From Soap and Lotion to 14 Serums: how social media sold us unrealistic Skin
Social media has democratised skincare. It has also, quietly, commercialised insecurity.
There was a time, not terribly long ago, when skincare was simple. You bath, use soap, apply some lotion, and if your mother was particularly serious about these things, she told you to drink more water. That was it. Your skin was expected to survive on its own, the way skin has managed to do for the entire history of the species.
Today, your skin apparently requires a management team. There is a cleanser for the morning and a different one for the evening, a toner, an essence, a hydrating serum, a separate serum for dark spots, something for uneven texture, something for pigmentation, something for “barrier repair,” an exfoliant, a moisturiser, sunscreen, and a mysterious little bottle expensive enough to make you question whether your pores were ever worth this much trouble.
Then comes body care: lotion, oil, scrub, butter, brightening cream, niacinamide, rice extract, vitamin C. Somewhere in all of this, the elbow you had cheerfully ignored for twenty-five years has been reclassified as a dermatological emergency.
Between our mothers’ Vaseline tin and this ten-step onboarding process, skincare stopped being a routine and became a full-time unpaid job.
The algorithm has opinions about your pores
Scroll TikTok for ten minutes and you will meet a parade of experts, most of them twenty-three years old, standing in suspiciously excellent lighting, informing you that your skin barrier is “compromised,” your pores are “reclogging,” and the product you bought last month is now, tragically, outdated science.
Niacinamide is in, then out, because it was apparently “pilling under sunscreen” the whole time, a crime nobody mentioned until this exact video. A ten-step Korean routine arrives to replace it, followed by a three-step Japanese routine promising to replace that, followed by someone insisting the real secret was never products at all, just “gua sha and cortisol management,” conveniently also for sale.
This is not skincare advice. It is a subscription service for feeling inadequate, and the constant churn is the entire business model. If your routine ever stopped changing, the algorithm would have nothing left to sell you, so it makes sure that never happens.
Comparing real skin to edited skin, then buying the gap
The irony is that the internet has made genuine skincare knowledge more accessible than ever, and that part is worth keeping. People can learn about ingredients, understand sunscreen, and become more informed about what actually helps their skin. The problem begins when education quietly turns into anxiety, and normal human skin starts looking like a list of defects that need fixing.
Pores become a problem. Texture becomes a problem. Dark spots, hyperpigmentation, dark knees and elbows all apparently require their own intervention programmes. Heaven forbid a single pimple should appear, apparently the nation must be informed.
None of this is helped by a smartphone camera, or by a beauty filter that quietly erases every pore, crease and piece of evidence that the person on screen is, in fact, human. So we compare our real faces to a permanently edited one, notice the gap, and then buy something to close it.
The beauty industry is only too happy to assist. There is always another serum, another “holy grail,” another seven-day transformation. The perfect skincare customer, after all, is not someone whose skin is finally healthy. It is someone convinced there is always one more thing wrong with it, which happens to be exactly the customer this content is built to produce.
The chase has a name now: “glass skin” wants your face to resemble a phone screen. “Poreless” wants you to have no pores at all, which is not a skincare goal so much as a medical impossibility, since pores are how skin breathes and releases oil. Eliminating them would be less “glow up” and more significant dermatological event. Yet millions of people are out here anxiously patting on serums chasing a texture achievable mainly through a smoothing filter and a well-placed ring light.
From self-care to self-surveillance
This is the real cost, and it is worth naming plainly. A skincare routine used to feel good. A few quiet minutes patting something nice onto your face before bed. The TikTok version turns the bathroom mirror into an inspection station, checking whether the pores look smaller today, whether the dark spot is fading fast enough, whether the “glow” matches the one in the video.
Self-care was supposed to make you feel good in your skin. A great deal of what passes for skincare content now is built to make you feel bad about your skin, efficiently, on a schedule, with a product recommendation attached to every complaint it just invented.
The Ghanaian remix
Ghana has its own version of this pressure, and it did not arrive with TikTok, though TikTok has certainly given it a marketing budget. Long before “glow” became an Instagram caption, Ghanaian skincare culture already prized radiant, even-toned skin, and the shea butter, cocoa butter and body oils that made up that routine were genuinely excellent, developed over generations, and are only now being “discovered” by the rest of the world and sold back to us in prettier packaging at triple the price.
What has changed is the pressure layered on top. Brightening creams, “glow” serums and imported routines now compete for space in a market that has never fully escaped the uncomfortable pull toward skin lightening, and the algorithm is not always a neutral bystander here. A product promising an “even tone” sits one scroll away from a product promising something considerably less gentle, and the line between healthy, radiant skin and lighter skin gets blurred exactly where it is most dangerous to blur it, especially for anyone already anxious about how their real face compares to a filtered one.
That deserves real scrutiny, not the breezy kind.
When did this stop being about healthy skin?
None of this is an argument against skincare, moisturiser or the genuine, evidence-backed pleasure of a routine that suits your actual skin. Sunscreen in particular deserves its reputation. It is one of the few things dermatologists, TikTok and your aunty all agree on.
The issue is a market that has learned to sell not products, but the absence of confidence, one convincing video at a time, to people who had a perfectly fine relationship with their own face before the algorithm introduced them to their pores and elbows as a problem.
The honest question underneath all the serums is simple: when did taking care of your skin stop being about having healthy skin, and start being about achieving skin that does not, structurally, look human?
Real skin has pores. It has texture. It carries scars, stretch marks, pigmentation, wrinkles and the occasional blemish that shows up despite the ₵700 serum you just bought, and none of that is failure. It is skin, responding to sleep, stress, weather and age exactly the way skin is supposed to, however confidently a twenty-three-year-old in good lighting explains otherwise.
Wash your face. Wear sunscreen. And the next time a video informs you that your skin barrier has been secretly compromised this whole time, feel free to ask, politely, compromised compared to what, exactly, and sold to you by whom.
Perhaps the next skincare revolution should be a little less about achieving perfect skin, and a little more about accepting healthy, ordinary, skin.
If your routine requires a spreadsheet, three alarms and a small personal loan, it might be time to step away from the mirror. Your skin was probably doing just fine before the algorithm found it.
By Hannah Agyemang
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