Growing up, my mother had beautiful skin and I spent my teenage years trying to replicate it by using whatever she was using, with predictably mixed results. By my mid-twenties I had a shelf full of half-used products, a lot of opinions about things I hadn't understood for long enough, and a growing suspicion that most of the advice I was reading had been written by people who were being paid to write it.
The notebook started in 2022, after a particularly frustrating autumn of wasted money. I was testing a vitamin C serum that had been recommended everywhere, costing me a significant amount, and doing nothing I could actually measure. I started writing things down: the date I started, what my skin looked like, what it looked like four weeks later, what I changed. It was useful. I kept doing it.
In January 2024, a friend asked me what moisturiser she should buy. I realised I had two years of notes that could answer that question properly — with context, with caveats, with an honest account of what had worked and what hadn't. So I moved the diary online, mostly for her, partly because writing in public forces a kind of discipline that private notebooks don't.
I am not a dermatologist. I am not an aesthetician, a beauty journalist, or a brand consultant. I'm someone who has been thinking carefully about skincare for a long time. Everything I write here is accumulated personal experience — and personal experience is only one data point. What works on my face may not work on yours. The thing I hope is useful is the process: trying things properly, waiting long enough, and writing down what actually happens.
I buy everything myself. Nothing has been gifted. I write what I think. That's all this is.
What this diary isn't
It isn't medical advice. If your skin is doing something that worries you — a mole that's changed, a rash that won't clear, something that feels wrong — please see a doctor. Skincare is a pleasure and a habit and sometimes genuinely helpful; it is not medicine, and I am not qualified to tell you otherwise.
It isn't comprehensive. I have one face, one skin type, one set of concerns. I test things on it and write down what happens. The reviews are honest but they are necessarily limited to my own experience.
It isn't sponsored. I have never accepted payment to write something kind. I have never received gifted products in exchange for coverage. When that changes, I'll say so plainly — and the fact that I'm writing this suggests I don't anticipate it changing.