If you want younger looking skin without botox, it’s easier than you think.
Three steps in the morning. Three at night. A couple of pills with breakfast.
No twelve-step Korean routine, no £90 serum, no face mask that makes you look like a serial killer.
I worked most of this out living in Thailand, where the sun is on you by eight in the morning and the lads who’d been there twenty years had faces like old leather. The ones who hadn’t aged had one thing in common. Sunscreen, every day, and a tube of tretinoin by the bed.
Here’s the whole protocol on one page.
01
Morning
You’re late, you’ve got a coffee in one hand, and your face is about to go out into the sun for ten hours.
The morning routine does one job. It protects.
Cleanse. Wash your face with a cleanser, not the bar of soap in the shower. You’re getting the night’s oil off, nothing more.
Moisturise. Any decent moisturiser. You’re putting water back in and sealing it.
Protect. Sunscreen, SPF 30 or higher, every single day. Cloudy, winter, sat in the office, doesn’t matter.
The third step is the one that matters and the one most men skip.
Hughes and colleagues followed 903 adults in Nambour, Queensland, for four and a half years. Half were told to put sunscreen on every morning, half to use it when they felt like it. The daily group’s skin aged 24 per cent less, measured by casts of the back of their hands. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2013.
The sun is what ages your face. Not time. Compare the skin on your forearm with the skin on your arse if you don’t believe me. Same age, very different mileage.
02
Night
It’s midnight, you’re knackered, and the bed is right there.
The night routine does the other job. It repairs.
Cleanse. Same as the morning, gentler if your skin’s dry. Get the day off your face.
Tretinoin. About a pea of it on a clean, dry face. Wait twenty minutes after washing or it stings.
Moisturise. Over the top, to lock the retinoid in and take the edge off.
Tretinoin is the one thing on this page that isn’t marketing.
Albert Kligman at the University of Pennsylvania published the first paper on tretinoin for sun-damaged skin in 1986. Weiss and colleagues at Michigan ran the first proper double-blind trial two years later, in JAMA, and the tretinoin side came out with fewer wrinkles, smoother skin and fewer brown spots. Nearly forty years and a lot of trials later, nothing you can rub on your face has more evidence behind it.
It works by speeding up the turnover of skin cells and nudging your skin to make more collagen. The first month is rough: red, flaky, tight. Then it settles, and about six months in people start asking what you’ve done.
If you can’t get it, an over-the-counter retinol does a weaker version of the same thing. Weaker, but not nothing.
03
The pills
A cupboard full of brown bottles, half of them doing nothing.
I used to take about eleven things for my skin. I’ll be honest: for most of them the evidence is thin, a couple of small trials paid for by the company selling the powder.
Three I still rate.
Collagen peptides, a scoop in my coffee. This is the one with real numbers: de Miranda and colleagues pooled 19 trials with 1,125 people in 2021, International Journal of Dermatology, and found better hydration, better elasticity and fewer wrinkles after three months. Industry money paid for a lot of those trials, so take it with a pinch of salt, but the direction is consistent.
Omega-3s, a fish oil capsule. Less for the skin and more because I’d take it anyway, but there’s decent reason to think it calms inflammation in the skin and helps it hold water.
A probiotic, with a prebiotic to feed it, because the probiotic does nothing on its own. The gut and skin link is real but early, and I’d call this a hunch I’m happy to pay for rather than a fact.
The rest, the astaxanthin, the hyaluronic acid, the CoQ10, the vitamin C, zinc, selenium, vitamin A and E, I’ve stopped buying separately. A decent multivitamin covers the vitamins and minerals, and the others I couldn’t find enough evidence for to justify another bottle.
That’s it
None of this is clever. Cleanse, moisturise, sunscreen. Cleanse, tretinoin, moisturise.
The hard part is doing it every night for a year when nobody is watching and you can’t see a difference yet.
And sleep. More than any of the above, which I covered in How to fall asleep faster.