on. I was done with those too. This one just sinks in and disappears. I was skeptical, honestly. After the retinol I didn't trust anything that didn't sting. I'd been trained to believe the burn was the point.

What I actually noticed

It doesn't sting. That was the first strange thing. It just felt calm.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you it erased 10 years or filled in every line. Nothing does that, and anyone promising it is the same voice that sold me the retinol in a nicer font.

What I'll tell you is my skin stopped looking angry. The redness settled. The tightness let go. And once it stopped bracing all the time, it started looking like mine again. Softer. Fresher. Less tired. My makeup stopped catching on dry patches. I stopped scrutinizing my own face in every mirror I passed.

I didn't need stronger. I needed to stop attacking skin that was already asking me to stop.

If you're in the thick of it right now, flaking and tight and telling yourself to push through, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm just going to tell you what I wish someone had asked me a year earlier.

What was your skin like before you started.

If the answer is dry, or sensitive, or reactive, or red, then your skin has probably been fighting you for a long time. Stop fighting it back for two weeks and see what it does. That's the whole test. That's where I'd start.

That's where I wish I'd started. 🤍

Lanarie Cica Serum

Calm first. Then glow. Cica made for mature skin.

• ✓Built around asiaticoside. The concentrated active from centella, not just a splash of the leaf.
• ✓A vitamin C that doesn't sting. Stabilized ethyl ascorbic acid for brightness without the burn.
• ✓No retinoids. No harsh actives. Made to calm and rebuild, not strip.
• ✓Light serum texture. Sinks in and disappears. Sits under makeup instead of pilling.
• ✓Full ingredient list shown. Read every ingredient yourself before you try it.

See the Cica Serum

This is an advertorial and is not medical advice; individual results vary. Lanarie Cica Serum is a cosmetic product intended to support the look and feel of the skin and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition. It is not a retinol product and is not a substitute for one. If your skin reacts to any product, discontinue use. If you have a persistent skin concern, speak with a licensed dermatologist. Review the full ingredient list before use.