The ten-step routine was never the instruction
It described a market, not a face — and Korea started arguing with it years before Europe had finished adopting it.
Routinae sells some of the products written about here, so read this the way you would read any shop’s opinion of its own shelves. Where we think a cheaper product does the same job we say so, and where the evidence is thin we say that too. Our buying standard is published so you can check the argument against it.
Ask most people in Europe what Korean skincare is and you will get a number. Ten steps. It is the most successful piece of beauty shorthand of the last fifteen years, it is printed on the back of a thousand gift sets, and it was never actually an instruction.
It started as a description. Korean shoppers, in a market with an unusually dense and unusually cheap range of products, used more categories than Western shoppers did — a first cleanse and a second, something watery after the toner, something thicker at night. Western beauty writers counted the categories, arrived at ten, and published the count as a routine. A description of what a market sold became a prescription for what a face needed, and it stuck, because a number is an easy thing to sell against.
Korea started arguing with it first
What did not travel was the argument that followed. By 2019 there was a visible domestic backlash — the skincare diet, and a “333 rule” that circulated with it: three products, no more than three brands, and a short list of ingredients to skip. Dazed reported on it at the time, and it is worth reading — partly because it is a better account than we would write, and partly because it is now seven years old. The idea that Korean skincare means maximalism was already out of date in Korea before most of Europe had finished adopting it.
We would not sign up to every part of that rule. The ingredients-to-avoid half of it is the same fear-based framing we refuse to use ourselves, and “free from parabens” is not even a permitted claim in the EU. But the first half is the interesting half, and it is the one that has held up.
We are not claiming that Korea has settled on three products, or that ten steps will hurt you. Plenty of people enjoy a long routine and have no trouble with it, and enjoyment is a perfectly good reason to do something. The claim is narrower than that. The number was never the mechanism. Nothing in a ten-step routine works because it is the tenth step.
What is actually doing the work
Take out the sequencing arguments and the essence-versus-serum disputes, and what remains is unglamorous and fairly well settled.
- Something that cleans without stripping. If your face feels tight afterwards, the cleanser is too aggressive for you, and everything you apply next is doing repair work that would not have been necessary.
- Something that holds water in. A moisturiser. This is the step people quietly drop when they start buying actives, and it is the one doing most of the visible work.
- Sunscreen in the morning, in the quantity on the label. The most evidenced product in the whole category, and the one most commonly applied at a third of the amount it was tested at. The American Academy of Dermatology puts it at roughly a teaspoon for the face, reapplied every two hours.
That is a routine. Everything after it is optimisation, and optimisation is only worth buying once the first three are happening every day rather than on the days you remember.
The inconvenient arithmetic
Three products used daily beat ten used sporadically. This is not a clever position and nobody serious disputes it. It is simply awkward, because it is an argument for buying less, and almost everybody who explains skincare to you is paid when you buy more. So are we — that is what a shop is — which is one reason we would rather you read the argument somewhere other than here.
There is a second cost that gets far less attention. A long routine is not only expensive, it is undiagnosable. If you are using nine products and your skin starts objecting, you cannot work out which one did it. If you are using three, you can. Every product you add is a product you cannot rule out later.
When a longer routine is genuinely the right answer
We are not interested in swapping one dogma for another. More steps make sense when there is a specific job for them to do. Very dry or barrier-compromised skin does genuinely benefit from more layers holding water in. A pigmentation concern needs an active that a cleanser and a moisturiser are never going to deliver. Somebody who finds ten minutes at the sink the calmest part of their day is getting a real benefit that will not appear on any ingredient list.
What does not make sense is adding a step because it exists, or because it came in the set, or because ten is the number everybody has heard.
What we do with this
It shapes the catalogue rather than decorating it. A product has to belong to a routine we would actually recommend, which rules out most of the orphan categories a ten-step set is assembled from. The catalogue is capped, so anything new has to displace something already here. And when somebody writes to ask what they should add, the most common answer we give is to take something away.
That answer costs us the sale every single time. We think it is the only version of this business worth running.