We are trying to sell you less.

There is no shortage of good Korean skincare in Europe. Open any of the large sites and you are looking at several thousand products, sorted by whatever is selling that week. Cleansers beside ampoules beside sheet masks beside a device that says it will lift your jaw.

What is missing is the sentence that makes any of it usable: what goes under what, in what order, how often, and which two of these are quietly doing the same job. Almost nobody is paid to write that sentence, because writing it honestly means telling you to put something back on the shelf.

So people buy carefully, follow the advice they were given, and end up with a row of half-finished bottles and skin that is no better than it was. That is not ignorance — it is the opposite. It is what happens to people who are trying, in a category with plenty of products and no sequence.

Routinae exists to sell the sequence.

Every shop in this category says curated. Most of the time it means the shop listed what the distributor had. Curation only means something if you can see what it cost — what was left out, what money was turned down, which rule was kept on the day keeping it was inconvenient.

Ours is written down and it is capped. There is a hard limit on how many products can be in the catalogue at once, and something leaves whenever something arrives. When a product goes viral and does not clear the standard, it does not go in — and we would rather publish that than quietly range it and hope nobody notices the contradiction.

A big catalogue is the easy version of this job. You list everything, sort by margin, and hand the actual decision to the person least equipped to make it: you, at eleven at night, at the sink.

A product on its own is almost meaningless. A serum is good or bad depending on what you put under it, what you put over it, when you use it, and what you stopped using to make room. The industry sells items because items are easy to photograph. We sell sequences, because sequences are what actually work.

That is why every product here carries its step, its frequency, what it combines with and what to be careful with. And why the shop is organised by routine — skin, body, tools — rather than by a hundred product categories that mean nothing to someone standing at the sink at the end of a long day.

Skin is the deepest department, because it is where the confusion is worst and where getting it wrong costs the most.

Body is treated as seriously as face, because your skin does not know where your jaw ends. The bottles are large on purpose: body care is a volume product, and paying a premium per millilitre for it is a mistake we would rather you did not make.

Tools are manual only. Nothing powered, nothing that claims to lift, sculpt or drain. A good tool makes you slow down and use less product, which is a real benefit and the only one we will claim for it.

Hair, fragrance and the quieter end of a routine will follow — but only when we can source them to the same standard. Better three departments we can defend than six we cannot.

We are a broker. We do not own a warehouse, we do not hold stock, and nobody here handles a product before you do. Our suppliers pack and post your order directly.

The upside is that stock moves quickly and we are never defending a pallet of something we have stopped rating. The downside is real, and you should hear it from us rather than from a tracking email: if your order contains products from two suppliers, it arrives in two parcels, sometimes a day or two apart. We say so at checkout when it applies.

Every cosmetic sold in the EU needs two things standing behind it. A Responsible Person — a named company or individual, at a real address inside the EU, who holds the product’s safety file and answers for it. And a notification on the CPNP, the European Commission’s central portal, made before the product is placed on the market.

This is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the mechanism that makes a recall possible, and the reason a regulator can find a human being when something goes wrong with a batch.

Most shops assume their distributor has both. We ask for them in writing, per product: the CPNP reference, and the name and address of the Responsible Person. “All our products are CPNP registered”, written once across a supplier’s homepage, is not an answer to that question and we do not accept it as one.

There is a consequence, and we would rather say it than bury it. It is why this shop has been visible for longer than it has been open. Nothing goes on sale until that evidence is in hand, per product, from the supplier who will actually ship it to you. Explaining a delay is uncomfortable. Opening with products we cannot vouch for would be worse.

• Call anything a miracle, instant or permanent. None of it is.
• Show you a before-and-after photograph. Lighting and angle do most of that work.
• Say clean, chemical-free or non-toxic. Those words have no definition in EU cosmetics law, and they are usually there to make you anxious about the thing you already own.
• Put a countdown timer on a moisturiser, or tell you three other people are looking at it.
• Sell a powered device on a claim we cannot evidence.
• Suggest a cosmetic treats, cures or prevents anything. If you have a skin condition, please see a doctor. We are a shop.
• Sell a ten-step set as a single decision.

We are new, and new is a real limitation rather than a charming one. Our views come from the published evidence and from the standard we buy against — including the rule that nothing is listed here until we have had it in our hands. Both have limits, so here are ours.

• For some ingredients the published evidence is thin. Thin is not the same as absent, and it is not the same as proven. Where it is thin we say so on the product page instead of borrowing confidence from the brand.
• Testing a product ourselves is not the same as testing it on you. Nobody has tested every product on every skin, and anyone implying otherwise is selling something.
• We have no repurchase data, because we have not traded yet. The day we do, we will publish what it says — including the parts that disagree with us.
• Our routine advice is guidance, not a diagnosis. It is built from what you tell us, not from a photograph, and it can be wrong about you.

The Netherlands is home, and it is where we intend to be genuinely good rather than average everywhere. Checkout is open across the EU and EEA, plus Switzerland and Norway. Prices are in euros, shown with VAT included.

The United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and the Gulf are deliberately not open yet. Each needs its own cosmetics paperwork, and we would rather be closed than sell into a country where we cannot show the documents.

A published standard is only worth something if somebody checks it. So the standard itself is on How we choose, the supply chain is on Behind our products, and the things we decided against are in the Journal, with the actual reasons rather than a polite silence.

If you think we have got something wrong — a claim that overreaches, a product that should not be here, a sentence that has started to read like marketing — write and tell us. That is not a courtesy line at the end of a page. Being corrected in public is the price of publishing your own rules, and it is a fair one.