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 handset 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 whatever it could get. Curation only means something if you can see what it cost — what was left out, what 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 whatever moved fastest last week, and hand the actual decision to the person least equipped to make it: you, at eleven at night, at the sink.

This is a shop. We choose Korean face skincare, we buy it, and we sell it to you. That is the whole of the relationship, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up as something more.

We are not dermatologists. We are not cosmetic chemists. There is no clinic behind this, no laboratory, and no one on the team who can look at your face and tell you what is wrong with it. Nothing on this site is medical advice. If your skin needs a doctor, it needs a doctor — not a shop, and not a routine.

What we can do is read an ingredient list properly, publish it in full, and tell you when a product is not for you even though we are the ones selling it. Every rule we hold ourselves to is written down and public, which means you can check us against it rather than take our word for anything. That is a smaller claim than most shops in this category make. It is also one we can keep.

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 arranged by what you do — cleanse, treat, protect — rather than by a hundred product categories that mean nothing to someone standing at the sink at the end of a long day.

It is also why the most useful page on this site gives you three or four steps and then stops. A routine with a stopping point is a routine you can actually finish.

This is a face skincare shop. Forty-four things are for sale today: forty-one products from twenty-two Korean brands, and three tools you move with your own hand.

Face, because that is where the confusion is worst, where the mistakes cost the most, and where a wrong answer is most visible to the person living with it. Everything we know how to do well, we know how to do here.

The tools are manual only. Nothing powered, nothing with a battery or a mode, 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.

We have narrowed rather than widened, and we would rather run one shelf we can defend than four we can only staff. If that reads as a small shop, it is. The size is the argument, not an apology for one.

One thing is worth saying before you buy rather than after, because it is the sort of detail people otherwise discover from a tracking email and feel misled by.

Some orders arrive in more than one parcel, occasionally a day or two apart. Where that applies to what is in your basket, we say so at checkout rather than leaving you to work it out from a delivery notification.

Everything else — times, costs, what happens if something arrives damaged, and the fourteen-day right of withdrawal — is set out on Delivery & returns, in the same plain terms as the rest of this page.

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.

It is the standard we buy against, and we are working through the catalogue to hold that evidence in writing, per product. We are not finished. We would rather say that plainly than claim a completeness we cannot yet show you — which is the same reason there is a list further down this page of things we do not yet know.

The consequence is real and we would rather state it than bury it. Where that evidence cannot be produced for a product, the product comes down — however well it sells and however much we liked it.

• 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, at all — not a softer version of that rule. Here is the whole reasoning.
• 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 young, and young is a real limitation rather than a charming one. Our views come from the published evidence and from the standard we buy against. 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 do not yet have enough repurchase data to publish honestly. 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 in forty-six countries: the EU and EEA, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Norway, the United States and Canada, eight Asian markets and six in the Gulf.

Prices are in euros. Routinae trades under the Dutch small-business scheme, so no VAT is shown separately on your order. Orders leaving the EU are exports: import VAT, duty and a carrier handling fee are normally charged when the parcel arrives, and they are paid by you rather than by us. The shipping policy sets out what to expect, country by country, before you pay.

A published standard is only worth something if somebody checks it. So the standard itself is on How we choose, what stands behind each product 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.