SKINCARE FOR MEN - Care for your skin, training for your jawline

Four steps, and three of them together take under two minutes:

• Cleanse, morning and evening with a mild cleanser.
• Moisturise, straight afterwards on skin that is still slightly damp.
• Sun protection, in the morning, in winter too and at a desk too.
• Treat specifically, when there is an actual problem, and only then.

Facial cleansing decides whether anything after it can work, and this is where most mistakes happen. Shower gel is formulated for different skin and strips the facial barrier harder than necessary. Hot water feels thorough but removes more oil than the skin can spare. And cleansing three times a day dries it out, which leads to more sebum rather than less. Lukewarm, twice a day, a third time after training.

In anti aging for men, sun protection is the step with the best evidence behind it, and it is unglamorous. UV is the largest controllable factor in skin ageing and it works on cloudy days too. Second come retinoids, which speed up cell turnover and need a slow start. Everything advertised beyond those two sits in territory where the difference between effect and promise is hard to measure.

You do not need more than these four steps. Skincare for men rarely fails from too few products, it fails from too many.

Skincare for men is rarely a general topic. Usually there is a specific trigger, and then one targeted step helps more than a whole new routine:

• Dark dots on nose and chin: usually blackheads, sometimes only sebaceous filaments, and those cannot be removed at all. A simple test tells you which you are looking at, and it is in removing blackheads.
• Spots in the beard area: almost always a mix of shaving and product build-up. Which levers you actually have is sorted out in pimples on the chin.
• Painful lumps under the skin: those are blind pimples. They need different treatment from an ordinary spot, and squeezing reliably makes them worse.
• A tired look: three different things hide behind that, and only two of them respond to anything you do. Which one you have is worked out in dark circles in men.
• Inflamed spots with a visible head: the one case where a product changes something overnight. Pimple patches cover the spot and take the decision to pick at it out of your hands.
• A puffy face in the morning: usually retained fluid, often after a salty meal or alcohol. Why that happens is under ate too much salt. If you want potassium on top of your food, there are 500 mg per serving in our DeBloat capsules.

What these cases have in common: they need one targeted step, not a completely new routine. Swapping out half the shelf for every problem means losing track of what actually worked, and starting over again a few weeks later.